Report on Female Factory

Evidence Type: Newspaper Report

PUBLICATION: THE PARRAMATTA CHRONICLE AND CUMBERLAND GENERAL ADVERTISER, p. 1

16 March 1844

THE FEMALE FACTORY

In taking into consideration the causes of the prevalent distress among the working classes, and the hardships they are exposed to, from an undue and unjust competition in the labour market with the local Government, that miscalled establishment—the Female Factory—forcibly presents itself to view. Doubtless, this receptacle of female depravity—this hot-bed of infamy—is represented in Sir GEORGE GIPPS’ despatches to LORD STANLEY, when he has occasion to mention it, as a manufactory, as its name imports, wherein habits of industry are taught, and principles of morality and religion inculcated: as a penitentiary, whose wholesome discipline is attended with those reformatory effects upon its degraded inmates, for which similar institutions in the mother country are remarkable. But what would the British public say, if we were to tell them, that eight or ten hundred women, with nearly one-third of that number of their own illegitimate offspring, were immured within the walls of an unwholesome prison, kept in comparative idleness, or, only engaged in those light female occupations, which nature adapted them to perform, without even enjoying the advantages of religious consolation or advices, beyond that humanely contributed by the Sisters of Charity, belonging to the Roman Catholic Communion? The immoral tendency of this system is sufficiently obvious to warrant its condemnation, if far strong and more weighty political arguments did not prove its inconsistency and folly. Some of the vile practices indulged in by the inmates of that unhallowed “prison house” have been divulged to us, but they are too disgusting to pollute our pages with their recital. — Suffice it to say, that, where eight or ten hundred women, of depraved habits and abandoned character, are continually together, without the presence of the other sex to restrain them, all modesty and decency, the brightest ornaments of female comeliness, are abandoned; all sense of shame is lost; and they resemble female demons in human form, rather than the natural companions of man.

At one period, profitable employment was found for these women, which engaged their minds, and, at the same time, in a great measure, reimbursed the country for the cost of their maintenance. They spun and carded wool for the manufacture of Parramatta cloth, which, at that period, bid fair to become as lucrative an article of export as the fashionable colonial tweeds of Penrith now promise to be; they made up the slop clothing for the male prisoners, and wove blankets; but these useful and profitable employments have been abolished, and SIR GEORGE takes credit to himself for having found them employment of another description, far more congenial to their habits and tastes, namely, washing, making up baby linen, for which they are rewarded by indulgences, such as tea, sugar, &c., and nursing their own children. This description of work, too, they perform for the public at a much lower rate than any humble competitor, outside the walls of this wholesale laundry and millinery establishment, could pretend to do it—consequently the hundreds of poor young females, whose bread those worthless creatures are eating in comparative idleness, fed by the charitable hand of our worthy Governor, who have been entrapped from their country and their homes by false promises and heartless chicanery, have been driven to prostitution and misery, from the path of honourable toil, and given up to hopeless abandonment and misery. Hundreds of industrious, hard-working mechanics, during the late calamitous dearth of employment in Sydney, have been supported, with their families, by the labour of an industrious wife, who might be a laundress or a needle woman, but when his Excellency hit upon the notable scheme of taking in washing at a very low rate, and canvased among his aristocratic friends for their custom; of course, that source of employment was dried up, and the poor free washerwomen had to break up their humble establishments, and betake themselves to service—unavoidably abandoning their children to the care of strangers, and separating all the endearing ties and comforts of married life. We beg our readers to distinctly understand that this is no fanciful picture, drawn from the colouring of an overheated imagination. We are personally cognizant of the fact we thus briefly assert, and could, did the subject admit of it, consistently with the delicacy of modern composition —descend to the “short and simple annals of the poor,” with a particularity of heart-rending detail, that would mantle the cheek of some of our colonial fine ladies, who can weep in morbid sensibility over a highly-wrought fiction, but can close their eyes to facts, which should cover them with confusion and shame. But we turn from the ungracious duty of taking the fair task, to perform the more pleasing and gallant one of supplicating those “high-born dames” who do possess these ennobling qualities which give additional lustre to the female character—i.e. charity and true sensibility—in behalf of these humble drudges of their own sex— the poor washerwomen. We entreat them to look with a pitying eye upon their hardships and sufferings, and to use their influence, which is great, with their aristocratic “lords and masters,” to discountenance a system fraught with injustice, immorality, and crime.

At the latter end of first the sessions of the Legislative Council a petition was presented by MR. BLAND from the washerwomen of Sydney, praying a consideration of their case, in the prayer of which MR. BLAND and his learned coadjutor MR. WENTWORTH cordially joined and, we believe, it will be brought under consideration at an early period of the ensuing sessions; but, in the interim, ship loads of immigrants are arriving, daily augmenting and accumulating the distresses of the poor, and we earnestly entreat the ladies to put a stop to this infamous, paltry system of Government competition with private enterprise in free trade, which is as radically, politically, and unconstitutionally reprehensible and wrong in principle, whether it affects the interests of an humble washerwoman, labouring over her wash-tub, for the daily sustenance of a young family, or interferes with the traffic of “gorgeous argosies, laden with costly merchandise.”

CITATION

Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Report on FEMALE FACTORY,” , accessed [insert current date].