Week Four Response

Female convicts have a long and varied history of recognition in the Australian narrative. From being almost ignored and bundled in with male convicts by Clarke to an in depth research by Anne Summers the way people view convict women continues to evolve. Deborah Oxley provides the most even handed and objective account of our founding women.

Clarke virtually ignored the female convicts as a group focusing mostly on the criminal class that they formed together with their male convicts. Clarke only refers to females in the ratios in which they came to the colony.  Commenting that prior to 1815 they arrived in a ratio of one third compared to males but after 1815 and the reforms to British law, 1824 to 1834, only at one seventh. The new laws Clarke believes decreed that transportation was too harsh a punishment for women.  That only the more heinous crimes were punishable by transportation also lowered the number of female convicts.

Anne summers makes it clear that convict women were victims of a male dominated system. They were utilised and abused by a system to ensure needs were met. The overriding reason that summers believes convict women were transported was to provide sexual gratification for the male inhabitants of the colony including their fellow male convicts. The primary goal of the British legal system was to find as many suitable criminals as they could. This was achieved by making female sentences harsher than male, particularly on first time offenders. Upon arrival the women would enter a world of whoredom where almost all women were considered to be prostitutes or concubines. In general summers asserts they were received rather as prostitutes than as servants, where the British government acted as imperial whoremaster. This was also the view of the time with judge Thomas McQueen declaring them “the most disgusting objects that ever disgraced the female form”. She also points to attempts at creating jobs for female convicts such as the Parramatta women’s factory as conveniently hiding the disturbing truth from the public eye.

Deborah Oxley deals less with the conditions that greeted the female convicts on arrival instead focusing on the reasons they were sent there. Oxley believed that though female convicts were criminals they were hardly the members of professional gangs of wrongdoers as Clarke contended. Nor where they all prostitutes, as Portia Robinson asserts in Oxley’s article, “prostitution was not a transportable offence”. Oxley agrees that the women were targeted by the government, as evidenced by young women being the first group to be offered fiscal reward for moving to the colonies. Oxley also notes the conspicuous absence of factory women from the convict indents, instead finding various forms of maids in the largest numbers. Oxley sees female convicts as “a diverse group of women united in the fact they were caught, prosecuted, sentenced and transported on the main for crimes against property”.

Female Convicts mooning the Governor of Van Diemens Land and Reverend William Bedford at the cascades women's factory demonstrating the very worst in the convict women. Considering such acts it is understandable that they developed such a poor reputation as expressed by Summers. http://www.convictcreations.com/history/images/moonings.jpg