The Poor Clares are the enclosed contemplative women order of the Franciscan family, and their founding is marked by a struggle to be allowed the very poverty the men order was built on.
Clare and the Privilege of Poverty
The order was founded in 1212 when Clare of Assisi left her noble family to follow Francis, and it grew into an enclosed community of women living a life of prayer, penance and radical poverty. The distinctive point of Clare achievement was legal as well as spiritual: she fought to secure for her community the Privilege of Poverty, the right to own no property even in common, which the church was reluctant to grant to enclosed women who could not, like the friars, support themselves by begging in the world. That she obtained it, and defended it against pressure to accept endowments, is the founding drama of the order.
Contemplation behind the enclosure
Where the friars were mobile preachers, the Poor Clares were and remain strictly enclosed, giving themselves to a hidden life of contemplative prayer within the monastery, supported by the work of their hands and by alms. The order spread across medieval Europe and produced its own reforms and observances, and it continues as one of the principal contemplative orders of women in the church. The Poor Clares thus hold the contemplative pole of the Franciscan family, the enclosed counterpart to the preaching friars, and their history preserves the memory of a woman who insisted that the poverty of Francis be open to women as fully as to men.