Mature Heterosexuality: Catholic Women Religious' Celibacy in Australia's Liberation Decades

ABSTRACT The celibacy of Catholic “women religious”, or nuns, presents a dilemma for familiar narratives about the 1960s and 1970s as Australia’s “liberation decades”. In this article, I analyse an important oral history archive, not previously considered for this purpose, to explain how women religious “made sense” of their sexuality in relation to the social and institutional transformations of this period. I argue that women religious in Australia redefined celibacy as mature heterosexuality, and by doing so, they identified as ordinary women even as they held to their special status within the Catholic Church.