20 Religious Women Who Built Empires From Nothing

Fatima al-Fihri, who came from a wealthy family that had migrated from Kairouan in modern Tunisia to Fez, Morocco, inherited a large estate from her father and husband in 859 CE. With her wealth, she built a mosque and school, al-Qarawiyyin, which, according to tradition preserved in a 14th-century chronicle, taught the Quran, law, grammar, and mathematics free of charge. UNESCO declared al-Qarawiyyin the world’s oldest continuously operating educational institution.

Born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in what is now Skopje, North Macedonia, Mother Teresa came to India as a missionary nun in 1929. Following what she called a “call within a call,” she quit her job teaching at a convent school in Kolkata to devote herself to helping those living in the city’s slums. Local authorities donated an abandoned Hindu temple to her in 1952, which she turned into a hospice for the poor and dying. It was the beginning of an international order that continues to thrive today.

In 1866, after recovering from a serious spinal injury, American author Mary Baker Eddy developed a theology that emphasized the power of spiritual healing. She wrote her central book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which was published in 1875, and established the Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston in 1879. Eddy established The Christian Science Monitor in 1908 when she was 87. It was created as a general-interest international daily newspaper, not as a religious tract aimed at the faithful.

Mother Mary Lange, born Elizabeth Clarisse Lange, was a free Afro-Caribbean immigrant teaching in Baltimore, Maryland, a slave state where it was illegal to educate Black children publicly. She had used her own inheritance to support a secret home school for several years. In 1829, she took vows with three other women, establishing the Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first Roman Catholic order for women of African descent. Later, the Sisters provided care to those infected during a cholera epidemic in 1832 in a state that would not abolish slavery until 1864.

Aimee Semple McPherson, a Canadian-born Pentecostal evangelist, inaugurated Angelus Temple in Los Angeles on New Year’s Day 1923 with its 5,300-seat auditorium and radio station. She incorporated it four years later as the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. During the Great Depression, its commissary fed and clothed over 1.5 million people, regardless of religion or race.

The Italian educator Angela Merici established the Company of St. Ursula in Brescia with 28 young women in 1535. These women would become known as the Ursulines. Rather than taking up residence in a convent, Merici’s sisters made their vows while still living in their own houses and came together only for prayer. They walked around the city teaching girls how to read and learn about their faith. The Ursulines were the first women’s teaching order in the Church, and they operated outside of cloister walls.

The Spanish Carmelite nun and mystic Teresa of Ávila sought to return her religious order to its original simplicity and austerity. In 1562, she broke through strong local opposition to open the first reformed Carmelite convent, St. Joseph’s. For the next 20 years, she traveled on muleback through Spain, founding 17 reformed convents. Together, these were called the Discalced, or “barefoot,” Carmelites.

In 1633, the French noblewoman Louise de Marillac partnered with the priest Vincent de Paul to establish the Daughters of Charity in Paris. The Daughters were made up of young peasant women who, unlike most nuns, did not take the usual monastic vows. They also did not live in a convent, but in rented rooms. This allowed them to serve in hospitals, visit the sick and poor in their homes, and staff orphanages and even battlefields. Marillac personally oversaw the training of nurses and ran several foundling homes throughout Paris.

In 1212, Clare was an 18-year-old Italian noblewoman. On Palm Sunday, she ran away from her family to follow the friar Francis of Assisi, who cut off her hair and dressed her in a coarse habit. When she became abbess, she resisted papal demands that her community take on land and revenue, eventually winning the right to the “privilege of poverty.” Two days before her death in 1253, the pope sanctioned Clare’s own Rule, the first one ever written by a female monastic founder.

In 1827, Catherine McAuley, an Irish heiress who had come into money after she cared for a wealthy Protestant couple, opened the House of Mercy on Dublin’s Baggot Street. She provided food, education, and vocational training for poor women. In order to establish her work as a lasting presence, she created the Sisters of Mercy in 1831. The order dictated that its members not live in the cloisters but rather walk around the city visiting the sick and poor in their own homes. They became known locally as the Walking Nuns.

