a) The emergence of the feminist movement in the early 1970s gave
an impetus to discover the forgotten history of women.
b) Australian feminists wanted to understand why Australia was
one of the most sexist and male dominated countries in the Western world.
c) Academics wished to investigate women’s history in order to
gain critical insights into the oppression of women and how these mechanisms
were formed and perpetuated.
Wood, Shaw, and Clark incorporated the female convicts into their
general studies of the convicts.
Robson, because he felt he had to obtain an ‘objective’ sample, was forced to look at the separate statistics on the women.
However, he uncritically accepted the opinions of middle-class Victorian authorities on the female convicts when analysing the data.
The result of Robson’s approach was that the female convicts statistically
were seen as being prostitutes as well as criminals. For Robson this confirmed
that they were, as the authorities at the time claimed, more morally depraved
or worse than the men.
She argued that Australian history reflected most acutely the Judeao-Christian notion that women were exclusively all good or evil.
Women were stereotyped by a male-dominated or patriarchal society as either ‘damned whores’ satisying men’s sexual pleasures or ‘god’s police’ as prim and proper wives to keep men morally upright.
Summers saw the predominance of prostitutes among the convict women as being the foundation of women’s low place in Australian society.
She blamed this situation upon the male-dominated British society which sent out a small number of female convicts to Australia expecting them to be sexually abused so that the male dominated convict society could be more easily governed because of the presence for a small number of women for their sexual pleasure.
Thus, Summers argued that ‘women’s punishment was transportation plus enforced whoredom’.
The ‘damned whores’ stereotype was based the process of for the first two decades of colonisation sending out predominantly female convicts who were classified as prostitutes.
Even women who did not fall into this category were diminished in the respect of the male-dominated society because of the strength of the stereotypes.
Some Problems with Summers’ Approach
She adapts various modern theories of social control and transposes
these onto the convict women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century.
Summers accepts that the sexist stereotypes laid down in the convict period were somehow transmitted from generation to generation of Australians.
Most critically, she shifts the blame away from the women themselves for being prostitutes to the male-dominated society whereas Clark, Shaw, and Robson had blamed the women themselves.
However, she uncritically accepts that the women were prostitutes.
While Summers set out to prove that Australian ideas about women were the product of a sexist culture established in the convict period, Dixson was more interested in looking at the psychological consequences of this culture for Australian women.
Dixson saw the convict society as creating women who were the product of victimisation, and castigated as outcasts. She argued that this resulted in Australian women having a ‘crippled self-vision of themselves’.
There were two responses:
1) They internalised the images that society gave to them and
developed low self-esteem and self-loathing.
2) They acted aggressively and reinforced their prostitute image.
Attacking the Male-dominated Image of the Bushman Australian Identity.
Dixson was concerned to attack the bush ethos developed by Russel Ward
in the Australian Legend as a mechanism which marginalised and oppressed
Australian women.
She noted that the patriarchal and sexist attitudes to the female convicts were not confined to members of the male middle class, but working class men sought to dominate working class women in a similar manner in which the middle class male dominated the working class male. Working class women were thus at the bottom of the pecking order.
Working class concepts of mateship and anti-authoritarianism which Russel Ward had seen as developing among the working class convict men, did not apply to women. The working class male excluded women from his social company, and his attitude to his wife and family was very authoritarian, as the male head of the household. The egalitarianism of the bush ethos did not apply to women. The culture of the working class male exhibited a contempt for women.
The convict society was seen as the period in which this ‘crippled self image’ was established and passed on from generation to generation, as the bush ethos was supposed to have been passed on from the convict period.
Dixson, like Summers, accepted that the female convicts were prostitutes.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s research by Portia Robinson and Michael Sturma, but most significantly Deborah Oxley, overturned this stereotype.
Patricia Grimshaw argued against Dixson’s and Summer’s notion of an oppressive patriarchy and argued that women achieved a higher status in the family. Her evidence was mainly drawn from the diaries of middle class families, and she does not look at the convict period.
Robinson directly challenged the stereotype of the female convict
as a prostitute. She made two major points:
1) that the stereotype was correct for only a minority of convict
women.
2) the experience of female convict women not being reconvicted
after arrival in Australia and settling down into prosperous and happy
marriages after their release demonstrates that the women were not really
immoral.
Micheal Sturma argued in the 1980s that the behaviour of the female convicts should not be seen in terms of middle class morality, but in terms of the behaviou of working class women at the time.
He sees the sources and the debate over the character the female convicts as a conflict between two class cultures. Working class men were unlikely to see the working class women as immoral.
Deborah Oxley in her contribution to Stephen Nicholas’ Convict Workers in 1988 and her own Convict Maids in 1996 conclusively established that the women were ordinary working class women who were skilled, and not prostitutes. She analysed their occupations which revealed they were not unskilled prostitutes, but skilled workers.
Oxley makes the point that the classification of prostitute seems to be too general because it was drawn from middle-class standards of the nineteenth century.
The term probably included women who were cohabiting with a man but not officially married, or living in the same residence with other women and men.
An overview of women's history in Australian can be gain from the summaries
on the two documentaries gender relations in Australia from the Open
Learning Australian Studies TV series: Gender
in Australia and The Drover's Wife.
Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia (1975).
Miriam Dixson, The Real Matilda: Women and Identity in Australia 1788 to 1975 (1975).
NAH 433 Course Notes:
‘Female Convicts’
‘Female Convicts Readings’