Here’s another reason to travel to Belgium, if the world’s best beer and chocolate weren’t enough to draw you there already: its beautiful, well-preserved beguinages .
If feminism means a desire for independence from patriarchal authority, the beguines — a Roman Catholic laic order that began in the 13th century and branched across northwest Europe — represented, perhaps, the world’s oldest women’s movement.
I can only speculate that these women of simplicity likely experienced more fulfillment than participants in the more infamous woman’s movement centuries later.
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