1535 · Brescia, Italy

Founding of the Ursulines

Angela Merici gathered a group of women to educate poor girls at a time when nobody thought girls needed educating. They became the first teaching order of women in the Church.

In 1535, Angela Merici founded the Company of St. Ursula in Brescia, Italy, with twenty-eight women dedicated to the education of girls, particularly poor ones. This was radical. In sixteenth-century Europe, formal education for women barely existed, and what little there was served only the aristocracy. Angela's vision was different: she believed ordinary girls deserved to learn, and she believed women could organize themselves to do the teaching without being locked behind convent walls. Her original company was not a traditional religious order. The women lived in their own homes, wore ordinary clothes, and went out into the community to teach. They took no formal vows. Angela trusted them to govern themselves and insisted on flexibility — she told her followers to adapt to the times and the needs they encountered. After her death in 1540, the institutional Church gradually pushed the Ursulines toward a more conventional model. Later popes required them to take formal vows and observe enclosure, which limited their ability to work in the community. But the Ursulines adapted and persisted. They became the first women's religious order specifically dedicated to education and eventually spread across Europe and to the Americas. In colonial New Orleans, Quebec, and elsewhere, Ursuline sisters ran some of the first schools and hospitals. Angela Merici's original insight — that women's education matters and that women are capable of organizing to provide it — was ahead of her time by centuries. The Church sometimes struggled to keep up with what she started.

Why it matters

Established the first women's teaching order in the Catholic Church, pioneered formal education for girls, and created a model of active female religious life that challenged conventional expectations.