Australian historian Edith M. Ziegler is an adjunct lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of New England in Australia. She is the author of Schools in the Landscape: Localism, Cultural Tradition and the Development of Alabama’s Public Education System, 1865–1915.
"This compelling study traces the transportation of female convicts
from Britain to Maryland in the 18th century. Piecing together
evidence from merchant letter books, runaway advertisements, and
court records, Ziegler (Univ. of New England, Australia) places
female convicts into the historical dialogue of criminal
transportation to North America. Though the scholarship on gender
relationships in the US is expanding, Ziegler emphasizes that
female convicts are overlooked. She argues that like female slaves
and servants, women convicts faced similar (and significant)
experiences of displacement, family loss, maltreatment, social
exclusion, and reinvention and therefore deserve their own
analysis. In the first three chapters, the author examines the
economic and technological circumstances that drove women to crime,
the types of crime they committed, and the physical and emotional
impact that Britain's Transportation Act had on female criminals.
The next four chapters cover their exile in Maryland, including
hostile encounters with colonists, being sold, abuse, sexual
relationships, attempted escape, and life after servitude. The
conclusion situates female convicts within the turmoil of the
American Revolution, raising more questions about the struggle of
this unique group to obtain an identity in a patriarchal (and
increasingly revolutionary) society. The author's methodology makes
this book a valuable resource. Highly recommended.'
--CHOICE "Harlots, Hussies, and Poor Unfortunate Women demonstrates
that women's history intersects with and lives within all
histories: women's history is transnational history, labor history,
crime history, economic history, political history. Ziegler not
only tells the stories of a heretofore invisible set of women, she
enhances, expands, and contextualizes the history of women during
the colonial period."
--Women's Review of Books "Harlots, Hussies and Poor Unfortunate
Women sheds light on one thread of early American women's history
that is both surprising and engrossing."
--Journal of Southern History
"Ziegler describes the significant impact of British penal and
mercantile trade policies as well as the neglected gendered world
of white servitude in a predominately slave economy. This
well-researched work will contribute significantly to early modern
gender, colonialism, and transatlantic studies and provide lively
required reading for undergraduate courses in these areas."
--Debra Meyer, author of Common Whores, Vertuous Women, and Loveing
Wives: Free Will Christian Women in Colonial Maryland and co-editor
of Colonial Chesapeake: New Perspectives "Edith Ziegler offers a
compelling social history about women convicts from the British
Isles who were sent to Maryland under the Transportation Act of
1718. Harlots, Hussies, and Poor Unfortunate Women carefully
reconstructs each step of these women's experiences, beginning with
their crimes and imprisonments in England, and following them as
they journeyed to Maryland to complete their sentences as bound
laborers. As these women left behind few first-person accounts,
Ziegler skillfully utilizes a variety of primary sources, including
ship records, court records concerning legal disputes, runaway
notices, and estate inventories, to reveal the challenges and harsh
conditions women convicts faced as a result of their dislocation
from family, friends, and home."
--Lucia McMahon, author of Mere Equals: The Paradox of Women's
Education in the Early American Republic
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