Announcing the Final Examination of Teresa Bass Foster

Title: Felonious Women & Familial Bonds: Convict Transportation to the Maryland Colony, 1718-1739

Date and Location:
April 11, 2018 at 10 a.m.
Sherman Hall, Room 422

This study examined the state sponsored penal transportation of early eighteenth-century British women, from prison incarceration and judicial conviction to forced emigration to the Maryland colony. Sold as chattel laborers for seven to fourteen years, convict women navigated colonial spaces in hitherto unexamined ways. In this study, gender, race, and class were employed as primary tools of analysis in order to more fully understand these forgotten historical actors.

Of the estimated 50,000 or more convicts transported to America from 1718 to 1783, approximately 80% debarked in the Chesapeake and approximately 30% were women. The creation of a dataset consisting of 968 women transported to Maryland between 1718 and 1783 helped facilitate an in-depth study. Data was collected through the examination of eighteenth-century primary source documents, including court transcriptions, prison records, shipping manifests, colonial port records, and merchant correspondence.

Focusing on women and privileging their experiences as valid sites of knowledge creation revealed a more nuanced understanding of convict transportation. Far from being monochromatic subjects, convict women led complex lives before becoming ensnared by an inhumane judicial process. A study of their familial relationships in Britain revealed that many were married, separated, or widowed. Many were mothers of living children, and/or provided support for parents and siblings. Consequently, their abrupt removal had a rippling effect on their communities. In Maryland, their lives were complicated by numerous restrictions imposed upon their physical bodies. Some women escaped by running away, while others formed intimate relationships with male laborers and gave birth to illegitimate children. As deviations from colonial social norms earned substantial and severe punishments, the service periods of rebellious convict women often extended well beyond their original bond periods.

This study treated convicted transported women as experientially separate from all other colonial immigrant labor groups, even as they inhabited the same social, legal, and economic landscapes as other laborers and colonists. The category “convict” was traditionally studied as stereotypically male, or was either absent from colonial historiography altogether, or incorrectly subsumed within the category of indentured servant. This study argued that transported convicts should be more correctly termed “convict bond servants,” a distinct category which identifies individuals who were forcibly relocated to the colonies and forcibly sold as chattel laborers for seven to fourteen years, without formal indenture agreements or the legal rights and protections afforded to indentured servants.

Dissertation Committee:
Marjoleine Kars, Chair
Amy Froide
Beverly Bickel
Carole McCann
Jean B. Russo

The public is welcome to observe.