Women Convicts - Damned whores

A Feminist View of the status of Women Convicts.

"No, no - surely not!  My God - not more of those damned whores! Never have I known worse women!"  Lt Ralph Clary of the First Fleet, on sighting the Lady Juliana of the Second Fleet coming into Sydney Harbour with over two hundred women convicts aboard. June 1790

The social and economic conditions of the first fifty years of white colonisation of Australia fostered the use of women convicts as whores rather than wives. The traditional Judaeo-Christian notion that all women could be categorised as being exclusively either good or evil, with the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene being the prototypes of each kind, was brought to Australia with the First Fleet. But its application to the women in this country was totally lop-sided.

From 1788 until the 1840s almost all women were categorised as whores. This categorisation was initially based on the fact that virtually all of the white women to come here in the first two decades of colonisation were transported convicts, but it was continually reinforced by the social structure which evolved in the penal colony.

Thus even female convicts who had served their sentences had little chance of having their status redefined and the stereotype came to be applied to many other women in the colony who had not been transported.

Governor Arthur Phillip hoped he was to be the first superintendent of a new outpost of British civilisation. He wanted free settlers to be encouraged to migrate and he wrote, 'As I would not wish convicts to lay the foundations of an empire, I think they should ever remain separated from the garrison and other settlers that may come from Europe." The British Home Office had other ideas, however, and intended New South Wales to be little more than a dumping ground for the excess of convicts which British gaols could not accommodate.

Within this penal colony, women were assigned only one main function, they were there primarily as objects of sexual gratification. The main difficulty, as far as the British authorities were concerned, was to find a sufficient number of women convicts, and to do this they had to impose preponderantly harsher sentences on women.

The sexual abuse of female convicts began on the ships. Although after 1811 the women travelled on separate ships from the male convicts, they still had the crews to contend with.

W. H. R. Brown told the Select Committee on the State of Gaols in 1819 that:

"Women informed me, as well as others of their shipmates, that they were subject to every insult from the master of the ship and sailors; that the master stript several of them and publickly whipped them; that one young woman, from ill treatment, threw herself into the sea and perished, that the master beat one of the women that lived with me with a rope with his own hands till she was much bruised in her arms, breasts, and other parts of her body. I am certain, from her general good conduct, she could not have merited any cruelty from him."

He also reported that 'the youngest and handsomest of the women were selected from the other convicts and sent on board, by order of the master, the king's ships … for the vilest purposes ... .

One convict woman, Elisabeth Barber accused Thomas Arndell, the assistant surgeon of the ship on which she was transported of being "a poxy blood-letter who seduced innocent girls while treating them for the fever, using his surgery as a floating whore-house."

When the First Fleet arrived at Port Jackson, the female convicts were kept aboard for five days while the other ships were unloaded and elementary shelters were constructed. Governor Phillip turned a blind eye to the riotous two-day debauch which ensued when the women landed." This Bacchanalia, and Phillip's response, signalled the kind of treatment that was to be the lot of the female convicts. One settler wrote to England:

"It will perhaps scarcely be believed that, on the arrival of a female convict ship, the custom has been to suffer the inhabitants of the colony each to select one at his pleasure, not only as servants but as avowed objects of intercourse, which is without even the plea of the slightest previous attachment as an excuse, rendering the whole colony little better than an extensive brothel ..."

The 1812 Select Committee on Transportation reported that female convicts 'were indiscriminately given to such of the inhabitants as demanded them, and were in general received rather as prostitutes than as servants.

The women were distributed to the men almost as part of the daily rations.

In 1803 forty women were listed, baldly, as 'women allowed to the New South Wales Corps'."

The women's punishment comprised transportation plus enforced whoredom.  For at least the first twenty years they had no means of escaping this fate.  The best a woman could do was to form an attachment with one man and live with him as his wife and in this way protect herself from the unwelcome attentions of any other man who fancied her. But whether she was concubine to one man or available to all she was still considered a whore.

Since there was virtually no escape from the colony, which required women to be whores, there was no escaping whoredom. Even those convict women who formed attachments with Governors or other prominent men, and bore them children, were unable to shake off the common status and assume anything matching the social standing of either these men or the wives and daughters of men of similar rank.

The list of time-expired male convicts who were able to cast aside their past and acquire wealth and respectability is long and impressive. Very few women could match their success. Mary Reiby, who inherited her husband's merchant business and expanded it successfully, is conspicuous because she was unique.

Marriage did not automatically ensure that women could flee from the whore stereotype. The taint borne by the female convicts seems to have been more permanent than it was for men. In any case, not many female convicts had the opportunity to marry, especially in the first three decades. Although the British authorities had made a perfunctory recommendation to Governor Phillip that he encourage 'the promotion of matrimonial connexion between the unmarried people, a measure which must tend to the improvement of their morals’ as in practice women were transported solely to serve as sexual commodities and the British Government acted as imperial whoremaster.

Although Phillip, who wanted to govern a new society not just a penal settlement, did encourage marriage, there was little incentive, and several obstacles, to these first settlers marrying.

