Women in Church history have played a variety of roles in the life of Christianity—notably as contemplatives, health care givers, educationalists and missionaries. Until recent times, women were generally excluded from episcopal and clerical positions within the certain Christian churches; however, great numbers of women have been influential in the life of the church, from contemporaries of Jesus to subsequent saints, theologians, doctors of the church, missionaries, abbesses, nuns, mystics, founders of religious institutes, military leaders, monarchs and martyrs.
Christianity emerged from within surrounding patriarchal societies that placed men in positions of authority in marriage, society and government, and, whilst the religion restricted membership of the priesthood to males only, in its early centuries it offered women an enhanced social status and quickly found a wide following among women. With the exception of the Eastern Christian churches, in most denominations, women have been the majority of church attendees since early in the Christian era and into the present. Later, as religious sisters and nuns, women came to play an important role in Christianity through convents and abbeys and have continued through history to be active—particularly in the establishment of schools, hospitals, nursing homes and monastic settlements. Women constitute the great majority of members of the consecrated life within the Catholic Church, the largest of the Christian churches. In recent decades, ordination of women has become increasingly common in some Protestant churches. Laywomen have also been highly active in the wider life of churches, supporting the community work of parishes.
Within Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Lutheranism, particular place of veneration has been reserved for Mary, the Mother of Jesus, which has kept a model of maternal virtue central to their vision of Christianity. Marian devotion is however, generally not a feature of Reformed Christianity.
Apostolic age
New Testament
The New Testament of the Bible refers to a number of women in Jesus' inner circle (notably his mother Mary, for whom the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodoxy hold a special place of honour, and St. Mary Magdalene, who discovered the empty tomb of Christ), although the Catholic Church teaches that Christ appointed only male Apostles (from the Greek apostello "to send forth").
Among the most famous accounts of Jesus directly dealing with an issue of morality and women is provided by the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery, from verses in the Gospel of John. The passage describes a confrontation between Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees over whether a woman, caught in an act of adultery, ought to be stoned. Jesus shames the crowd into dispersing, and averts the execution with the famous words: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her". According to the passage, "they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last", leaving Jesus to turn to the woman and say "go, and sin no more".
Another story contained in the Gospels concerning Jesus' attitude to women is the story of Jesus at the house of Martha and Mary. In this story Mary sits at Jesus' feet as he preaches, while Martha toils in the kitchen preparing a meal. When Martha complains to Mary that she should instead be helping in the kitchen, Jesus says that, on the contrary, "Mary has chosen what is better" (, New International Version).
From the very beginning of the early Christian church, women were important members of the movement, although much of the information in the New Testament on the work of women has been overlooked. Since sources of information stemming from the New Testament church was written and interpreted by men, many assumed that it had been a "man's church". Recently, scholars have begun looking in mosaics, frescoes, and inscriptions of that period for information about women's roles in the early church.