Damned Whores and God's Police

by Anne Summers

  As was shown in the last chapter, the early female immigrants were subjected to the same treatment as the female convicts and this resulted in the Damned Whore stereotype remaining even after transportation had ceased. This, as we have seen, excluded the women tainted by it from marriage or at least from the respectable status that marriage and family were now intended to bestow. The position of women was the key to family development. The bourgeois family required wives who were sexually faithful and who, ideally, were virgins at marriage. Wives were seen by the bourgeois class as a form of property and as instruments of reproduction; husbands wanted their property to be untainted and they wanted a guarantee that they had fathered the children they were obliged to provide for. In addition, as the wife’s functions increased and she undertook the moral guidance and elementary education of the children, it was seen as essential that she conform to bourgeois moral standards. So, although a woman characterised as a Damned Whore could marry and raise children, the stigma of the stereotype would brand her forever, in the eyes of society if not her husband, and her fitness for performing these functions would always be called into question. The kind of women who were seen as being ideal wives in the bourgeois family were those who had led thoroughly respectable lives, who knew little of the world and especially of its seamier, that is, sexual, side, and who were prepared to submit to the authority and opinions of the husband who was regarded as the undisputed master of the bourgeois family.

  This at least was the way things were seen in England. In Australia there were differences, and these differences led to an altering of emphasis placed on the wife’s position and on the husband’s authority. The Damned Whore stereotype and the social conditions that produced it were so intertwined that its critics considered that more than the processes of time and gradual social evolution were needed to eradicate it. Colonial society needed to be totally restructured and those who urged the facilitation of the establishment of the bourgeois family all saw the securing of a safe and respectable position for women as integral to this process. But where they differed from their English counterparts was in their opinion that women themselves could play a major role in restructuring society. All of them saw reform of the immigration system as an essential prerequisite.

  The three main articulators of this idea were the founders of South Australia, particularly the social architect of that colony, Edward Gibbon Wakefield; and Caroline Chisholm and John Dunmore Lang in New South Wales. All three argued for, and devised schemes to implement family colonisation as opposed to the government schemes of selective immigration, which tended to increase the already large imbalance between the sexes, and to lead in their view to moral degeneracy and chaotic employment arrangements.

  Wakefield had pointed out in his plan for the new colony that the great need felt in all infant colonies where there was neither convict nor coloured slavery ‘and that which leads most of the other wants which then suffer in its train, is the want of labour’.8 His solution to this shortage was also designed to alleviate the other wants, and it was on the basis of his attempt to grapple with the labour problem that he devised a theory of colonisation, which formed the basis of the new settlement in South Australia in 1836. His primary considerations were economic:

  It is obvious … that great as has been the augmentation of the value of land in the Australian Colonies, it would have been much greater if, every thing else remaining the same, the expense which has been incurred in sending convicts to them in the proportion of at least ten males to one female, had been employed in furnishing them with young couples well selected from the classes of agricultural labourers and workmen.9

  Lang and Chisholm began by criticising the female immigration system. In the opinion of Lang, Minister of Scots Church, Sydney: ‘The female emigration system has added greatly to the immorality of the colony … the total amount of licentiousness has greatly increased, and the outrageous form it has assumed is certainly much more prominent’.10 Caroline Chisholm had similar misgivings about the scheme:

  Shiploads of females from parishes thrown on the shores of Australia! It is far from being complimentary to the feelings or character of the Australians, and knowing the settlers and the manner of living in that colony as well as I do, I cannot but feel apprehensive that a greater evil may arise from such a system than even from the present partial disparity of the sexes in the colony.11

  Wakefield was able to engage in the luxury of planning an entire social system from scratch. He was able to see the virtues, and the errors, of other colonies, and once he was able to gain the backing of a substantial group of influential Englishmen who were prepared to finance the founding of the new colony, he was able to expound his principles of colonisation as a practical activity, not merely a theoretical endeavour.

  What Wakefield did – and his plan was largely adopted by the founders of South Australia – was to provide a framework for a colony designed to suit the moral, economic, political and religious needs of the rising class of mercantile capitalists.12 He proposed that, in contrast to the colonies of the eastern states of Australia, land would be sold, thus providing revenue for some internal development and to finance immigration. He advocated that the population be concentrated in towns, rather than dispersed all over the countryside, for such concentration would enable manufacturing and service industries to develop and would constitute a secure base for social development. But most importantly, he stressed the need for an equal number of the sexes in order to provide a source of labour and to secure a future population. He calculated that if this policy had been followed in New South Wales from 1788, its population in 1834 would have been ten times more numerous than it was.13 Along with a population increased in this natural manner, Wakefield expounded, would develop the social cohesion necessary for the smooth evolution of the colony, and with it, the bourgeois form of ‘the family’. The official plan for South Australia stressed that ‘no woman there would be without a protector, and no man would have an excuse for dissolute habits’.14

