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Remember that the banking industry in Italy was originally developed to deal with the horrific expense of paying for dowries etc.. In places like Venice, the richer you were, the more expensive marriage was. The marriage of each daughter was a major financial blow to anyone middle class or above. As a result, they had to find alternatives. A lot of women got shunted off to nunneries whether they were suited to the life or not. Quite a few of these nunneries became known as sort of high end brothels, where the extremely rich visited what amounted to their friend's sisters for some pretty wild parties.

There was also a real surge in new religious orders, some of them lay, in reaction to what was seen as debauched convents. You get women doing really extreme fasts and licking the sores of lepers and stuff.

The thing to remember about Venice is that women really had no say in their lives or what happened to their bodies. They were sold to other families as part of a system of political and commercial alliance, or at a discount to nunneries. Their husbands had the right to kill them if they had reason to think they might be unfaithful. If a woman was raped under any circumstances, this was seen as consensual on her part. They had essentially no rights and no political or commercial power of their own in a state obsessed with those things. Upperclass women could be married as young as twelve to men over 35, and often were. (Marriage Europe wide tends to be later the poorer you are for the Middle Ages).

Yes, Venice produced some very intelligent, politically astute women. For the most part, they had to be that way to survive a system that worked so hard to keep them quiet and submissive.