Includes index. 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.