  That ‘the family’ was now seen as an integral economic feature of mercantile capitalism was made clear by Wakefield’s rationalisation for sending whole families, or young people of marriageable age, to the new colony: ‘If males only are sent, the expense of conveying each person purchases for the Colony but one labourer. If young couples are sent, their cost of passage is paid for them, and all their progeny, their five or six children, fifteen or eighteen grandchildren, and for the succeeding generations which descend from them’.15 And Colonel Torrens who, along with Wakefield, was responsible for much of the philosophy of colonisation that was implemented in South Australia, saw this scheme as invalidating Malthus’s ‘demoralising doctrine that the working classes ought to delay their marriages’. Now, he said, ‘that doctrine would be blown to the winds. In South Australia a large family would be a large source of wealth, and happy is the man who has his quiver full of them’.16

  The reformers in eastern Australia, by contrast, had to contend with a society where males greatly exceeded females and where government attempts to alter the situation had simply compounded the problem. In New South Wales in 1833 there were 44 688 men and 16 173 women17, while in Van Diemen’s Land the following year there were 22 240 men and 10 496 women.18 The first census taken at Port Phillip, the embryonic Victorian settlement, in September 1838 showed a total of 1580 men, 431 women and 267 bonded servants, the sexes of whom were not distinguished.19 The government did not have an official view of the likely consequences of continuing this situation, but the fact that attempts were made to try to reverse the trend indicated that it wished to equalise the population. In 1831 the government began to finance the immigration of single girls but, as already pointed out, these women were treated similarly to the female convicts. In 1835 a new immigration scheme was introduced, which granted settlers bounties to bring out the number of immigrants they required. The colonists had complained about the women sent out under the old scheme and had also said that
the labourers and artisans who had been sent out to fill urgent labour shortages were unsatisfactory. Under the new scheme the onus was now on the future employers to ensure the suitability of prospective immigrants. No single criterion of eligibility existed, for different employers had different needs, and these were often at variance with what the reformers saw as conducive to the long-term needs of the colonies. The squatters wanted single men ‘with no encumbrances’, whereas the religious and other reformers wanted to import young married couples and suitably chaperoned single women. The latter’s views were shared by the government to the extent that these two classes of immigrants were given assistance with their passages. But in 1840 the government ceased to subsidise fares, and the bounty scheme, with substantially increased bounties, became the only means of enticing immigrants to Australia.

  Since it was impossible for the colonists to select the immigrants themselves, they began to rely on a newly arisen vulture class of immigration agents, and the bounty permits were eventually transferred to the English ship-owners. A booming new enterprise was soon underway. Emigrants were supposed to furnish certificates of good character but the ship-owners, anxious to cram full their specially reconstructed ships, were willing to provide forged references. Thus while the volume of immigrants increased considerably, they were a pot-pourri of people whose motives for immigrating were undoubtedly to improve their current fortunes, but who could not always be assimilated into the schemes of the main employers of labour in the colonies.

  The immigrants themselves had good cause for dissatisfaction during this period. On reaching Sydney they found scant welcome.

  They were permitted to remain on board ship for ten days on full rations; whether they had found employment or not they were turned loose to fend for themselves after that. There were no hostels or barracks to accommodate them, and no employment registration office nor any means whereby prospective workers could be directed to existing jobs in the country.20

  The immigrants who fared worst in these circumstances were the two groups that the authorities claimed were needed most – families with young children, and single women. The former were often unable to find work because employers were usually unwilling to provide rations for unproductive labour, that is, pregnant or nursing women and children aged under seven, while the single women were subject to the vagaries of an erratic employment system in a city crushed by a depression. Even if jobs were available, the women were often unable to find them as there was no body that concerned itself particularly with the employment arrangements of domestic servants. Groups of penniless women, often very young, were to be found sleeping on the Sydney Domain during the early 1840s, completely at the mercy of whoever might decide to prey upon them.

  The initial government immigration schemes failed to substantially alter the social structure of the colony because they were piecemeal and made little attempt to secure employment and accommodation for the people they had enticed out to the colony. It became evident that, if things were to change, direct intervention was required. This came – in the person of Caroline Chisholm. She arrived in Sydney from India with her husband in the late 1830s and was horrified to discover the plight of the single-women immigrants. She went round the streets and parks of Sydney, gathering up distressed women and took them into her home, but she soon recognised that large-scale measures were necessary to alleviate the plight of what she estimated to be 600 women.21 She had children of her own and recognised her responsibilities to care for them, but she also became convinced that she had received a divine-appointed mission to do something about the needs of immigrants. She began by pressuring Governor Gipps, who grudgingly gave her the use of a building where, on 26 October 1841, she opened a Female Immigrants Home.22

  Chisholm’s aim was to find employment, not merely provide shelter for the women, and she established the first free labour registry in Sydney. Other registries that were in operation by then charged employers five shillings (or a guinea if they lived in the country) and employees two and sixpence. These were large amounts to pay during a depression, particularly when there was no guarantee that the contracts arranged would be mutually suitable. It also quickly became evident that although there was insufficient employment available in Sydney, plenty existed in the country, and so Chisholm began what became regular trips to the bush, escorting cartloads of prospective employees.

