This is a timeline of notable moments in the history of women's ordination in the world's religious traditions. It is not an exhaustive list of all historic or contemporary ordinations of women.
Ancient history and Middle Ages Biblical Tradition, Christian, Tabitha/Dorcas was the first named female disciple. Acts 9:36. 65-67 CE. 6th century BCE: Mahapajapati Gotami, the aunt and foster mother of Buddha, became the first woman to receive Buddhist ordination.
19th century 1815: Clarissa Danforth was the first woman to be ordained by the Free Will Baptist denomination in New England. 1830: Emma Hale Smith was ordained by the Church of Christ (Latter Day Saints) in the United States. After she became President of the Relief Society in 1842, Joseph Smith declared that Emma had "previously been ordained to expound the scriptures". 1853: Antoinette Brown Blackwell was the first woman ordained as a minister in the United States. She was ordained by a church belonging to the Congregationalist Church. However, her ordination was not recognized by the denomination. She later quit the church and became a Unitarian. The Congregationalists later merged with others to create the United Church of Christ, which ordains women. 1861: Mary A. Will was the first woman ordained in the Wesleyan Methodist Connection by the Illinois Conference in the United States. The Wesleyan Methodist Connection eventually became the Wesleyan Church. 1862: Bishop of London licenses Elizabeth Ferard as the first deaconess in the Church of England. Ferard founded the North London Deaconess Institution. 1863: Olympia Brown was ordained by the Universalist denomination in 1863, the first woman ordained by that denomination, in spite of a last-moment case of cold feet by her seminary which feared adverse publicity. After a decade and a half of service as a full-time minister, she became a part-time minister in order to devote more time to the fight for women's rights and universal suffrage. In 1961, the Universalists and Unitarians joined to form the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). The UUA became the first large denomination to have a majority of female ministers. 1865: The Salvation Army was founded, which in the English Methodist tradition always ordained both men and women. However, there were initially rules that prohibited a woman from marrying a man who had a lower rank. 1866: Helenor M. Davison was ordained as a deacon by the North Indiana Conference of the Methodist Protestant Church, probably making her the first ordained woman in the Methodist tradition. 1880: Anna Howard Shaw was the first woman ordained in the Methodist Protestant Church, an American church which later merged with other denominations to form the United Methodist Church. 1883: Ellen G. White was the first woman whose ministry was recognized as "ordained minister" in the Seventh-Day-Adventist Church by the Michigan Conference in the United States. She was also one of the founders of the Seventh-day Adventists. 1884: Marion Macfarlane became the first woman to be ordained as a deaconess in the Anglican Church in Australia, when she was ordained to the "Female Diaconate" in 1884 in the Diocese of Melbourne.Jane Shaw (2012). "The ordination of Anglican women: Challenging tradition". Preachers, prophets & heretics: Anglican women's ministry. Elaine Lindsay, Janet Scarfe. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. pp. 14-29. . . 1888: Fidelia Gillette served the Universalist congregation in Bloomfield, Ontario, during 1888 and 1889. She was presumably ordained in 1888 or earlier. Lady Grisell Baillie (1822–1891) became the first deaconess in the Church of Scotland on 9 December 1888 in a service conducted by Dr James Mackenzie Allardyce at Bowden Kirk in Bowden, Scottish Borders. 1889: The Nolin Presbytery of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church ordained Louisa Woosley as the first female minister of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, USA. Ella Niswonger was the first woman ordained in the American United Brethren Church, which later merged with other denominations to form the American United Methodist Church, which has ordained women with full clergy rights and conference membership since 1956. 1890: Mary Sterling was the first woman ordained as minister/pastor by the German Baptist Brethren/Brethren Church in America. 1892: Anna Hanscombe is believed to be the first woman ordained by the parent bodies which would form the Church of the Nazarene in 1919. 1894: Julia A. J. Foote was the first woman to be ordained as a deacon by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
Early 20th century 1909: The Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) began ordaining women in 1909. 1911: Ann Allebach was the first Mennonite woman to be ordained. This occurred at the First Mennonite Church of Philadelphia. Anne Zernike was ordained as a church minister by the Mennonite Church in the Netherlands and became the first female church minister in the Netherlands and Europe. St. Joan's International Alliance, founded in 1911, was the first Catholic group to work for women being ordained as priests. 1912: Olive Winchester, born in America, became the first woman ordained by any trinitarian Christian denomination in the United Kingdom when she was ordained by the Church of the Nazarene.Women, the Church and Ministry: Celebrating 100 years of women's ordination in the UK. 1914: The Assemblies of God was founded and ordained its first woman pastors in 1914. 1917: The Congregationalist Church (England and Wales) ordained their first woman, Constance Coltman (née Todd), at the King's Weigh House, London. Its successor is the United Reformed Church (a union of the Congregational Church in England and Wales and the Presbyterian Church of England in 1972). Since then two more denominations have joined the union: The Reformed Churches of Christ (1982) and the Congregational Church of Scotland (2000). All of these denominations ordained women at the time of Union and continue to do so. 1918: Alma Bridwell White, head of the Pillar of Fire Church, became the first woman ordained as a bishop in the United States. Rosa Gutknecht and Elise Pfister became the first two women in Switzerland to be ordained as pastors. 