Female Factories
Female factories in Australia housed convict women who were awaiting assignment, pregnant or undergoing punishment. They were called factories because the women were expected to work and because they also employed free working women. Task work was established in female factories in 1849, requiring the occupants to do chores, needle-work and washing. If extra work was done, the convict's sentence might be shortened. Punishments for misconduct in the factories were often humiliating, a common one was to shave the woman's head.
Conditions in these factories were miserable. In the Parramatta female factory the occupants were not given mattresses or blankets to sleep on and the social conditions inside were indecent.
Read more about this topic: Convict Women In Australia
Famous quotes containing the words female and/or factories:
“Jail sentences have many functions, but one is surely to send a message about what our society abhors and what it values. This week, the equation was twofold: female infidelity twice as bad as male abuse, the life of a woman half as valuable as that of a man. The killing of the woman taken in adultery has a long history and survives today in many cultures. One of those is our own.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“I know no more affecting lesson to our busy, plotting New England brains, than to go into one of our factories with which we have lined all the watercourses in the States. A man hardly knows how much he is a machine, until he begins to make telegraph, loom, press, and locomotive, in his own image.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)