M&D-related: penile servitude

[Doug Millison]

Of possible interest to M&D readers, from today's PW Daily for Booksellers
from Publishers Weekly
http://publishersweekly.reviewsnews.com.


Indecent Proposal: Sian Rees' The Floating Brothel

The Floating Brothel (Hyperion, $23.95) by University of Oxford history
graduate Sian Rees is a profoundly researched account of the lives,
loves and misdemeanors of the 240 women on board the Lady Julian in the
summer of 1789 headed to penal servitude in Australia. Her passengers
range from pre-pubescent pickpockets to middle-aged madams, from the
obviously innocent to the very guilty, and her blending of historical
fact and lively conjecture, performed with consummate skill, has earned
The Floating Brothel a nomination in the prestigious WH Smith Awards.

The passengers of the Lady Julian were just some of the many British
female petty criminals condemned to "transportation beyond the seas," a
euphemism for a life sentence of unpaid prostitution and
race-propagation in New South Wales. These women, many of them still in
their early teens, quickly learned that the best way to ensure food on
the table and clothing on their backs was to "wife" a high-ranking man,
either as soon as they got to the colony or onboard the Lady Julian, on
the voyage Down Under.

According to a starred PW review, Rees' "meticulous scholarship vividly
recreates the social conditions of late 18th century England that
produced both the criminal activities of her subjects and the terms of
their punishment"--many of the women on board the Lady Julian were there
only because the economy had forced unemployed men into women's jobs and
women onto the streets. In their poverty, these women were forced to
mate and marry for money alone, and Rees' account of their plight is a
fine and timely example of popular history brought to popular
life.--Nicky Agate