There were 144,171 women religious in Italy in the year 1951, 1 accounting for twenty point one per cent of the unmarried female population. 2 Yet, the church remained, according to Adriana Valerio, 'hierarchical, clerical, and male, […] and was a space of institutional invisibility for women '. 3 This is a claim which has very recently been echoed by the Vatican's own newspaper, which ran an article entitled 'The (nearly) Free Work of Nuns', exposing the 'free, poorly-paid and nonetheless hardly-recognised work of women religious'. 4 Although thoughtful studies have been made of modern women religious and their work in Britain and Ireland, 5 Italian academic study of women religious is almost invariably focused on medieval or early modern history. 6 Existing literature about the work of women religious is largely -although not exclusively -restricted to convent records, or histories of individual convents, foundresses, or saints. This literature has not, as Tom O'Donoghue and Anthony Potts observe of the English-speaking world, 'been accompanied by a major corpus of serious scholarship on the social history of the lives of the "religious"'. 7 In Italy, the drive to record or celebrate the work of women religious often comes from within institutions themselves, rather than from academia. This article aims to both redress this scholarly oversight, and thus the invisibility of women (religious) of this historical period.Women's invisibility has also been more widely observed of post-Second World War Italy. 8 Historian Paola Bonifazio argues that 'work empowered and regenerated the male citizen' in the post-war period. 9 This article will ask whether the same can be said for women religious. Focusing on the period between 1945 and 1965 in Italy, it evaluates the church's attitude to the work of women religious and the professional opportunities afforded to them through education and missions. Using a corpus of oral histories collected in three Roman convents, the article responds to historian and Dominican sister, Margaret MacCurtain's call to 'hear the voices of women religious ', 10 Flora Derounian Studies • volume 107 • number 427