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In the 1950s and 60s, seven young women left their families and friends to join a strictly enclosed order of nuns in Melbourne. They could leave the convent only for medical appointments and rarely received visitors, whom they would meet from behind a partition built into the parlour. They vowed to submit themselves to the rhythms of the Divine Office and the dictates of the Mother Superior for what they thought would be the rest of their lives.

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 to a new world and the women wanted to be part of it. The personal accounts of the nuns and ex-nuns in Unconventional Women are unusually candid, giving a rare glimpse into the world of the convent, and exploring the women’s changing relationships with God and one another.