The Shortest Skirt - Paperback

by Sally J. Jardine (Author)

The Sixties were a wild time but not for six young girls who each wanted to give their lives to serve as God wished them to serve. Each had a dream in her heart of becoming a nun, a Bride of Christ. Trouble began almost immediately when the young women tried to mold themselves to the severe and structured life of the convent: a world of silence, penance, self-deprivation, unquestioning obedience and prayer. The strategies and self-deceptions they learned in order to cope with their strange new life are told here through the voice of one inmate, a fourteen-year-old who left behind family and entered the shuttered world of the nunnery. Who stayed and who could not stay becomes evident as the story of their spiritual and emotional journey unfolds.

Author Biography

Sally J Jardine was raised in the south Chicago suburb of Tinley Park. She was sent to Catholic grade school. There she became interested in the strange and exotic life of the sisters who taught her. She joined them in their convent life when she was fourteen years old, beginning her religious formation with the goal of becoming a professed sister. By the age of twenty-one, she decided that she must leave this life and return to "the world." She married, had one son, and moved to Junction City, Kansas where she became a bookkeeper and eventually a Kansas State University instructor in English and Creative Writing. She spends her free time reading, playing the piano, volunteering with the Arts Council and writing a biweekly column on art for the local newspaper