In late Ottoman and mandate Palestine, Christians emerged as a major part of a new, self-consciously "modern" middle class, intent on reinventing themselves and their communities as a central part of a transnational Arab intellectual and political elite. This paper examines the ways in which women became important symbols of the Christian centrality to this new modernity through their reinvention of Palestinian Christian religious institutions. Women placed themselves and were placed at the forefront of this new Christian “modernity” in a number of ways. Their participation in unprecedented numbers in Christian educational institutions throughout Palestine, and the remaking of Christian educational curricula to serve the needs of these Palestinian women, deliberately broadcast the role of a specifically Christian education in the construction of a Palestinian middle class. New women’s church clubs and charities undertook to support the work of clinics, schools, and orphanages, often focusing on assisting poor women with education and job training; these women’s organizations advertised Christianity as central to the project of transforming Palestine into a “modern” state. Socially, Christian women used their church circles as venues for the sorts of bourgeois activities – music, theater, sports – that publicly demonstrated the emergence of a new Palestinian Arab middle class. During the mandate period, Palestinian Christian women became an important public signifier of the centrality of Christian institutions and communities to the project of middle-class modernity in Palestine. The transformation of women’s church-related public spheres – including education, charitable organizations and social spaces - was intended to broadcast the Christian communities’ claims to be a central part of Palestine’s emergence as a modern nation. It also, of course, had the inverse result of shaping Palestinian feminist approaches around a particular brand of middle-class thought heavily influenced by the structures of Christian education.