Women have played a vital role in the birth and development of Christianity since, and even before, the birth narratives of the Gospels. However, many church histories poorly or hardly acknowledge this fact. At least one aspect of feminist theology is its struggle to correct this oversight by attempting to prove and/or validate the essentiality of women in church history, particularly by pointing out the ways in which women have been oppressed by the church throughout its history. By contrast this course seeks primarily to examine the importance of women and the roles women have played in the development of the Church, particularly in the United States, from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.