Couldn't find an easy way to make this into a short title description!

So I was reading the Social History of England - and suddenly I had a thought about - well, let's set this up properly.

So the period where Henry VIII of England and his Great Matter - how can I divorce my wife when the church won't allow it, and what is the nature of marriage, and should he have married his brother's wife in the first place. Anyway this leads to the Dissolution of the Monasteries - or the destruction of them.

Now (finally) here's my question! So suddenly all the monasteries and nunneries were gone - what did the well off families do with their spare children? In particular, I'm curious about the daughters. Sons could always go to the army, etc. to find their way in the world. But if a family didn't have enough dowery money to spread around sending your spare daughters off to the nunnery was at least an option. And suddenly bam, that door is closed. I'm thinking that maybe you could still ship your daughter to one overseas.

Anyone have any books where this has been mentioned? I'm assuming it'd be a mention and not a whole book since I would think it wasn't safe to advertise you were Catholic at the time and wanted your child to be a nun. (I'm going to check out the references on the wiki page for the Dissolution, but thought it wouldn't hurt to ask here.)

I'm not sure.

But one of the problems with the ecclesiastical houses that Henry finally dissolved (and for some years before he dissolved them) was that they were suffering from a real decline in people joining them (as seen, in historical fiction, in Sansom's Dissolution).

Later marriage, resulting in fewer children? More unmarried daughters of the house serving as companions? I'm not sure.

Yeah it seems like it's something that would be hard for any historian to track. Apparently some of the monks and nuns were at first urged to marry, some did, then Mary was on the throne and suddenly all those marriages were voided and they weren't allowed to remarry. Then post-Mary things switched around again. Chaos = confusion in records too.

This might be one of those Only Written Up In Dissertation Somewhere bits of history.

Well, Henry VIII fought a number of really costly and stupid wars (costly not only in terms of money but also in terms of human lives -- especially that French campaign of the mid-1540s took an enormous toll on the country); so did, at the beginning and at the end of her reign, Elizabeth I (in Scotland and Ireland, respectively). So conceivably, men were first in demand as human fodder for the war machine, and then in order to rebuild the country and fill in the voids left by those killed on the battlefield.

As for women ... here's a snippet from Antonia Fraser's introduction to "The Weaker Vessel" (she's writing about the beginning of the 17th century, but the legal and social issues she refers to hadn't changed in essentials in centuries):

"Under the common law of England at the accession of King James I, no female had any rights at all (if some were allowed by custom). As an unmarried woman her rights were swallowed up in her father's, and she was his to dispose of in marriage at will. Once she was married her property became absolutely that of her husband. What of those who did not marry? Common law met that problem blandly by not recognizing it. In the words of The Lawes Resolutions [the leading 17th century compendium on women's legal status]: 'All of them are understood either married or to be married.' In 1603 England, in short, still lived in a world governed by feudal law, where a wife passed from the guardianship of her father to her husband; her husband also stood in relation to her as a feudal lord.”

In other words, women continued to be, as had always been the case, either married off and put to making themselves useful in the production of offspring, or treated as yet another unwanted mouth to feed in their fathers' households. Though conceivably, most of those men filling the shoes of other men killed on the battlefield would have wanted wives ... And undoubtedly, a fair number of former nuns also would have ended up as prostitutes, especially if neither their families were able or willing to take them back in, nor were they lucky enough to find husbands for themselves, either.

The situation wasn't limited to England, btw.: the same issues arose in Germany in connection with the Reformation. Most prominent and one of the best-documented cases in point: Katharina von Bora, Luther's wife-to-be. She had been a nun (entered a convent at age 6), but fled her monastery together with a number of other nuns when she turned 24. They ended up in Eisenach, where they found shelter with Luther's group of friends. It was obvious to all concerned from the very start that the women's only chance of survival was to find husbands -- and quickly, too; otherwise they would have ended up in the gutter (all the more so in a country that, at the time, was deeply torn by the Reformation movement, and where a Catholic Emperor was still actively trying to quash Protestantism once and for all). Luther's general opinion of women wasn't very high, and he scoffed at the notion of marrying at all, let alone marrying any of these runaway nuns, even if he was quite willing to help them find husbands elsewhere. Katharina changed that attitude in fairly short order, and theirs turned out to be not only a very happy but also, for the time, an unusually equal partnership. But the moment Luther was dead, Katharina began having to struggle to survive -- Luther's testament that had left her as his sole heir was voided, and it was only due to the protection of the local prince (who had been a friend and admirer of her husband's) that she didn't fall into abject poverty. Without that protection, she and very likely all of her children would have starved.

Great question, btw, Batgrl!

ETA, as for books, there are a number of great German bios on Katharina von Bora that have been published in recent years, but the only one that seems to be available in English is Katharina Von Bora: A Reformation Life by Rudolf K. Markwald and Marilynn Morris Markwald (2002).

Antonia Fraser talks about women's situation in pre-17th century England a bit at the beginning of "The Weaker Vessel" in order to set up her main topic (which is more concerned with the developments over the course of the 17th century), but IIRC she doesn't go at great length into the consequences of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. (Susanna?)

C.J. Sansom's Shardlake novels, which Susanna mentioned, throw side lights on women's life in 16th century England, but their main focus is the men's world (and I found the woman-focused part of the plot of Sanson's so far last Shardlake novel, "Heartstone," a bit of a stretch of the imagination, even if not entirely unplausible).

Will continue to look, though -- now I'm curious myself!

There might be something on it in Lawrence Stone's Family Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (I've read it, but it's been at least 20 years), or Helen Berry's more recent The Family in Early Modern England, which I haven't read, but looks interesting.