Nuns can teach us about feminism

One way to reclaim feminism can be learned from the increasing number of women who choose to become nuns, writes Shelina Janmohamed

Nuns attend a canonization ceremony of four new saints led by Pope Francis in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)

Feminism is fashionable. Celebrities now gain stature by openly declaring themselves aligned with the global women’s movement.

What’s supposedly not cool, however, is being a woman of religion taking control of her own life and finding liberation within faith from the strictures of modern womanhood.

But these women offer us insights into the deepest challenges facing women around the world today – particularly first world challenges. Their radical life choices should set us thinking about new ways to address the surface as well as structural oppression women face, even if we would never follow suit.

According to the Catholic Church in England and Wales, the number of women becoming nuns has reached a 25-year-high. The absolute number is small – 45 women took orders past year – but it’s trebled in the last five years from 15 in 2009. And of the women who entered last year, 14 were under 30. It seems baffling – who’d be a nun, with all the freedom women enjoy in the 21st century?

One of these nuns explains that the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience “might sound like the end of any normal life” but to her they give her “freedom from possessions, wealth and status, and a freedom to love more widely and generously than I can imagine”.

In our highly sexualised world women are finding affirmation in vows of abstinence. Even while conspicuous consumption is a sign of success, they flaunt their aspiration towards poverty. And as women make every effort to redress the power balance, these women are removing themselves entirely from the equation. All this to create a new beat by which to live their lives.

Sex, money and power are the modern trinity that women are fighting against. The vows taken by the nuns of chastity, poverty and obedience hold a mirror to these key challenges. It is perhaps the most radical of moves to reject this trilateral hold to assert “freedom” and define a different kind of womanhood.

Turning towards a life of faith tells us that one of those ways appears to be to reject outright the limits of the imposed social order.

This involves removing sex, money and power from the equation to see where that lands women in the pursuit of freedom.

Is this a way to reclaim feminism? After all, once upon a time, to take orders was a way to escape the stifling social rigidity prescribed for women and to be free of the oppression of the male order. Faith could literally set you free.

Of course women of faith face their own challenges, whether it’s cultural and social battles within their own communities, anti-women interpretations of faith designed to reinforce existing power structures or the very real prejudice they face for choosing to practise their faith. These are important problems to solve.

Personally, I could never be a nun and I’d never want to. But their radical rejection of the modern trinity standing between women and their freedom should give contemporary feminists food for thought.

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www.spirit21.co.uk