When an American Jewish scholar named Henrietta Szold visited Ottoman Palestine in 1909, she was shocked by the extent of the disease and the lack of treatment for the sick. Upon returning to New York, she established Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, in 1912. The all-volunteer organization sent nurses to Jerusalem the next year, established pasteurized milk stations and, in 1939, opened the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, admitting any patient regardless of race or religion.

Princess Nana Asma’u was an Islamic scholar in the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria. Her father was Usman dan Fodio, the caliphate’s founder. In about 1838, she established a network of educated female teachers that fanned out across the country, setting up study groups for women confined to the home. Asma’u composed poems for her students on hygiene, law, and theology in four different languages, allowing women who were never allowed out of the house access to education.

Ellen White was an American religious leader who established the Seventh-day Adventist church with her husband James White and fellow minister Joseph Bates in 1863. She advocated for health and education as important aspects of religion, prompting the establishment of a college in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1874, and a medical school in Loma Linda, California, roughly three decades later, which eventually became Loma Linda University and Medical Center.

Indian Christian reformer and Sanskrit scholar Pandita Ramabai sought to protect high-caste Hindu child widows and other destitute women from abuse and abandonment. In 1889, she established a home for these women in Mumbai, which was designed to honor their Hindu faith. Following famines in several regions of India, she established the Mukti Mission near Pune in 1898, a self-contained compound consisting of farms, workshops, and schools where over 1,500 women and children could live safely.

Early Irish Christian lore and a 7th-century Vita describe how the Irish nun Brigid founded an abbey ca. 470 CE at a location known as Cill Dara, “Church of the Oak.” This evolved into a double monastery, with separate monastic communities of men and women under Brigid’s authority as their abbess. She appointed a monk as her supervisor for metalwork and other crafts, and established a workshop to produce illuminated manuscripts. Kildare became one of the major religious and economic centers in Ireland.

In 1805, Elizabeth Ann Seton, an American widow and mother, converted from Episcopal to Roman Catholicism following her husband’s death. In 1809, she and several friends started a sisterhood in Emmitsburg, Maryland, which set up a one-room school for all children regardless of their economic status. That schoolroom became the model replicated throughout the American Catholic parish school system.

Frances Xavier Cabrini was an Italian-born religious sister who wanted to go to China as a missionary. Pope Leo XIII instead asked her to go to the United States to minister to Italian immigrants there. After establishing her own order in Italy in 1880, she came to New York in 1889 and, through hardship and opposition, established hospitals, orphanages, and schools throughout the U.S., as well as in Argentina and Europe. She became a U.S. citizen in 1909 and, by her death, had founded 67 such institutions.

An English Catholic living in exile, Mary Ward believed women could perform intellectual and ministerial work without cloistering themselves in a convent. She founded the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1609 and operated free schools throughout Flanders, Austria, Germany, and Italy. A papal bull, however, deemed women’s uncloistered work forbidden and directed that the institute be suppressed in 1631. Ward herself was taken by the Inquisition on suspicion of heresy but was released soon after. Her nuns continued the work, and the Church eventually acknowledged it.

In a speech in 1900, Nannie Helen Burroughs, an African-American educator and Baptist leader, criticized how women were being excluded from the church’s decision-making process. Then she urged the National Baptist Convention’s Women’s Auxiliary to take action. They collected donations from Black working-class women to purchase a plot of land in Washington, DC. She opened the National Training School for Women and Girls in 1909, which provided students with academic and vocational training, and she rejected offers of financial support from white philanthropists in order to maintain control of the school.

Mahapajapati Gotami was both the aunt and foster mother of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. After his mother died a week after he was born, Gotami raised him. Per the Buddhist canon, after her husband, King Suddhodana, died, Gotami asked the Buddha for full ordination for women, which he refused. She cut her hair, put on yellow robes, and led 500 women on a barefoot march of hundreds of kilometers. Moved by their persistence, the Buddha agreed, and Gotami became the founder of Buddhism’s first formal order of nuns.

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