1920s: Some Baptist denominations started ordaining women. 1920: Riek Rappold became the first woman to be ordained by the Remonstrant Church in the Netherlands. 1922: The Jewish Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis stated that "...woman cannot justly be denied the privilege of ordination."American Reform responsa by Central Conference of American Rabbis, Walter Jacob (pg. 25) However, the first woman in Reform Judaism to be ordained, Sally Priesand, was not ordained until 1972. 1927: Winifred Kiek was the first woman to be ordained in the Christian ministry in Australia on 13 June 1927 in South Australia to the Congregational Union of Australia (now part of the Uniting Church in Australia). 1928: A secular law was passed in Thailand banning women's full ordination in Buddhism; however, this law was revoked some time after Varanggana Vanavichayen became the first female monk to be ordained in Thailand in 2002. Maude Royden began a year-long preaching and speaking tour of churches in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, China, Ceylon and India, promoting the ordination of women. 1929: Maria Izabela Wiłucka-Kowalska was the first woman to be ordained by the Old Catholic Mariavite Church in Poland. Jantine Haumersen became the first woman to be ordained as a pastor by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Netherlands. Maude Royden co-founds the interdenominational Ministry of Women in the Church. 1930: The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ordained its first woman elder, Sarah E. Dickson. Maude Royden founds the Anglican Group for the Ordination of Women. 1935: Regina Jonas was ordained privately by a German rabbi and thus became the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi. 1936: Sunya Gladys Pratt was ordained as a Buddhist minister in the Shin Buddhist tradition in Tacoma, Washington. 1940: Maren Sørensen became the first woman to be ordained in Denmark. 1943: Ilse Härter and were ordained in the German Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), on 12 January 1943. 1944: Florence Li Tim Oi became the first woman to be ordained as an Anglican priest. She was born in Hong Kong, and was ordained in Guandong province in unoccupied China on January 25, 1944, on account of a severe shortage of priests due to World War II. When the war ended, she was forced to relinquish her priesthood, yet she was reinstated as a priest later in 1971 in Hong Kong. "When Hong Kong ordained two further women priests in 1971 (Joyce Bennett and Jane Hwang), Florence Li Tim-Oi was officially recognised as a priest by the diocese." She later moved to Toronto, Canada, and assisted as a priest there from 1983 onwards. 1947: The Lutheran Protestant Church started to ordain women as priests. The Czechoslovak Hussite Church started to ordain women. 1948: The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark started to ordain women. The African Methodist Episcopal Church started to ordain women. 1949: The Old Catholic Church (in the U.S.) began to ordain women. Élisabeth Schmidt became the first woman to be ordained as a pastor of the Reformed Church of France.
Late 20th century 1950s 1954: Bé Ruys became the first woman to be ordained as a Dutch Reformed minister by the Dutch Ecumenical Congregation in Berlin, Germany. 1956: The Presbyterian Church in the United States of America ordained its first female minister, Margaret Towner. 1957: In 1957 the Unity Synod of the Moravian Church declared of women's ordination "in principle such ordination is permissible" and that each province is at liberty to "take such steps as seem essential for the maintenance of the ministry of the Word and Sacraments;" however, while this was approved by the Unity Synod in 1957, the Northern Province of the Moravian Church did not approve women for ordination until 1970 at the Provincial Synod, and it was not until 1975 that Mary Matz became the first female minister ordained within the Moravian Church. 1958: Women ministers in the Church of the Brethren were given full ordination with the same status as men. 1959: Ietske Jansen became the first woman to be ordained as a minister by the Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands.
1960s 1960: The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Swedenn started ordaining women as priests The three first women to be ordained were Elisabeth Djurle, Ingrid Persson and Margit Sahlin . 1961: Ingrid Bjerkås became the first woman to be ordained a minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Norway. 1964: Addie Elizabeth Davis became the first Southern Baptist woman to be ordained.Encyclopedia of women and religion in North America, Volume 1 By Rosemary Skinner Keller, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Marie Cantlon (pg. 294) However, the Southern Baptist Convention stopped ordaining women in 2000, although existing female pastors are allowed to continue their jobs. 1965: Rachel Henderlite became the first woman ordained in the Presbyterian Church in the United States; she was ordained by the Hanover Presbytery in Virginia. Freda Bedi, a British woman, became the first Western woman to take ordination in Tibetan Buddhism. 1967: The Presbyterian Church in Canada started ordaining women. 1969: The first woman to be ordained as a minister in the Church of Scotland was the Revd Catherine McConnachie by the Presbytery of Aberdeen. She served as assistant minister at St George's Tillydrone, in Aberdeen.
1970s 1970: The Northern Province of the Moravian Church approved women for ordination in 1970 at the Provincial Synod, but it was not until 1975 that Mary Matz became the first female minister ordained within the Moravian Church.