Yes. The early church had mothers as well as fathers. Women taught the men we now call church fathers, paid for hospitals and churches, served as deacons, and stood with persecuted bishops during the doctrinal fights over who Jesus is. Many belonged to the desert movement that took shape in Egypt and among Christians along the Nile. We hear little about them because women of that era rarely wrote their own stories, and later historians, with the records in hand, kept retelling the men’s stories instead.
Sister Laura Swan, a Benedictine sister who gathered these women’s stories into her book The Forgotten Desert Mothers, is a useful guide. She does not claim a hidden archive or a conspiracy. Her finding is simpler: the women were in the record the whole time, and almost nobody bothered to put them together.
How did the women go missing from the story?
Swan came to this through her own training. When she entered monastic life in her mid-thirties, part of her formation was learning monastic history. Her teacher kept returning to the desert fathers, whom she calls wonderful, colorful people. Yet by her reading of the sources, the women in the desert outnumbered the men, and the lessons still kept circling back to the men.
She went looking. By her own description she is not a formally trained patristic scholar; her academic work lies more in women’s monastic and medieval history. What she found was scattered: women in footnotes, in notes, in side comments. When she raised this with specialists, one told her that patristic scholars know all of these women but had no idea anyone would be interested. Swan’s reply to that assumption is the reason her book exists: “women would like to know about our own contribution to Christianity, which is quite significant.”
So the gap was rarely a lack of evidence. People who had the evidence decided, again and again, that the women were not worth telling about. Swan also says the recovery is unfinished. Scholars keep sending her stories she did not know, many from sources in Syriac and in the Ethiopian church language, which she does not read.
Where did the desert mothers come from?
Women were present in the church from its first days, and the Gospels say so plainly. Luke lists the women who traveled with Jesus. Luke 8:3 names “Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance.” The phrase “of their substance” means they paid for the work out of their own resources. Women funded the mission before there was a church building to fund.
Swan traces what came next. After the destruction of the temple in 70, believers scattered across the empire and met in homes, the way synagogues gathered. Following the trade routes, the faith moved south along the Nile into what we now call Ethiopia. Christianity was rooted in Africa during its formative centuries, and the desert mothers belong to that African story.
Once Christianity was legalized, Swan explains, believers began gathering in basilicas, a word that originally meant something like a town hall. The faith became a public religion. Alongside the public churches, the older home gatherings continued, and some grew into monasteries. The desert ascetics came out of that second track. They left city life to separate themselves from Rome and to give themselves wholly to seeking God.
Their desert was sometimes literal and sometimes not. Swan describes women who lived inside walled family compounds, and some who lived in family tombs. That sounds grim today, but Swan notes that tombs were places where families gathered and even picnicked, and robbers were generally too afraid to enter a cemetery. A woman who wanted solitude could close the tomb’s gate and be safe at night. Swan credits these desert mothers and fathers with a practice churches still use: spiritual direction grows out of their tradition.
Macrina: a teacher known through her brothers
Asked what the mothers contributed, Swan began with their influence on the men. Women, she says, frequently challenged the church fathers to stop living as Roman society expected and to give their lives to the gospel. Her first example is Macrina the Younger.
Macrina came from a family in what is now Turkey. Her grandmother, Macrina the Elder, and the family were major supporters of their community through famine and drought. The younger Macrina was the oldest of the children. Her younger brother was Basil the Great, and Swan places Gregory of Nyssa in the same family circle; both are counted among the dominant church fathers of the Orthodox tradition. Swan credits Macrina with teaching them the Christian way of life and with pressing them to leave a self-indulgent life behind, be baptized, and get serious about serving the gospel.
That raises an obvious question about evidence. How do we know any of this if Macrina left no writings? Swan’s answer explains much of the larger problem. In that world, she says, women frequently did not write their own biographies, because doing so was considered vain. Someone else wrote it. Macrina’s teaching came down through her brothers’ memories. They compiled what she had taught them into a long sermon set at her deathbed. Swan describes the method exactly: “they put it metaphorically in her mouth as she’s dying.”
So the trail runs like this. Macrina taught orally. Her brothers remembered and valued that teaching enough to preserve it. The surviving text is their composition, a literary deathbed address that gathers a lifetime of instruction into one scene. Swan reads its content as Macrina’s understanding of the Christian calling, including serving the marginalized and standing against the corruption of the empire. We have her teaching, and we have it secondhand.
Olympias: a fortune, a diaconate and an exiled friend
Swan’s second example lived in the 300s and came from the top of Roman society. Olympias, she says, was a member of the imperial family, so wealthy that patristic scholars compare her to the richest philanthropists of our own time. She refused to take part in the imperial family’s ways and gave her life to serving the gospel.
Swan describes her as an ordained deaconess, recognized as helping with baptisms and with preaching. Deacons were meant to be the church’s face to the poor, and Olympias acted the part. She fed prisoners and paid off their debts, cared for widows and orphans, and funded hospitals and churches. She gave guidelines for how her money should be used, letting go of her wealth responsibly as she stepped away from the imperial life she was born into.
