Independent Women Through History: From Beguines to the Longevity Era

Scroll any modern news or social media feed and the narrative feels alive: women building portfolio careers, living solo by choice, launching second acts after 50, forming communities that look nothing like the traditional rulebook. Sounds amazing and exciting all at once, right?

Hmmmm. We had to research because our intuition told us everything felt same same, but, different.

What we learnt wasn’t from a few decades ago. What we learnt was much further back and you could say without meaning to burst any bubbles, that history is raising an eyebrow at us and our excitable futures. Almost smirking.

It all started a long long time ago…

Eight centuries ago in fact, when a loose network of women across medieval Europe were already stress-testing many of the same ideas. They were not influencers. They were not activists in the modern sense. Structurally though, what they built was quietly radical.

They were known as the Beguines.

At the centre is Mary of Oignies (1177–1213), who is often, according to research, described as the prototype Beguine.

Her choices were stark for the time. She declined marriage early. She chose a life of service, nursing people with leprosy. She embraced voluntary poverty and intense spiritual practice. Most notably, she did all this outside the formal confines of a convent.

Her contemporary and biographer, Jacques de Vitry, helped bring attention and a degree of legitimacy to women like her. But Mary was not building a personal brand. She was modelling a different way for women to live: economically modest, spiritually driven, socially useful and institutionally independent.

Across the Low Countries and parts of Germany, Beguine communities began to take shape. Note; they were not nuns, they took no permanent vows and they could leave if they chose. Many supported themselves through textile work, teaching, nursing or other forms of labour.

In governance terms, you could call this flexible infrastructure. In social terms however, it was quite the disruptiver.

Women such as Hadewych of Antwerp wrote sophisticated mystical poetry and letters that still feel emotionally contemporary. Mechthild of Magdeburg produced The Flowing Light of the Godhead, blending theology with personal spiritual insight in ways that made authorities uneasy. Beatrice of Nazareth articulated nuanced writings on divine love and union.

And then there was Marguerite Porete, whose book The Mirror of Simple Souls was ultimately condemned as heretical. She was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310 — a brutal reminder that independent female thought has never existed without risk.

Different personalities. Different outcomes. Same underlying architecture: women creating lives with agency inside systems that offered them very few formal lanes.

The structure

Strip away the medieval clothing and the Beguine model looks surprisingly familiar.

They were economically self-supporting.
They formed intentional communities.
They centred purpose and service.
They operated with flexible commitment rather than lifetime lock-in.

In modern corporate language, this was a decentralised, values-led ecosystem. Importantly, they were not attempting to overthrow the social order. They were working within its gaps. That distinction matters. Social change begins with quiet structural workarounds that, over time, become impossible to ignore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beguines_and_Beghards

Fast-forward a few centuries and the pattern keeps resurfacing in different clothing.

Industrialisation pulled more women into paid labour. The world wars accelerated workforce participation out of necessity. The late 20th century saw the rise of second-wave feminism, formal workplace rights and expanding educational access.

Each wave was treated, at the time, as unprecedented.

Yet the underlying through-line remained consistent: when women gain even partial economic leverage and community support, new life configurations emerge.

What is genuinely new today is scale and longevity. Women are living longer and working longer. Remaining socially and intellectually active well into decades that previous generations rarely reached. The result is not just extended life, but extended agency.

The modern moment

Look closely at women over 50 today and the Beguine echo becomes hard to miss.

Many are:

redesigning careers rather than retiring cleanly
balancing caregiving with personal reinvention
choosing community in intentional ways
prioritising purpose alongside income
building micro-enterprises or portfolio work.

The longevity economy is being shaped significantly by women who refuse to disappear quietly into the later chapters of life. They are studying, launching, mentoring, caregiving, travelling, creating and, importantly, earning.

In other words, they are doing what women have done for centuries when given even a sliver of room: expanding the brief.

So, the Beguines were not modern feminists. They operated within deeply religious frameworks with their freedoms partial and often precarious. However, their strategic insight holds up remarkably well:

Independence rarely arrives as a clean policy win.

It accumulates through economic participation.

It stabilises through community.

It endures through purpose.

The road ahead

Demographics alone suggest the next twenty years will amplify these patterns.

Longer lifespans
More nonlinear careers
More solo households
More chosen communities alongside traditional family structures.

The smart organisations, media platforms and community builders will recognise what the Beguines demonstrated eight hundred years ago: when women are given even modest structural flexibility, they adapt and redesign the system around the life they intend to live.

History has been quietly documenting that reality for centuries. The only surprise is that we keep treating it as news.

While the Beguines understood this centuries ago; the rest of the world is still catching up.