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Women played central roles in the very first Christian organisation. In the year 352, however, the Council of Laodicea decided women should not be priests. The Roman Catholic church has kept this standpoint, but in the Protestant church you started seeing female priests/pastors in the mid 1700s in both European and American congregations.  

In the early 1900s Christian churches in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Scotland, England, Poland, France, Japan, Canada, Indonesia, Argentina, Africa and a range of other countries had female priest/provosts, according to Bibelfrågan, the largest Christian online information site in Swedish. 

Sweden has had female priests/pastors (e.g. within the Salvation Army) since the late 1800s. The Baptist church introduced female pastors in 1956 and the Church of Sweden did so in 1960.

Denmark has the largest number of female priests in the Nordic region, 56 percent. The Danish parliament removed the ban on female priests as early as 1947, and one year later the three first female priests were ordained — Johanne Andersen, Ruth Vermehren and Edith Brenneche Petersen.

In Norway Ingrid Bjerkås became the first female priest in 1960. Six out of nine bishops did not want to recognise her. But Norway was the first Nordic country to get a female bishop, Rosemarie Köhn, in 1993. At the time she became the world’s third female bishop in the Lutheran church, after German Maria Jepsen in April 1992 and American April Larsson in June 1992.

Finland is the one Nordic country where opposition to female priests has been biggest. Four different votes between 1963 and 1986 were needed to secure the three quarters majority needed at the synod. The change came into force in 1988 and in March that year the first female priests were ordained. In 1990 Finland allowed female bishops, but Irja Askola became the first female bishop only in 2010. 

Iceland got its first female priests in 1974.