Eye of the Beholder: The Stereotype of Women Convicts, 1788-1852

The convict origins debate: Historians and the problem of the ‘Criminal Class’

“…But even those accounts that demonstrate an awareness of the limitations of these sources, such as Sturma (1978), perpetuate the obsession of Australian historians with the supposed 'moral character' of the convicts and the extent of prostitution amongst the female convicts. Kay Daniels has pointed to a critical problem with attempts, such as those of Robson, Robinson and Sturma, to distinguish between the 'immoral convict' and the ordinary working class offender driven to crime ·or prostitution through circumstance.…”

“…They paid scrupulousregard to the conventions of the discipline and interpreted the 'facts' by reference to the primary sources. But these sources, as later historians argued (Sturma, 1978) were largely the views of a particular class and gender and did not necessarily represent an 'objective' image of the convicts.…”

“…They had little sympathy for the culture of the lower classes and sought to transform that culture through philanthropic intervention, popular education, temperance and in the last instance incarceration. These opinions tell usmore about the concems of these social groups than the convicts themselves and a reliance on them as unmediated observations of social reality have led historians to paint a particularly bleak view of the character of the convicts, especially the women (Sturma, 1978).…”

Essentialism, Radical Criminology and Left Realism

“…Lineages of crime related themes can be found in the (mostly critical) social historical literature on transportation and the convict origins debate (Clark, 1956;Ward, 1958;Robson, 1963Robson, , 1965Shaw, 1966;McQueen, 1970;Sturma, 1978;Rude, 1978;Hirst, 1983Hirst, , 1987Evans and Nicholls, 1984;Hughes, 1987;Nicholas, 1988;Neal, 1987Neal, , 1991Garton, 1991) bushranging (McQuilton, 1979;O'Malley, 1979O'Malley, , 1980 Aboriginal resistance, criminalisation and welfare (Rowley, 1980;Reynolds, 1982Reynolds, , 1987 public order crime (Grabosky, 1977;Stunna, 1983) the state and social order (Sydney Labour History Group, 1982) imprisonment (Garton, 1988a;Finnane, 1991) prison architecture (Kerr, 1988) parole (Barry, 1958) crime trends (Mukherjee, 1980) prostitution (Daniels, 1984Golder and Allen, 1979) drugs (McCoy, 1980) policing (Finnane, 1987Allen, 1988b;Goodall, 1990) the rise of psychology, psychiatry, and eugenics (Garton, 1988) and crimes involving women (Allen, 1990). Much of this work is largely outside officially constituted criminology, indeed this is one of the sources of its considerable strength.…”

Consensual partnering in the more developed countries

“…In Australia it was widespread among the European population during the convict era (1788-1840), reflecting both the nonexceptional nature of such behaviour among the British working classes from which convict settlers were drawn (Sturma 1978) and peculiarities of their Australian situation that discouraged marriage. 3 European, and especially British and Scandinavian, forerunners of the modem phenomenon have been described extensively.…”