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.