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Convict Women In Australia In The 1930's

1555 Words7 Pages

British government transported over 160,000 convicted felons to Australia between 1788 and 1868; of which at least 20% were convict women. Australia seemed like the perfect place to relocate “the very worst of British womanhood,” so they loaded them up and sent “hordes of drunken prostitutes who proceeded to infect everyone in sight with their criminal tendencies” to Australia. Or at least this is what most Australian historiographies would have you believe! With a shortage of testimonies and information about these convict women, many historians tried to paint a picture of the experiences and challenges these women encountered upon their arrival in Australia. These convict women were described as ‘damned whores’ of an ‘incorrigible class’ …show more content…

Some would withdraw labour as a sign of discontentment whereas others would deliberately commit offenses in order to be sent back to the factory for reassignment. Many considered it to be the lesser of the two evils. With women constantly circulating through the factory, households that had unfavourable working conditions and difficult attitudes from masters and mistresses were quickly identified by the convict women and avoided as much as they could. However when the factory was changed into a convict invalid and lunatic asylum, it left women without husbands or masters defenceless with nowhere to go. These convict women now had to find a way to survive, some turned to prostitution and stealing and were seen by society as “more uncivilized than the savage, more degraded that the slaves, less true to all natural and womanly instincts…guilty of lying, theft, unchastity, drunkenness, …show more content…

One cannot argue that convict women made a vital contribution to the Australian colony without also acknowledging the behaviour of some of these women. A person should not be punished for acting on their natural instincts; however this was often the case for these convict women. While on assignment, few became pregnant or slipped out at night to meet a lover and were caught in compromising circumstances thus sent back to the factory for confinement where matrons tried to keep them inside to prevent them from “having any intercourse with the people of the town” before reassignment or marriage. These women tried everything to get out of the system thus many resorted to abortions to stay with their masters or convinced their lovers to get

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