Paul already uses this language for a woman. In Romans 16:1 he writes, “I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea.” The word the KJV renders “servant” is the one elsewhere rendered “deacon,” and some translations render it “deacon” here. Faithful Christians disagree about what that word implies for church office and about what roles women should hold in the church today. The historical point needs no ruling on that debate. Women served the church by name from Paul’s letters onward, and Olympias stands in that line.
She also took on the emperor. Swan identifies her closest friend as John Chrysostom, the golden-tongued preacher of Constantinople. When he was driven out of the city for condemning the corruption of the imperial family, which was her own family, Olympias supported him financially and politically. Swan says he considered her “his foundation and his backbone.”
Then comes the detail that makes her a case study in how women disappear. His letters to her survive. Her letters to him were lost somewhere over the centuries. One side of a famous correspondence remains, so the bishop speaks and the deaconess is heard only through his replies. Swan says she dreams of her letters turning up in some future desert find. Until then, the record has a hole exactly where her voice should be.
Did these women shape doctrine, or only devotion?
It is easy to assume the mothers supplied piety while the fathers did theology. Swan rejects that division. In the great fight over whether Jesus was fully God and fully human, she says, the desert mothers generally sided with Athanasius against his detractors. They defended the confession that Jesus is fully human and fully divine. They also sheltered bishops and monks whom Roman troops were driving out for refusing an emperor’s position on a theological question. Backing the side an emperor opposed carried real risk.
Swan pairs that doctrinal loyalty with a second contribution. The mothers, she says, kept reminding the church “that the relationship with the divine is more important than theology.” In context, she is describing order and integrity. These same women had just defended Athanasius. Their point was to cultivate the relationship with God first, protect it, and live what you preach before you start preaching.
She gives concrete examples. The desert ascetics, she says, sold what they made in the village and gave ten percent to the local deacon, who might be a man or a woman, before buying their own supplies. They gave away whatever remained and lived month to month, choosing to depend on God’s provision. They received everyone who came to their door as Christ. The same women held the doctrine and lived the practice.
Why did so few of these stories get written down?
The losses happened in layers, and each made the next more likely. Custom came first: a woman who wrote her own life looked vain, so her story passed through someone else’s hands, as Macrina’s did. A story held by others is easier to lose, and uneven survival followed, with Olympias’s letters gone while John’s were kept. Thin records invited distortion. Swan points to Mary Magdalene, whom medieval tradition turned into a reformed prostitute by confusing her with another woman. Distortion then became habit. Church historians, Swan says, kept repeating the familiar story rather than stopping to ask, “who am I not seeing? Who am I not hearing?”
The Mary Magdalene case shows how far the drift could go. The Gospel text is clear about her role. In John 20:18, she goes to the disciples and tells them she has seen the Lord and that he has spoken to her. A woman carried the first report of the risen Christ to the men who would lead the church. If her story could be bent that far, women with fewer surviving sources could fade entirely.
Is this history built on thin evidence?
The strongest objection deserves a straight answer. If these women mattered this much, why do we depend so heavily on men’s writings and on footnotes? Is the case stronger than the sources?
Part of the objection is right. Much of what we know about Macrina comes through her brothers, and much of what we know about Olympias comes through John’s letters. Swan herself relies on specialists for several key ancient languages. Some of her broader claims also outrun what can be checked here. The largest is her report that “patristic scholars tell us that Christianity was actually originally a woman’s movement.” That is Swan’s summary of other scholars, and readers should treat it as a claim to test.
Still, a record filtered through men tells us who held the pen. It does not tell us the women did little. The men who wrote about Macrina and Olympias were recording women they knew and depended on, whom they treated as teacher, foundation and backbone. The evidence is also still growing. Swan describes new translations from the original languages and monasteries being uncovered under the sand in Ethiopia, where researchers read the artwork for what those communities believed. The case is incomplete because the recovery is incomplete.
One more qualification belongs here. Swan notes that some women honored among the desert ascetics did not hold the orthodox position, yet were remembered for their compassion for the poor. She draws from this that right practice may matter more than right thinking. Christians who hold the full deity and humanity of Jesus as essential will not rank the two that way, and the mothers themselves did not. They fought for orthodoxy when emperors opposed it. Their example is better read as a refusal to separate belief from life.
What changes when the mothers return to the story
A history that skips the mothers teaches a false lesson without ever stating it: that women watched the faith take shape from the sidelines. The chronology says otherwise. Women funded Jesus’s travels. A woman carried the first resurrection report. Women served as deacons in Paul’s churches and in imperial Constantinople. They taught the men who wrote the theology and supported the bishops the emperors exiled. Swan tells her students that “women have always been a major force in Christianity. We just don’t tell our stories.”
Telling them also changes how we read the fathers. Basil learned the Christian life from his older sister. John’s preaching against imperial corruption was carried through exile by a deaconess who gave away an emperor’s kind of fortune. The fathers were formed in households and friendships that included women, and a church that tells only their half of the story misunderstands even that half.