  Although she had begun her work with single women, she extended it almost immediately to include any unemployed person. She persuaded country people to allow her to use their empty drays returning from the city to carry men, women and children to their jobs in the country. She devised a form of employment survey and, bypassing the squatters completely, sent questionnaires designed to reveal existing employment opportunities to ministers and to farmers and other small employers. The Sydney Herald encouraged her work by urging the public to support her with subscriptions, and asked for the cooperation of settlers in the interior in lending their drays.

  Within a year, Chisholm had established employment centres at Parramatta, Moreton Bay, Liverpool, Maitland, Campbell Town, Wollongong, Scone, Bong Bong and Yass. Persons requiring servants or other labour could apply to these centres and each week a suitable supply of people would be directed to the available jobs. As well as simply placing people, Chisholm acted as a broker in securing them fair wages and she insisted that contracts for service be drawn in triplicate, copies going to employer, employee and herself. At the end of her first year of work, Caroline Chisholm claimed that she had been ‘the instrument either directly or indirectly of serving upwards of 2,000 persons’; 1400 of these were women, including 76 whom she said were ‘reclaimed’ prostitutes.23

  Chisholm wanted the employment she found for the women to be temporary. What she wanted was for them to become wives and mothers, and she went to great lengths to encourage marriage between single women and respectable settlers. She described her trips to the country placing employees as ‘my matrimonial excursions in the Australian bush’.24 Whenever she found a comfortable farm owned by a reputable bachelor or widower, she placed a suitable woman with the nearest married neighbour and ‘in the natural course of events many suitable and happy marriages were the result’.25

  Chisholm had strong views on the contribution respectable married women could make to a restructuring of Australian society. As the quotation at the beginning of this chapter shows, she considered women to be ‘God’s Police’, a civilising and moderating influence in an intemperate social environment. She saw women as actively complementing, if not taking over, the policing role played by chaplains during the penal era. Wives, she considered, could have a much greater and more direct influence on their husbands than any once-a-week contact with religion could ensure. She thought that even wild colonial Australia would be elevated if men could be rescued from their ‘enforced bachelorism’: ‘Give them helpmates and you make murmuring, discontented servants, loyal and happy subjects of the State’.26 She was confident that ‘the influence of … one hundred wives in the Bush would soon be visible in the improved sympathy and feelings of their husbands’.27

  This view of women as moral police was not new – it was a basic tenet of Christianity, and Caroline Chisholm was a devout Roman Catholic; but it was not a facet of feminine ability that was stressed much in England at the time. It undermined the absolute authority of the patriarchal husband, for instance, and was seen as superfluous in England where respectable society had a solid enough base to be unconcerned with the vast lower strata of people who were forced, by grim economic conditions, to eke out wretched lives of squalid poverty where crime was the only means of acquiring food and clothing. In Australia, the embryo of a respectable society existed, but it was necessary to protect it, and allow it to expand and perpetuate.

  Caroline Chisholm was not so naive as to imagine that the mere presence of women would alter things; she knew only too well the fate of the unchaperoned female immigrants and this is what prompted her to endeavour to
secure respectable posts for the women she hoped would become the mothers of future generations of middle-class Australians. But her early efforts entailed settling immigrants who either arrived privately or else on the government scheme, and she could do no more than tinker with what was still an ill-conceived means of acquiring a balanced population.

  Both Chisholm and Lang soon recognised that if their dreams of an Australia based on the bourgeois family were to be realised, they would have to select suitable immigrants themselves. In 1843 Chisholm left Australia for England. She had three principal aims: to locate and arrange passages for the wives of emancipated convicts; to do likewise for the children whom immigrant couples had been forced to leave behind; and to found a ‘national colonisation’ scheme. To aid the latter aim she had collected nearly 700 statements from settlers.28 These were to provide evidence of the bountiful life one could lead in Australia, and to assuage the fears of prospective emigrants. She had some success in her attempts to reunite families, but the third aim took much longer to effect and it was not until 1849 that her Family Colonization Loan Society was born. The immediate aim of the society was to ‘relieve the distressed and to help the poorer classes of people to emigrate’; wherever possible the reunion of families was to be encouraged and the ultimate aim was to raise the moral standard of the people.29 Chisholm ascertained the respectability of the prospective emigrants and obliged them, as proof of their sincerity to want to start a new life, to contribute part of their passage money in advance. The balance was repayable after they had established themselves in Australia.

  John Dunmore Lang was suspicious of Chisholm’s motives: he accused her of trying to people the colony with Papists, but the two were agreed on basic principles. Lang wrote