’Innocence and penitence hand clasped in hand’: Australian catholic refuges for penitent women, 1848-1914.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Catholic religious sisters in each of what became the Australian states opened a refuge for penitent women - those who bore the stigma of disgrace through failing to meet society’s standards of female sexual behaviour. Their transgressions may have taken the form of working as a prostitute, becoming pregnant outside of marriage, being known to have engaged in pre-marital or extra-marital sexual activity, or of demonstrating a likelihood of engaging in one of these activities. This thesis contends that for several decades the object of the refuges was to serve the immediate material and spiritual needs of the women, but that through the influence of secular domestic ideology and evangelical Protestantism, the reformers changed their aim to inculcating the penitents with the values of feminine propriety and social usefulness. It aims to show compassion for the penitent women and empathy with the reformers who tried to alleviate their suffering. However, it will be critical of the social structure that created inequality of wealth between classes and inequality of opportunity between the sexes, and of the moral code that set narrow limits for acceptable female activity and strict censure of any deviation.Thesis (M.A.) -- University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 201