Unconventional Women: The story of the last Blessed Sacrament Sisters in Australia

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Sarah Gilbert

Unconventional Women

The story of the last Blessed Sacrament Sisters in Australia

Sarah Gilbert

$38

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRES
02 July 2024

Oral history; Religion & beliefs

The lives of the women who joined a closed convent in Melbourne in a time of great upheaval

In the 1950s and 60s, six young women left their families to join a strictly enclosed order of nuns in Melbourne. They could leave the convent only for medical appointments and rarely received visitors, who they would meet from behind a partition built into the parlour. Their lives were confined 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 threw open its doors on a new world and the women wanted to be part of it.

The personal accounts of the six nuns and ex-nuns in Unconventional Women are unusually candid, giving a rare insight into the world of the convent, and exploring their changing relationship with both God and the world.

By: Sarah Gilbert
Imprint: MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRES
Country of Publication: Australia
Dimensions: Height: 1mm, Width: 1mm,
Weight: 1g
ISBN: 9780522880397
ISBN 10: 0522880398
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 02 July 2024
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Sarah Gilbert is a writer, producer and oral historian from Sydney. She began her career as a copy girl at News Ltd before moving to New York where she worked as a feature writer at the New York Post. She returned home to work as a reporter in current affairs television, but soon moved Argentina where she wrote for Lonely Planet and Time Out. Sarah's writing has been published in the Sydney Review of Books, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Wall Street Journal and Marie Claire. She works as a writer/producer across documentary film, television and podcasting, with a particular focus on Australian history, and she is the books columnist at Galah magazine. Sarah lives in Darlinghurst with her husband and their two children.