Throughout history, eremitism and solitude have been circumscribed by culture and society. For men, solitude has been perceived as a goal of religious aspiration or for a personality attracted to wilderness, nature, and self-sufficiency. For women, solitude has historically limited them to convents and anchorholds. Many modern women have expanded the concept of solitude to represent a resource for personal growth and creativity, perhaps the only prescribed configuring of solitude available for women in the context of male-dominated society.
While creativity, spiritual or aesthetic, has always been a male privelege, women have faced the difficulty incorporating solitude into a more complex social role. Historically, men have little difficulty in being solitaries in a crowd; a woman alone in a crowd will often be harassed, criticized, or ostracized. Being a solitary in a crowd is not alienation but an assertion of self, yet this experience can differ radically between men and women. The psychology of creative aloneness is valued differently by class, sexg, and circumstance. How society nurtures men versus women in the processes of socialization and expectations often depends on a sense of control or power. For women, solitude is more often the result of suffering, not a conscious crafting of the use of time and resources.
Wholeness of self is often a men’s experience of privilege that maintains itself even in the midst of psychological or economic vicissitudes. Men maintain self-identification readily, often not from their own strength but from social and gender dominance in society. Women are relegated by society to resolving their experience of differentiation without society’s helpful intervention. Men are identified with reason, rationalism, logic, power, dominance, control, and violence. Women are identified with empathy, caring, emotion, connection, love, sensitivity, and giving. Men are typified as productive, women as reproductive; the stereotypes are reflected in popular definitions, in careers, social roles, and functions within institutions, inevitably suggesting that women’s role is to support men’s activity, not to pursue their own self-identification. These stereotypes affect aspiratants pursuing eremitic goals.
The women who became desert hermits in early Christianity radically broke social convention. Stories relate that some women even disguised themselves as men when going into public places. Some women shamed monks in the street by rebuking the men’s feigned curiosity when they noticed women. The theme of the repentant harlot suggested to women candidates for sisterhood or eremitism that their quest was granted by ecclesiastical authorities as reluctant privelege. The Middle Ages witnessed many women forced into marriage attempting to regain their individual status through refusal and insistence on erimitism (not necessarily nunhood) in a convent as anchorites. The Beguines of the late Middle Ages concluded that successful solitude and simplicity must be pursued outside of the male-dominated institutions of convent and monastery. Their efforts were short-lived, perhaps historically premature, certainly not supported by the institutions of the day.
The prescription of convent and anchorhold had its male adherents but served women more “logically” given the temperament of society. The outstanding women solitariesoftheMiddleAges, from the anonymous sisters of Aelred of Rievaulx to mystics like Juliana of Norwich, carved a space for social autonomy not viable in public places. In modern time, outstanding women solitaries from Sarah Bishop to Orgyan Chokyi, from Emily Bronte to Emily Dickinson, have cultivated solitude in the updated modern sense that also perceives solitude as an opportunity to pursue creativity. Medieval or modern, women attracted to solitude found or formed contemporary ways to incorporate all that solitude bestows as discernment and worldly wisdom.
But always, one notices, as plight, hardship, challenge, rebelliousness against the conventions of the day. As the Buddhist hermitess Orgyan Chokyi put it, the very body of woman is samsara. The words are not an indictment of women but an indictment of society itself. Thus the history of women solitaries is the story of multiple historical phenomena, but especially of hermits and women.