There is no Woman of the Day post today but if there was, it would be nun and teacher Mary Ward who was born in January 1585 in Mulwith, Yorkshire. She devoted her life to founding schools for girls across Europe and was imprisoned as a heretic for it.

Mary was born a Catholic at a time of great danger for Catholics. Two of her uncles had been involved in the Gunpowder Plot and her family home was burned down during an anti-Catholic riot. Her father had to carry her and her siblings to safety.

Even so, she was driven by a great need to serve and to help others and she entered a convent of Poor Clares - a contemplative order - in Saint-Omer, France, before founding a new convent nearby specifically for Englishwomen using her own money. She was still only 21.

However, the contemplative life was not for Mary. She wanted to do more. She wanted to open a school for girls, minister to the sick and encourage religious tolerance. Those were close to being Jesuitical principles and were regarded with much suspicion and hostility when practised by men, never mind by women - and particularly women who didn’t feel they needed to wear religious dress, be cloistered away from the world or accept the restrictions of the local bishop.

None of those would raise an eyebrow these days but in those days, Mary’s ideas were controversial even though the work carried out by her new Order was both necessary and popular.

Mary ignored dogma and joined a group of women who felt as strongly as she did. ‘The English Ladies’, as they became known, set up a school in Flanders. It became so popular, she wanted to found more and so she applied to the Vatican for permission.

In 1629, she was allowed to plead her cause in person before a congregation of cardinals appointed by Pope Urban to examine the case and thereafter, she travelled throughout Europe on foot, in extreme poverty, frequently ill, founding her girls’ schools in the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Austria, and in today's Czech Republic and Slovakia.

That’s when it all escalated. Women not doing as they were told? Girls being educated? No, absolutely not.

In 1631, Pope Urban VIII passed a law closing the schools and condemning the ‘English Ladies’. Mary was arrested as a heretic and imprisoned for nine weeks. She refused to let her work be destroyed however. She sent a coded letter written in lemon juice - a substitute for invisible ink - to her network of women and they carried on running the now illegal schools.

Mary returned to England, established free schools for the poor, nursed the sick and visited prisoners. She died in 1645 during the Siege of York during the Civil War, just a week her 60th birthday - still classed as a heretic. A vicar “honest enough to be bribed" allowed her to be buried in the churchyard.

Eventually her life’s work was given approval by Pope Clement XI in 1703, 58 years after she died.

Mary was declared Venerable ("heroic in virtue") by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 but I prefer her other title, “the first Sister of Feminism”.

"There is no such difference between men and women that women, may they not do great things? And I hope in God that it may be seen in time to come that women will do much."