What is the role of women in Karaism?

The Catholic encyclopedia, credits Isabella as an extremely able ruler and one who "fostered learning not only in the universities and among the nobles, but also among women". Of Isabella and Ferdinand, it says: "The good government of the Catholic sovereigns brought the prosperity of Spain to its apogee, and inaugurated that country's Golden Age". Amidst the backdrop of Industrial Revolution and expanding European Empires during the 17th-19th centuries, Christian women played a central role in developing and running of many the modern world's education and health care systems.

Catholic religious orders like the Sisters of Mercy37 the Little Sisters of the Poor3839 Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart40 were founded around the world and established extensive networks of hospitals and schools. The Anglican Florence Nightingale was influential in the development of modern nursing. For much of the early Twentieth century, Catholic women continued to join religious orders in large numbers, where their influence and control was particularly strong in the running of primary education for children, high schooling for girls, and in nursing, hospitals, orphanages and aged care facilities.

The Second Vatican Council of the 1960s liberalised the strictures of Catholic religious life, particularly for women in holy orders, however, in the latter half of the 20th century, vocations for women in the West entered a steep decline. The Catholic Church conducted a large number of beatifications and canonisations of Catholic women however, of women from all over the world: St. Josephine Bakhita was a Sudanese slave girl who became a Canossian nun; St. Katharine Drexel (1858-1955) worked for Native and African Americans; Polish mystic St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938) wrote her influential spiritual diary;42 and German nun Edith Stein was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. 43 Three Catholic women were declared Doctors of the Church, indicating a re-appraisal of the role of women within the life of that Church: the 16th Century Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Ávila; the 14th Century Italian mystic St. Catherine of Siena and the 19th century French nun St. Thérèse de Lisieux (called Doctor Amoris or Doctor of Love).

While Catholicism and Orthodoxy adhered to traditional gender restrictions on ordination to the priesthood, Ordination of women in Protestant churches has in recent decades become increasingly common. The Salvation Army elected Evangeline Booth as its first female General (worldwide leader) in 1934. 44 New Zealander Penny Jamieson became the first woman in the world to be ordained a bishop of the Anglican Church in 1990.