Unconventional Women

In the 1950s and 60s, six young women left their families to join a strict enclosed order of nuns in Melbourne. They never left the convent except to visit the doctor, and only rarely received visitors, living a life whose limits were marked by the convent walls, the rhythms of the Divine Office and the dictates of the Mother Superior. By the late 1960s, this community of women was upended by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, and by the changing times. Their convent opened its doors on a new world and the women wanted to be part of it. This book, based chiefly on the oral histories of six nuns and ex-nuns, charts the spiritual journeys of several remarkable women as they navigated a changing world and their evolving understandings of the divine.