Textile manufacturing
The “female factories” in Tasmania constituted a system of female convict prisons located in four locations across Van Diemen’s Land, in Hobart, George Town, Launceston and Ross. The latter factories were constructed in the early 1830s to alleviate overcrowding issues within the Cascades Female Factory. Eleanor Casella argues that the design of the female factories were predicated on the thought that convict women could be morally reformed through the prescription of manual labour, thus these institutions were essentially turned into economically productive, government supervised “manufactories”. According to Adrien Howe, the experiences of the convict women in Tasmania’s colony during the nineteenth-century were much more interlinked with the prison institutions then the male convicts, who were largely employed in the construction of infrastructure within the colony. Textile manufacturing was chosen as the primary program to implement within the female factories as, besides being a traditionally gendered industry, it was the most practical to fit within the factory-like atmosphere of the prison. The factory played a multiplicity of roles within Hobart’s society; it functioned as source of labour, a marriage bureau, gaol and hospital. After women had served their sentences, or after periods of nominal good behaviour, they were promoted to a “hiring class” which meant that they were ready to be employed within domestic service, often on farmland, within the hospital or a role within the prison itself. The factory administration was responsible for integrating the female convicts back into society. Today, the Cascades Female Factory remains as a historic site for tourists to explore the heritage of Hobart’s female convict landscape. By 1851, there was a sum of approximately 12,000 convict women that had been transported to the Van Diemen’s Land colony. Casella maintains that contrary to traditional portrayals of these women as “a monolithic bunch of damned whores,” most of them were convicted of petty crime, serving sentences of seven to fourteen years.