Claustration. Not an easy word to find. The medieval practice of putting women into cloisters
against their will.
"Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, the female cloistered population began to grow
sharply, in direct proportion to the rising costs of secular marriage. It is thought that in Milan
as many as seventy-five percent of women born to upper-class families wereconsigned to
nunneries by the end of the seventeenth century. One scholar believes that convents were
designed primarily to be a means of controlling the surplus female population of the wealthy
or noble classes.

The most eloquent and angry condemnation of the forced claustration of young women was
written by Archangela Tarabotti, herself a victim of this practice.

One scholar believes that convents were designed primarily to be a means of controlling the surplus female population of the wealthy or noble classes.

In turn, controlling the ability to produce competition for the family estate. Sounds like it had the potential to become a sibling *issue.

I can understand the noble families wanting to avoid losing financial status by providing
dowries to their girls. I suppose Galileo put his daughter into a convent because he could
not provide her with a dowry. I didn't know he had a son, until one of the "engines" episodes
mentioned it. At the same time, I'll bet he had to make a substantial gift to the convent.
Incidentally, it is worth remembering that the Church was the first and most important
social agency for many many years. I wonder what that bastard Rousseau would have done
with his unwanted offspring if hadn't had the church doorsteps to dump them on.

the word is used in a transferred sense to refer to current Middle East practices.

1980. The Lebanese civil war shakes me, hurts and wounds me deeply. My world seems to crumble and fall apart into fragments of what I have held most precious. The tragedy makes me ask more questions. I try to explain its cruelty both scientifically and existentially, having both experienced it up close and seen it from afar. I discover that practices such as forced marriage and virginity, claustration, the veil, polygamy, repudiation, beatings, denial of freedom and of the possibility to achieve one's aims and desires in life - oppressions which motivated me to run away from Lebanon at the age of twenty-two - are closely connected to the internal war in Lebanon. I am therefore compelled to make connections between the role of women, the relationships between men and women, and the war. They become the central theme of an essay I later write on the subject.
- Beirut: The city that moves me
World Literature Today; Winter 2002; Evelyne Accad;

Another word for the practice in Muslim and Hindu cultures: "purdah".
purdah
n.
5Urdu & Hindi pardah, veil < Pers6
1 the practice among some Hindus and Muslims of secluding or hiding women from strangers
2 a curtain or partition used for this
3 the section of a house reserved primarily for women