Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia

In the years between 1788 and 1868, Britain transported 160,000 convicts to its colony of Australia. Of these, 25,000 were women. Damousi explores the world of these convict women from the 1820s to the 1840s--the peak of transportation, focusing especially on their sexual behavior with men and other women, much of which was deemed improper, and cultural responses to it. Damousi's main concerns are discourses of power and "how ideas about masculinity, femininity, and sexuality are shaped and defined and how convict women dealt with their relationships with the convict men and their commanders in order to be autonomous and create a space for themselves". Transgression of the strict boundaries and borders in three specific areas where there existed a marked fluidity between public and private was a means to independence for many of these women: on convict ships, in public streets, and at the border between the inside and outside of the female prison. [Heather Lee Miller, reviewer]