Women
Approximately 20% of the transportees were women, for whom conditions could be particularly harsh. For protection, most quickly attached themselves to male officers or convicts. Although they were routinely referred to as courtesans relatively few had been prostitutes in England; prostitution, like murder, was not a transportable offense.
Read more about this topic: Convictism In Australia
Famous quotes containing the word women:
“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I kept in mind that the minute it got too rough, the minute the fourteen-hour days became too long, the minute people started to be naggy and frustrating, I knew that I could walk away and there were over seventy-nine thousand women who would trade shoes with me in a second.”
—Kaye Lani Rae Rafko (b. c. 1968)
“... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal, that we can understand our past through a male lens—if we are unaware that women even have a history—we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)