Instances are not wanting of heroic women of those early days who were
capable of holding and defending person and property against
aggression and warfare. But the logic of events was strong then, as
now, and the destiny of the woman was not that of military supremacy.

The first step in associated life taken by women was a simple protest
against the use and abuse of power on the part of men, wrought up by
fear or loathing to the point of desperation. Women, usually of rank,
fled to the desert with one or two companions, and encountered
unheard-of hardships rather than submit to the fate to which they had
been condemned by father, brother, or some other man who could
exercise authority over them. The first Church-sisterhood grew out of
such beginnings, and gradually obtained the sanction of the Church. A
recent remarkable work, "Women in Monasticism," shows how wide and
powerful the system of religious sisterhoods had become as early as
the fifth century, and traces its growing strength and enlargement
until its decline, which was coeval with the Reformation.

The strength of this extraordinary development lay in the fact that it
furnished women with a vocation; it gave employment to faculty. The
sisterhoods of the convents and monasteries were the nurses, the
teachers, the students, the caretakers of the poor, and the guardians
of the orphaned rich. The Fathers of the Church--St. Jerome, St.
Chrysostom, St. Augustine--all bear witness to the high character of
these sisterhoods and to their individual members, to their virtues
and lives of self-sacrificing devotion. Many of these women became
learned by the exercise of memory alone, for they had no books. Many
enriched their convents with manuscript books--the result of lives of
painstaking labor. The Beguines, who founded hospitals and schools,