Female asceticism is as old as the male desert tradition, with women recorded among the earliest Egyptian ascetics, but the medieval convent became, for roughly a thousand years, one of the very few institutions in Western Europe where a woman could receive an education, exercise real administrative authority, and pursue scholarship or the arts largely free of a husband's control, which is why learned abbesses, composers and mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen appear disproportionately from among the religious rather than the laity of their centuries.
The Council of Trent in the sixteenth century tightened enclosure requirements for professed nuns considerably, partly in response to Reformation-era criticism of convent life, and that stricter enclosure is part of what later made the canonical distinction between the cloistered nun and the uncloistered sister necessary, once new communities of women in the seventeenth century and after began seeking permission to work outside a convent's walls. The nineteenth century then saw a large expansion of active, uncloistered sisterhoods dedicated to teaching and nursing, congregations that went on to found and staff much of the school and hospital system of Catholic Europe and its colonies and, later, the United States, before the sharp decline in vocations that began in most Western countries in the 1960s.