Time-expired convicts and other free settlers received grants of land in Phillip's time, and married men received larger grants if they had a wife, as well as getting an additional ten acres for each child. But this was a limited inducement. The majority of convicts had come from cities and had little interest in land cultivation. Many admitted signing over their land holdings at no charge - because they had no use for them."

Neither was marriage encouraged by the legal position prior to 1834 whereby a marriage was invalid unless an Anglican clergyman officiated and where a licence from the Governor was necessary." Roman Catholics, Presbyterians and other non-Anglicans were thus prevented from being married within their religion because of the first provision while the high cost of the licence deterred others.

During his governorship from 1809 to 1820, Lachlan Macquarie made some attempt to alter the situation of female convicts. Viscount Castlereagh wrote to Macquarie:

"It has been represented to me that upon the arrival of female convicts in New South Wales, the unfortunate females have been given into the possession of such of the inhabitants, free settlers and convicts, indiscriminately, as made a demand for them from the Governor. If a practice so extraordinary and disgraceful has not been abolished, you will by no means suffer it to continue, and I am to desire you will take the proper means for having the female convicts, upon their arrival, kept separate until they can be properly distributed in such a manner as may best encourage attention to industry and character."

But neither pompous sounding instruction from across the ocean, nor Macquarie's efforts, could substantially alter what was by then a deeply entrenched attitude. The men of the colony were accustomed to having convict women at their disposal, even if there were at least three men to every woman, and it was impossible to prevent servants being regarded as prostitutes both by their employers and any other men on the place. Single men were supposedly not able to have female convicts assigned to them, but in 1837 James Mudie, reported to the Select Committee on Transportation that 'they generally manage to get them'.

The major obstacle to reform was the strength of the Damned Whore stereotype. The ideology had become so powerful that it was confused with reality. Even if large numbers of women did not conform to the attributes of the stereotype, their behaviour was overlooked and the ideology that all convict women were whores remained unchallenged. Female convicts were universally condemned. Thomas MeQueen, a magistrate and a former convict himself, described the women he sentenced as 'the most disgusting objects that ever disgraced the female form’.

Governor Darling wrote in 1830, a decade after Macquarie's term of reform had ended, that 'the women sent out to this country are of the very worst description, not in general being transported until there is no longer any hope of their reformation at home."

James Mudie thought that they were 'the lowest possible ... they all smoke, drink and in fact, to speak in plain language, I consider them all prostitutes."

Even Macquarie was condemnatory and he wrote to Earl Bathurst in 1813 that the female convicts were 'so very depraved that they are frequently concerned in the most dreadful acts of atrocity." Although he wanted more male convicts to be sent out since the prosperity of the Colony depended on labour being available for public works and agriculture, he considered that 'female convicts are as great a drawback as others are beneficial' .

None of these men tempered their vilifications with any recognition of the lack of choice open to the women. They had been transported to service the sexual needs of the males of the Colony and were then condemned for their behaviour. This has always been the fate of prostitutes in a patriarchal and sexist society: the women are chastised while their male patrons, without whom prostitution would not exist, escape criticism or punishment.

Governor Macquarie reported to Castlereagh that he had been 'induced to grant more free pardons than I could have wished; in order to enable a number of women, who had lived for many years with and had children by soldiers of the 102nd regiment, to marry those men, and accompany them home. Although he regretted having to take this course of action, he was comforted by the thought that it had at least saved the Government the expense of vitualling the women and their pregeny, and being demanded of him by England he could be assured him that his actions would be approved.

Even the contemporary evidence makes it clear that the women had no option but to prostitute themselves. Commissioner Bigge, who was sent to report on the colony at the end of Macquarie's governorship, drew a vivid picture of the fate of women sent to the old Female Factory at Parramatta. All women who were not selected as servant/bed-mates when their ships arrived were sent to the Factory:

On their arrival there, they are allowed to remain in a wooden building that is near the factory; and if they have succeeded in bringing their bedding from the ships, they are permitted to deposit it in there, or in the room in which the female prisoners are confined for punishment. The first of these apartments is in the upper floor of a house that was built for the reception of pregnant females. It contains another apartment, on the ground floor, that is occupied by the men employed in the factory. It is not surrounded by any wall or paling; and the upper room or garret has only one window, and an easy communication with the room below. No accommodation is afforded for cooking provisions in this building; nor does there exist either inducement to the, female convicts to remain in it, or the means of preventing their escape. The greater portion, therefore, betake themselves to the lodgings in the town of Parramatta, where they cohabit with the male convicts in the employ of Government, or with any person who will receive them.

Such was the accommodation offered by the authorities! The women who had just arrived had no opportunity to earn any money as they came straight from imprisonment in England. They were thus unable to pay for lodgings in Parramatta. The Government did not provide beds for them so what was their option but to sell their bodies in return for a bed?

The Molesworth Report on transportation in I837 amassed evidence of the iniquities of the system of assigning convicts as servants or labourers to colonial settlers.

