Evidence Type: LETTER TO THE EDITOR
DATE: 21 December 1844
THE FEMALE FACTORY.
WASHERWOMEN’S PETITION.
To the Editor of the Parramatta Chronicle.
Now that the Legislative Council has re-assembled, and is manifesting a laudable anxiety to make amends for the dilatoriness of their proceedings of the last session, by going vigorously to work in bringing up the arrears of public business, I trust the petition, presented by the learned and honorable member for Sydney, (MR. WENTWORTH) and so ably supported by his colleague, (DR. BLAND) relative to the system pursued, —under the especial auspices of “Sir GEORGE GIPPS and his amiable Lady,”— of washing and mangling linen, in the Female Factory, at half price, will meet with due consideration at the hands of our legislators, before the close of the present session.
To the unthinking and unfeeling, whose destinies have placed them,—however unworthy,—above the humble petitioners against this vile and paltry system, the mere idea of a washerwoman’s petition to the Supreme Legislature of the Colony, carries with it so much of the vulgarity and absurdity, as to excite sensations of risibility rather than compassion for their wrongs. But, I apprehend that, to use a vulgar expression, suitable to the homely subject under consideration—they will “laugh at the wrong of their mouths” when we remind them that the vulgarity of the theme is not only equally but surpassed by the meanness of which they are guilty, who affect such lofty notions of gentility, yet send their washing to the Factory, at the risk of losing it in its transit from Sydney to Parramatta, to effect the paltry saving of a few pence!
The claims of the petitioners are stronger, and the reasons for affording them a solemn investigation are of more grave political importance than such shallow-pated witlings imagine. In fact the interests of the washerwomen and laundresses, however ludicrous the proposition may seem, I am prepared to show, are inseparably and intimately connected with the universal well-being of the male portion of the working classes—more especially in times of scarcity of employment for handicraftsmen of every description, such as have prevailed in this Colony for many months past.
Independently of the gross and cruel injustice of converting a convict penitentiary, designed for the punishment and reformation of depraved and abandoned women, into a Laundry Establishment wherein and whereby their labor is rewarded with forbidden luxuries (such as tea, sugar, tobacco, and the like) to stimulate them to an unequal competition with the unfortunate females of the immigrant class, so many of whom are starving with their families, their husbands being out of work—after being cajoled out to this colony by the emissaries and agents of a delusive speculation, entered into with the sanction of the British Government, to which it must ever be an irretrievable disgrace—independently of all this, I repeat, the whole order of things has been subverted—transportation has been converted into a blessing—immigration into a curse—and anarchy, confusion, want, misery, and universal suffering have been spread among all conditions of the whole community by a strong-headed, perverse, and wicked policy, of which “Sir GEORGE GIPPS and his amiable Lady” are the sole propounders.
I have, already, filled up my allotted space, I assure my humble, but deserving and much injured constituents—the washerwomen, that—even at the risk of being though “an old washerwoman” myself, I will return to the subject next week, and prove—what I have proposed to do—the intimate and inseparable dependence of the general interests of the Working Classes on the perseverance or abolition of the impolitic, unjust and cruel system of convict competition with free labor, at present countenanced and supported by the would-be aristocracy of Botany Bay, with “Sir GEORGE GIPPS and his amiable Lady” at their head!
PUBLICO.
CITATION
Female Factory Online (femalefactoryonline.org), “Letter to the Editor: The Female Factory: Washerwomen’s Petition,” https://femalefactoryonline.org/female-factory-reports/r18441221/, accessed [insert current date].
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