Is this critic writing about the same period as Highes? Whore and prostitute, then, were bandied about to serve the moral views of middle-class ideology; and neither the male nor the female convicts thought it disgraceful, or even wrong, to live together out of wedlock. However, female convicts in Australia were all to greater or lesser degrees oppressed as women -- as members of an inferior sex.
The sexism of English society was brought to Australia and then amplified by penal conditions. A convict woman needed unusual strength of character not to be crushed by its assumptions.
Language itself confirmed her degradation, and some sense of this may be gleaned from the slang and cant words applied to women in Georgian times -- a brusque, stinging argot of appropriation and dismissal. The brutalization of women in the colony had gone on so long that it was virtually a social reflex by the end of the s. The first full account of it was given by Robert Jones, Major Foveaux's chief jailer on Norfolk Island in the early 's, who thought the lot of the women prisoners there "must surely have been greater than the male convicts Several have not recovered yet from their treatment at the hands of the Major.
Women were in his estimation born for the convenience of men. He was a bright intelligent Irishman. During governorship of Major Foveaux convicts both male and female were held as slaves. Poor female convicts were treated shamefully. Governor King being mainly responsible. We see the "bright intelligent" Kimberley pursuing a married convict woman named Mary Ginders with an axe, shouting that "if she did not come and live with him he would report her to the Major and have her placed in the cells.
At least their union lasted: Foveaux married Ann Sherwin in England in In such a moral environment, although male convicts had some rights however attenuated, the women had none except the right to be fed; they had to fend for themselves against both guards and male prisoners.
