Nun, Suffering Saint or Outcast? Single Middle-Aged Women in the Church

If you're Protestant, a woman is supposed to get married. If you're Catholic or Orthodox, a woman can get married or become a nun. The Bible also offered polygamy as an option, one the Mormons famously adopted in their need to care for a large number of widows and orphans, but that is frowned up today. So women are often pressured to marry men that won't be good husbands, or ostracized as a threat. What are the answers offered to the whole generation of women who either through circumstances or cultural pressure find themselves sing and childless in middle age? This an episode with a lot of questions and no answers...Referenced in the Episode:A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich