What impact did the protestant reformation have on women?

“Luther in particular denied it (the convent) a place in the godly society where God solemnized the first marriage and made the bearing of children every woman’s path to salvation”

Out of the convents and into families was the Protestants ideal. Luther himself helped organise the escape of a few dozen nuns and married one such escapee, Katharina von Bora, himself in 1925. Wittenberg and other protestant cities and duchies made monasteries themselves illegal, though they left room for the old who were allowed to live out their lives in these groups under greatly reduces circumstances. In theory it was even illegal to remain unattached with a law code of 1534 making such a crime punishable by death. Though many of these laws were not strictly enforced, it shows though a distinct change in character. Women were no longer sidelined but now an integral part of society with a clearly defined position and increased influence.

“Matrimony, which during the middle ages had only been a minor institution compared with the monastic way of life, was moved right into the centre of the new concept of true Christian life”

Authorities were increasingly aware of the important position women now held. The Genevan Consistory, an institution created to impose protestant morality and discipline on common people, is an example for this. It was particularly concerned with the female negligence of the new religious codes and practices. Because women were deemed to be by nature sinful, its main concern was over the influence mothers had over their children. As a result, women constituted well over half of those who were questioned about their church attendance (55%) and those asked to recite prayers and creeds (60%). More strikingly 23 women were put on trial for their celebrating Catholic holidays, but only 3 men.

This public recognition of woman’s novel status was part and parcel of the renewed obedience to all hierarchies, from state to father to mother and children then servants. It also opened the floodgates for improvement in coming decades and centuries. By the mid seventeenth century therefore a new class of women emerges who:

“believed in their inalienable right to choose a religious form that conformed to the principles which they endorsed and about which they had thought closely. They did not follow their husbands” 

But for those who lived in Luther’s times, change was not that dramatic. In fact the solace offered by the ‘old religion’ still outweighed the freedom granted to them by the protestant reform. The figures of the Genevan Consistory must also be taken to claim that women were not been given enough incentive to leave their religion of comfort.

This cautiousness is understandable for women in the sixteenth century had already seen a great deal of change. The household workshops had necessitated female involvement in early medieval period. The decline of these had left many women working exclusively in the house as early as the thirteenth century. Though this process was not curt it did mean that by “around 1600, women totally disappeared from the world of work.” The reasons for this are twofold, but not necessarily religious. The introduction of individual pay in the thirteenth century allowed blatant discrimination against women, with wages often pushed so low as to make staying at home more productive use of time. Further, the guilds formed in the thirteenth century gradually forbade female apprenticeship in many areas of work from the late fourteenth century onwards. This meant that women were effectively banned from many areas of work with competition in the remaining areas depressing wages and making work an exclusively male domain, with women returning to the house. Thus, the changes advocated by the protestant reformation were already in effect in much of Europe by the time they came into religious practice.

“The protestant emphasis on marriage as the only proper vocation for women coincided with the political strengthening of the patriarchal household"

Undeniably however, though the protestants can be seen a ‘following the trend’, the further call for subordination would not have strengthened the female position but denied them power. Generally, the number of women in employment at the end of the sixteenth century was considerably down from the figures of pre-reformation Europe.

Further, though women were given a new social standing and increased influence with the reformation this did not necessarily mean that their voices would be heard. Their influence, it seems, was restricted to educating the household, though even civic authorities saw this as an area of grave importance. However as the examples of Argula von Grumbach in Germany and Anne Lock in England show, even women of outstanding character and endurance were not taken seriously when commenting on religious of civic issues. 30,000 copies of von Grumbach’s eight writings were distributed, but her direct impact on society was negligible. Though silencing these voices was not as easy as it might previously have been, their “garrulity had been taken as evidence of their sexual depravity”. Exceptional in their own right these women were of a rare kind and did not represent the female population as a whole.

The exclusion of the common woman from religious influence was more complete than that of Lock, von Grumbach and their contemporaries. With the loss of visual artefacts like saints and their shrines with the protestant reformation, religion now focused more and more on the written word. Though the invention of the printing press had brought an increase in literacy, this was still more a domain of man, and women were therefore excluded. They had to be acceptant of all the teachings received by husbands and priests, for they could not read the books which would have allowed them to form their own opinion. Women therefore remained in the most essential way secondary citizens and were deprived of any genuine influence. The “real battle was for the minds of men and that of women would then follow”. 

Though the women as a whole were not involved in shaping the changes made by the reformation, they were affected by them all the same. Women of the time might only have felt the impact of the actual change in religious rituals. The act of ‘Childbirth cleansing’ was one such custom, which maintained that the “unclean and dangerous” new mother was “surrounded by all kinds of prohibitions and taboos” and should therefore abstain from church services for six weeks and must then attend purification. The ban of this and similar rituals was not always respected and it might seem that even the disbanding of convents was not felt to be a major impact by the contemporary population.

With little written evidence to account for the ‘woman on the street’ this is hard to judge. And although references to the impact of the reformation on women might be found in some writings it is problematic to generalise and apply them to the fate of women in other countries. The reformation was heavily localised, with extremes emerging in Switzerland, Martin Luther providing a focal point in one of Germanys many duchies and the Netherlands being more open than most to female commentary. To emphasise this point one can look at the political turmoil that sparked the reformation in England, not the masses:

“The dissolution of monasteries… were acts undertaken at government level, less out of faith than covetousness”

Further problematic is the separation of what changes in perception were brought on by economic developments and which might be the result of the protestant reformation. But hindsight and the recent improvements for the female world allow us to judge the impact of the reformation in a way which might not have been possible to the woman of the day. In general the protestant reformation brought an improvement for mothers and wives, it was a step forward for womanhood, not a step back. This is not due to any increase in independence, for it did not occur. If anything women were more restricted in what they could do and where there could do it. They were tied to the stove, so to speak. But though modern, feminist commentators might judge this a negative development, it is not so. It placed women firmly on the social map and acknowledged the importance of their position. Without this change in perception women would have continued to be understood as an unwanted necessity by men in their dominant positions. It gave the modern world a healthy understanding of the importance of the woman and paved the way for future feminist developments. Within a hundred years of the beginning of the reformation, female commentary and critique was being more widely tolerated and even accepted. “We will not sit in silence” became the slogan of those days. Change of this dimension cannot be rushed, though it requires events to push the developments forward. The protestant reformation was undoubtedly one of these.

“You make me do what you will; you have full sovereignty here, and I award you, with all my heart, the command in all household matters, reserving my rights in other points.”

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