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: Convicts In Australia
Famous quotes containing the word women:
“upon these maxims meditate:
All women dote upon an idle man
Although their children need a rich estate;
No man has ever lived that had enough
Of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“In the adjustment of the new order of things, we women demand an equal voice; we shall accept nothing less.”
—Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947)