Introduction

Who were the female convicts? The female convicts have not been subsumed within any universal set of ‘convicts’ for two reasons. Firstly, in a patriarchal society the attributes attained by women and men frequently differ; as there were so few females among the convicts transported to New South Wales such differences are easily swamped in a statistical sample which reflects this sex imbalance, that is, in which males predominate. To avoid this loss it is therefore necessary to look at women separately. There is also a second reason for making this division, and that is because the division has already been made by historians and contemporaries of the convicts who condemned the male convicts for their crimes but the female convicts for their sex. In spite of the fact that prostitution was not an offence punishable by transportation it is the alleged crime for which the female convicts have been made to pay. Commentators have responded to the complex question of ‘who?’ with the simple answer of ‘whore’, in their eyes making further analysis redundant. In this chapter a more comprehensive answer is sought and two questions in particular are addressed: what sort of criminals were these women, and what sort of workers?

Damned whores and criminal classes

The view that presented the convicts as the victims of an oppressive economic and social system in which, as Arnold Wood has it, the real villains were left behind on the court benches and in the House of Lords has been put asunder by the onslaught of Manning Clark, Lloyd Robson and A.G.L. Shaw.