Free Immigrant Women Essay

The experiences of free immigrant women in colonial Australia suggest a quality of women 's citizenship similar to that of transported women. The readings place importance on the role of female immigration in the history of colonial Australia, however an examination of free-immigrant women’s citizenship indicates that their experiences are closely associated to those of convict women transported to Australia. At the heart of this relationship is that colonial elite saw single female immigration as unnatural, even immoral. The independence of these women who had journeyed unaccompanied to the colony translated into rhetoric of immorality, which over time was shaped to a perception of sexual depravity. The strength of the perception that all women in the penal colonies were whores conveyed that free immigrant women who were not convicts became its
Some women did go on to contribute to society, make a life for themselves and have families; however an analysis advocates that the profiles of the free-immigrant women and women transported does not match the common stereotype of the time of morally degenerate, prostitutes, from a crime class, unskilled and illiterate. The arrival of free-immigrant women into the colony was intended to provide domestic labour for middle-class households and quite possibly, given their young and fertile age, to grow the colony. However, given the immense imbalance in the colony based on gender, these young women of marriage material were of some value, if not due to their scarcity alone. Conversely, given they were ‘imported’ to service the needs of the new colonial settler society, you have to consider, given their station in colonial life, how you could describe them even remotely as approaching the status of a free