Australian History/Education
Book Details

Growing Good Catholic Girls

Education and Convent Life in Australia

Christine Trimingham Jack

Growing Good Catholic Girls offers an illuminating study of life in a convent boarding school from the mid-1940s to 1965.

Opinion

‘This is a fascinating account of life in a Catholic convent.’ (The Age, 2 August 2003)

'This thoughtful book is part reminiscence . . . and part analysis of Catholicism in 1950s Australia . . . The book offers a clever and subtle analysis of an aspect of Australian life that is long departed.' (Sydney Morning Herald, 9–10 August 2003)

About this Title

Until the 1960s most Catholic girls in Australia were educated in convents. For middle-class girls this typically meant a convent boarding school.

The Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was founded in France in the late nineteenth century, with the aim of educating the daughters of the upper classes, thus influencing society through family life. The Society also ran vocationally oriented day schools for poor girls. Sacred Heart schools were established in Australia from the 1880s. Here young girls were educated to be ‘ladies’, to be ‘good’.

In Growing Good Catholic Girls, Christine Trimingham Jack offers an illuminating study of life in one such school from the mid-1940s to 1965, based on interviews with a number of former students and nuns. Their narratives provide insights into the school’s social order and the ways in which individuals responded to it, and show how traditional Church symbols and myths shaped the life of the religious and the students. The book also explores the meanings which the women took, both as children and as adults, from their experience at the school.

Growing Good Catholic Girls will make an important contribution to this neglected topic within the history of education in Australia, and it will resonate with all women who have attended or taught at a Catholic girls’ school.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1 Safety in an English setting
2 A moulding haven
3 Early years
4 Consolidation and resistance
5 Sacred symbols
6 Struggles and Failure
7 Stories of home
8 Revisiting goodness

Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Dr Christine Trimingham Jack was born in Sydney and attended a number of schools conducted by the Religious of the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, including Kerever Park. She has taught at a number of Catholic schools, and at the education faculty of what is now the Australian Catholic University. She is currently Head of Primary Education at the University of Canberra.

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978-0-522-85055-0