The first thing to keep in mind here is that for the medieval church there were essentially considered two tracts for the spiritual life.

The monastic and clerical was seen as the superior, more holy, path to take and was duly privilege for that reason. The laity was, thus, an inferior path. But thanks to conceptions of a treasury of merit (essentially a bank account of grace deposited by Jesus that the Church has access to) the laity could could pay the monks to say masses for them. And this brought a lot of wealth into monastaries.

Enter the protestant reformation. Reacting against both this whole system of a two tract spirituality, the treasury of merit, and the opulent, immoral, lifestyles of many churchmen, the entire system that supported all these monastic houses (and other forms of vowed religious life) went away. In it's place was an emphasis on the holiness of lay, married life and secular work. And so where this new protestant ethos was popular, many monks and nuns renounced their vows to take up this single spiritual tract of family life.

However, not all monastic houses folded after the reformation. For example, Herford Abbey became Lutheran and continued to operate as a women's religious house (with many of the abbesses being Calvinists including the early modern philosopher Elisabeth of the Palatinate) until 1802.

Later on in Protestantism you also get the development of deaconesses. Single women, living together, and carrying out charitable functions on behalf of the church in a similar role as a convent.

Of course, in England, the religious houses were all shut down and their property confiscated by King Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Henry VIII didn't seem to have a theological problem with monasteries (unlike Cromwell) but he did not appreciate their loyalty to the Pope and the huge sums of wealth they had were rather attractive.

However, in the 19th century new monastic houses began to pop up in the Church of England (and other parts of the Anglican Communion) in response to the Oxford Movement, a theological shift that sought to reemphasize the Catholic nature of the Church of England. Many of those orders continue to operate to this day. As an aside, you can see a fictionalized version of one of these monastic communities in the show "Call the Midwife." As the show depicts these early communities often focused on offering relief and aid to the urban poor.

So, because of a change in emphasis on the spiritual life being just as available to the lay as to the vowed/ordained the monastic life was drastically diminished in Protestantism but hasn't entirely gone away and you can still find Protestant monks and nuns in Anglican and Lutheran churches.