Doctor of Philosophy

Elizabeth Hellwig OP, Dominican Archivist and Historian, was recently awarded a PhD for her dissertation: ‘Sisters in Service: Dominican Lay Sisters in Eastern Australia 1867-2017’. The work was completed part-time through the National Centre for Biography, Research School of Social Sciences Australian National University, aided by a full scholarship, three great supervisors and encouragement from her sisters.

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“In 1867, James Murray, bishop of Maitland New South Wales, invited eight Irish Dominican sisters to open boarding and day schools for middle-class girls. Two of the women were lay sisters – housekeepers and homemakers – for the cloistered community. This dissertation explores collectively, individually and chronologically, the lives of those first two lay sisters and the other 78 women who joined them in this capacity, between 1867 and 2017. It addresses who they were, where they came from, why they chose this difficult lifestyle and what happened to them when their class was suppressed in 1958. Consideration is given to how an ancient two-tiered European class system operated in Australian convents, the circumstances that led to its abolition and lay sisters’ response to the disappearance of their corporate identity. A working class within women’s cloistered communities is mentioned rarely in the historiography. Original archival material has been employed extensively. Intersectionality theory and Edgar Schein’s model of evolving institutional culture are drawn on. A community culture, enriched by a transnational Dominican meta-narrative, evolved for all Australian Dominicans, but lay sisters’ agency and experience, in constrained and changing contexts, was unique in its blending of class, ethnicity, the nature of their employment and the extent of their cultural power. While now quickly moving from living to historical memory, these were women of faith, active participants in the reconstruction of their congregation’s culture and their own identity.”