Irish Female Convicts and Tasmania

Abstract

Until recently women's contributions to society and history have been largely ignored by writers and historians. Two books which tried to redress the balance clearly indicated this. Dr. Miriam Dixson in The Real Matilda argued that nearly all 'serious analysis of character?or identity?is by males about males'.1 Anne Summers in Damned Whores and God's Police agreed: 'Virtually all writers about society and history use the terms Australian and synonymously.'2 Both writers stressed the importance of Australia's convict past in shaping attitudes towards women. According to Summers, the colonisation of women and the 'Damned Whore' stereotype began with the convict period when women were sent to a rough colonial society, dominated by male convicts, in which the 'social and economic conditions of the first fifty years . . . fostered whores rather than wives'. Further, the whore stereotype was a 'calculated sexist means of social control', used and abused by men, but regarded as being the 'fault of the women who were damned by it'.3 Dixson, following to some extent R?ssel Ward's thesis, isolated Irish convicts because they had a major influence on working class attitudes.4 She asserted that the 'humble quasi-Western status of Irish women, Irish rigid sexual stereo typing and Irish fear of sexuality have done a good deal to shape the curiously low standing and impoverished self-identity of women'.5