Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal designed the Visitation at Annecy in 1610 specifically as a congregation without the severe fasting and physical austerity that excluded widows and women of fragile health from other orders, and their original plan had the sisters actively visiting the sick and the poor in their homes, an outward, charitable mission reflected in the very name Visitation. That founding design did not survive long unaltered.
Archbishop authorities, most decisively in Lyon, judged an active, unenclosed community of women difficult to reconcile with the expectations the post Tridentine church placed on women's religious life, and within roughly the first decade of the congregation's existence the Visitandines were required to accept full monastic enclosure, converting what had begun as an active charitable congregation into a contemplative, cloistered order much closer in practice to older monastic communities than to Francis de Sales's original intention.
The change paralleled what happened to the Ursulines around the same broad period, another active women's foundation reshaped by outside authority into an enclosed form, and it left the Visitation's eventual character, gentle in spirituality, contemplative in daily practice, markedly different from the mission its own founders had first set out to build.