One of the most common complaints lobbed against people who are pro-life, religious, and conservative (or any combination of the three) is “ThEy WaNt To SeNd WoMeN bAcK tO tHe MidDlE aGeS!!!!” This is always presented as a horrific possibility, something to be automatically feared by any correct-thinking person. I’m not exactly sure why. For one thing, fashion was much better in the Middle Ages. Who wouldn’t want to wear a hennin (one of those cone-shaped hats with a veil) instead of yoga pants?
Perhaps one of the reasons people give as to why they wouldn’t want to live in the medieval era is that “women have more choices now.” But women had choices then too. The fork in the road that is the site of squabbling in our era is where girl-bossery diverts from trad-wifeliness. The route of so-called self-determination and financial independence, that of the career-focused woman, is set at odds with the more holistic path of prioritizing motherhood, the home, and faith. Some women, intellectuals, enter the academy. Others, “creatives,” live lives of squalor in various states of arrested bohemian development (guilty). But in the Dark Ages, another choice reigned for women who didn’t fit in. “The convent filled several basic needs,” Frances and Joseph Gies write in “Women in the Middle Ages.” “It provided an outlet for nonconformists, women who did not wish to marry because they felt a religious vocation, because marriage was repugnant, or because they saw in the convent a mode of life in which they could perform and perhaps distinguish themselves. The nunnery was a refuge of female intellectuals, as the monastery was for male. Although the majority of nuns were at best literate, most of the learned women of the Middle Ages — the literary, artistic, scientific, and philosophical stars — were nuns.” Historian Elizabeth Kuhns notes that “for women called to religious life, monasteries offered the ideal setting to become great writers, thinkers, and mystics.”
Is this still the case today? A New York Times piece from 2019 reported on the phenomenon of young progressives boarding with and learning from communities of aging Catholic religious sisters. The project, called Nuns and Nones (“nones” meaning the millennials not affiliated with a religion), matches people seeking “radical … lives of total devotion” with elders who are “already doing this.” Many of the young people spoke of a need for ritual and found warmth in the exchange between generations. Still, the article noted that “convents around the country are closing. The number of nuns in the United States has collapsed from 180,000 in 1965 to below 50,000 today.” The author also states that fewer than three-in-ten millennials attend church.
A common rejoinder to the angst of a woman choosing to prioritize either career or motherhood is “you can have both,” or “you can have both, just not at the same time.” But what if you don’t want either? What if the thought of working for a corporation for the rest of your life makes you want to slit your throat, and what if you also can’t abide the thought of childbirth? What if you don’t belong in an office, but you’re also not a woman who melts at the sight of an infant? You can have both. But much like the two-party system, this two-p*ssy system isn’t working either. There needs to be an outlaw option.
Female monasticism flourished in many forms in the medieval era. Not only did numerous women live in convents and make lifelong vows, performing tasks like service to the poor, cycles of prayer throughout the day and night, and the copying of sacred manuscripts, but there were semi-monastic communities that made simple vows and ran their own businesses called Beguines. These “holy women” were chaste like nuns but free to leave the order and marry if they so chose. Their communities produced a plethora of ecstatic mystics such as Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete. The Beguines were viewed with suspicion, however, by more orthodox Christians who saw them as “heretical ‘free spirits.’” One of their highest callings was to “risk one’s life and to suffer with those who are suffering.”
In August the CDC reported that the per-year number of suicides is as high as it has ever been in the United States. The spiritual hunger that is evident everywhere, if one chooses to tune into it, is perhaps related to this painful revelation. There are people desperate to opt out at any cost from a culture that is offering them nothing. A no less radical choice, yet a much more positive one, consists in giving oneself to God, fully and completely. And there are many ways to do this. We need to be much more experimental in our faith, much more unwilling to accept the unacceptable. Sometimes, as Ani DiFranco sang, you just have to “drive out of range.” Scholar John Dominic Crossan wrote of the earliest Christians, who had left behind their former way of life, that “it was ethical to accept the abandonment of such a system and no longer to participate in its exploitative normalcy.” Monastic life, or any form of spiritual emergence, can be thought of as a kind of “death-to-self” or living martyrdom which allows the self-in-Christ, or enlightened consciousness, to exist anew. I see hope in the millennials seeking guidance in the Nuns and Nones movement and in articles like this one from Front Porch Republic that talk about the conservative case for cohousing. It’s time to run for our eternal lives.