Delivered at History and Nostalgia: The 1950s in Popular Culture, 27th and 28th March 2025, Virtual Conference.

Although numerous films and television shows focused on nuns have been released in the new millennium, the majority of releases have taken the form of period dramas set around the end of the 1950s. This trend remains consistent across a wide variety of genres and mediums, with dramas, BBC serials and even horror films set in and around this date.

The usage of this specific date range, coupled with the traditional wimpled appearance of the nuns depicted, may well be due to the sense of nostalgia these images produce in their baby boomer target audience, as Elizabeth Kuhns suggests. Alternatively, if nuns always reflect the social conditions of contemporary women as theorized by Janosik, the enormous social changes of the 1950s and the proto-feminism embodied by nuns offer shows like Call the Midwife fertile ground to address a range of modern social issues.

Whether by pre-empting the seismic changes enacted by the Vatican 2 or responding to them directly, however, modern representations of the nun are defined by their relation to the changes of the late 1950s, suggesting the same hesitation to represent religion in modern or urban contexts Anthony Burke Smith identifies in far earlier Catholic films.