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Pack of thieves? 52 female factory lives

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Pack of thieves? 52 female factory lives

by Alison Alexander et al.

Softcover, trade paperback.

Accession 9780957939462 ISBN 9780957939462 Publisher Demos Medical Publishing

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on_shelf: True
position_updated_at: 2026-05-05 17:11
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binding_type: Hard Back
dimensions: none captured
spine_text: PACK OF THIEVES? 52 FEMALE FACTORY LIVES PORT ARTHUR HISTORIC SITES

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Topics and Themes

1. **Female Convict History & the Penal System**
The book profiles 52 women incarcerated or employed at the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart, recovering their individual life stories from historical records. It shines a light on how the colonial penal system processed, confined, and controlled women.

Connect to books about: convict transportation, Australian penal colonies, prison history, colonial law and punishment.

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2. **Women's Lives Under Colonialism**
The women in this book lived under British colonial rule in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), where gender, class, and empire intersected to shape their fates. Their stories reveal the particular burdens colonialism placed on women.

Connect to books about: colonialism and gender, women in the British Empire, postcolonial studies, settler history.

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3. **Social History from the Margins**
Rather than focusing on governors, explorers, or colonial elites, the book recovers the lives of ordinary, forgotten women — many of them poor, Irish, or working class — giving voice to people typically absent from the historical record.

Connect to books about: microhistory, subaltern studies, history from below, working-class history.

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4. **Crime, Punishment & Moral Judgement**
The title *Pack of Thieves?* — with its pointed question mark — interrogates the label applied to these women, many of whom committed minor or survival-driven offences. The book asks readers to reconsider how crime and deviance were defined and punished.

Connect to books about: criminology history, moral panics, poverty and crime, criminal justice reform.

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5. **Gender, Power & Institutional Confinement**
The Female Factory was a gendered institution — a space specifically designed to manage and discipline women's bodies and behaviour. The book explores what it meant to be confined as a woman within such a system.

Connect to books about: feminist history, carceral feminism, institutions and gender control, reproductive coercion.

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6. **Irish & British Working-Class Migration and Displacement**
Many of the women transported to Van Diemen's Land came from impoverished Irish or British backgrounds, uprooted by poverty, famine, and legal persecution. Their stories are part of a broader history of forced and desperate migration.

Connect to books about: Irish diaspora, forced migration, transportation and empire, the Irish famine.

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7. **Biography, Prosopography & Life Writing**
The book assembles 52 individual biographical sketches drawn from archival records — a form of collective life writing or prosopography — raising questions about how we reconstruct lives from fragmentary evidence.

Connect to books about: biography methodology, archival research, life writing, recovered histories.

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8. **Heritage, Memory & Commemorative History**
Published alongside a set of illustrated playing cards and tied to the Cascades Female Factory Historic Site, the book sits at the intersection of public history, heritage tourism, and collective memory.

Connect to books about: public history, heritage sites, memory and commemoration, material culture.

Pack of thieves? 52 female factory lives

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