Between 1867 and 1958 eighty women took up the lay sister housekeeper position in Dominican convents throughout Eastern Australia.  They were the helpmeets of the teaching sisters, known as choir sisters, who without the domestic work of the lay sisters could not have maintained their convents and boarding schools alongside their commitment to the communal recitation of the Prayer of the Church.  In 1958 the two classes of lay and choir sisters were subsumed into one.  This seminar addresses historical questions about who these obscure lay sisters were individually and collectively, the nature of their social class, what led to its abolition and the outcomes for the women whose identity and rights had been aligned with their lower class occupation.  Historiographically this is a unique study of a group of women rarely mentioned in the increasingly available literature about Religious sisters.