Lord Molesworth said of the female convicts:

At times they are excessively ferocious, and the tendency of assignment is to render them still more profligate; they are all of them, with scarcely an exception, drunken and abandoned prostitutes; and even were any of them inclined to be well-conducted, the disproportion of the sexes in the penal colonies is so great, that they are exposed to irresistible temptations: for instance, in a private family, in the interior of either colony, a convict woman, frequently the only one in the service, perhaps in the neighbourhood, is surrounded by a number of depraved characters, to whom she becomes an object of constant pursuit and solicitation; she is generally obliged to select one as a paramour, to defend her from the importunities of the rest; she seldom remains long in the same place; she either commits some offence, for which she is returned to the Government; or she becomes pregnant, in which case she is sent to the factory, to be confined at the expense of the Government; at the expiration of the period of confinement or punishment, she is reassigned, and again goes through the same course; such is too generally the career of convict women, even in respectable families."

These two Reports are tantamount to an official admission of the enforced whoredom which was the punishment endured by the convict women. Molesworth also drew attention to a further discriminatory feature of the women's punishment. No matter what length of sentence had originally been imposed, in practice women were often transported for life. Time-expired male convicts could work their passages home aboard a ship. Women could not do this except, again, by prostituting themselves to earn the fare. This was likely to earn them another pregnancy and another year at the Female Factory, thus effectively extending their sentences.

Not even these official acknowledgements of the situation of female convicts could make much impression on the Damned Whore stereotype. It was continually reinforced both by the now entrenched ethos of the colony and by the numerical disparity between the sexes.

The two continually reacted on each other. The following table sets out the numbers of convicts transported to New South Wales during the convict period.

Convict Population of New South Wales'

Before 1840 the convicts always numbered at least one-third of the total population. Before 1800 they amounted to over 6o per cent but even in 1828, 46 per cent of the total population were convicts.

Transportation to New South Wales stopped in 1840, and by the time of the 1841 census, convicts comprised only 20 per cent of the population but the free population included many ex-convicts and it was difficult for women to escape from the reputation they had acquired as convicts. Given the numerical disproportion of the sexes, it would ordinarily be expected that every woman who wanted to would have the opportunity to marry. Yet Commissioner Bigge had reported that:

"The marriage of the native born youths with female convicts is very rare, a circumstance that is attributed to the general disinclination to early marriage that is observable amongst them, and partly to the abandoned and dissolute habits of the female convicts, but chiefly to a sense of pride in the native born youths, approaching to contempt for the vices and depravity of the convicts even when manifested in the persons of their own parents."

By 1828 only 42 per cent of those women transported prior to 1826 had married . Nearly one-quarter of these already had husbands in England and were not eligible to marry. But many apparently wished to, and by this time the authorities were trying to promote marriage and discourage concubinage. Some married women convicts used to write letters informing themselves of the death of their husbands, post them to friends in England who would send them back to the Australian authorities so that their names could be entered in the widows' register.

On 24 February 1810 Macquarie had issued a Proclamation designed 'to reprobate and check . . . the scandalous and pernicious custom so generally and shamelessly adopted throughout the territory of persons of different sexes cohabiting and living together unsanctioned by the legal ties of matrimony. The main point of the Proclamation was to inform the populace that in the case of a man dying intestate, the 'mere circumstances of illegal cohabitation, for whatever length of time, with any man, confers no valid title upon the woman to the goods and effects of that person.' Thus it was definitely in the material interests of women to marry rather than cohabit. Marriage also afforded women some protection against the advances of other men. So if women who were convicts or ex-convicts failed to marry it is unlikely to be because they chose not to; rather, as Bigge suggested, it was because they were not seen as worthy women. They were whores, not wives.

Editors Note:  Being a male of the opposite sex myself I don't feel overly qualified to write this page  so here is the first of a two part look at Colonial women taken from the feminist writer Anne Summers' book Damned whores and God's Police.   Part two is found here  God's Police.  

This Feminist view of Colonial women is obviously an important starting point but it is not the only possible perspective.  Summers casts the woman into the role of victim.  Irish women by comparison, are warriors who have turned Roman Legions to flight in battle.  

My own view is that our Convict Women offer a case study in the difference between the English Imperial culture and the Modern Native Australian culture that have developed here in Australia since 1788.   Whereas the English Imperial culture is totally patriarchal and even today keeps its women constrained in the leg irons of "lady-like behaviour", convict women were Transported equally with the men, they were enchained equally with the men, they were scourged equally with the men and they were abandoned into an alien environment equally with the men.  

Those same women went on to stand "truly by " their men as the squatter and his wife opened up the wilderness to productivity, and equally beside their brothers in the Union as we forced the Imperial Colonists to Federate.  I have always understood that this difference in the treatment of women is the reason Australian women got the vote before English women and why Australian women stood among the world leaders in the Feminist Rebellion of the 1970's and 80's.

As I build the Colonial Index those women will be receiving rightful recognition for their contributions.  I am hoping to find women who will tell their mother's stories.  Would you like to see your mother honoured?  Use the Email button on your left and we will talk about it.              John.  

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