Varieties of Female Friendship: The Nun As Loose Woman(2/2)

【Suppression of Loose Religous Women】
1. Internal suppression: the Roman Catholic Church. The canonical restraints & the rule of enclosure. Abbesses relegated to prioresses. Forced withdrawal from active "masculine" tasks. Domestication of convent life.
2. External suppression: the Protestant Church. The Dissolution. Attack on virginity (equated with prostitution). Closing of convents and expelling of inhabitants. Marriage and motherhood -- "women's most acceptable state before God".
(Gyn/affection) has been suppressed -- either internally by Roman Catholic male church authorities or externally as in the Dissolution of convents in England and on the continent during the sixteenth century.
The former intellectual achievements of nuns were also brought to decline. More and more, convent life centered on the domestic. In settlements where women's and men's houses continued to coexist in the same location, nuns prepared the meals and made clothes. (...) Especially during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, convents relinquished their artistic pursuits.
The rule of enclosure was a double-edged sword. Whichever way nuns turned, their Self-definition, freedom, and ultimately their physical well-being and integrity were under siege. If they did not submit to the so-called reform measures, they were subject to male invasions of all sorts. They were easy targets for assault and rape and could not count on any protection from church authorities. If they did submit to the 'reforms', they had a relative amount of protection from the local ecclesiastical authorities, but they abdicated freedom of movement, independent decision making, and the right of Self-governance. At best, acceptance of such 'reforms' gave nuns a modicum of separation from men and a cloistered sphere of sisters.
The Dissolution materialized the theology of the Protestant Reformation. It smashed devotion to the mother goddess, Mary, and her incarnation in groups of nuns living together. Its strident attack on virginity was accompanied by contentions that nuns broke up family bonds, were unwilling to engage in the natural duties of marriage and motherhood, and wanted to escape the bonds of marriage only so as to lead loose lives. Women who were not married were abused and feared in an emerging social climate that placed marriage and motherhood at the top of the moral ladder of God.
What happened to the nuns who were 'freeed'? Those who took dispensations were given a small sum of money to tide them over until they presumably 'settled down' and got married. Many women were simply 'set free' to drift and fend for themselves. These women had led secluded lives and were discharged into a world where they would never really belong. Henceforth, they were obviously endangered. And, once again, the Church -- this time Protestant -- created the very class of loose women against which it inveighed.
In the emerging Protestant perspective, convents were seen as destructive to the family. Attacks on unmarried women who took religious vows continued well after the first days of Reformation. When the Catholic Church was allowed to reestablish its hierarchy in England in 1850, rabid anti-Catholicism followed. Many of the attacks on the Church included propaganda against the reestablishment of convents.