Long Bay : prison, abortion and women of the working class

Sweetapple, EJ

Long Bay : prison, abortion and women of the working class

Sweetapple, EJ

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Publication Type:: Thesis
Issue Date:: 2015

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Sweetapple, EJ
dc.date.accessioned	2015-09-01T03:22:35Z
dc.date.available	2020-05-25T19:05:52Z
dc.date.issued	2015
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/36972
dc.description	University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.	en_US
dc.description.abstract	In 1909 Rebecca Sinclair and her husband Donald Sinclair were found guilty of manslaughter in Sydney’s Central Criminal Court. She was sentenced to three years Hard Labour at Long Bay Women’s Reformatory and he to five years penal servitude. Rebecca and Donald Sinclair had been performing illegal abortions with Epsom Salts and a syringe when their patient – a mother of three children – died. After six months in prison Rebecca was taken to the Royal Hospital for Women in Paddington where she gave birth to a daughter. When her daughter was two weeks old, they returned to prison together. Long Bay is the story of how Rebecca Sinclair became involved in the burgeoning illegal abortion racket and how she was drawn into Donald Sinclair’s world. Her husband’s mother was a known abortionist called Nurse Sinclair who advertised her services in the back of the newspapers, and always managed to escape conviction. The creative portion of my Doctorate of Creative Arts is an 86,000 word novel Long Bay, based on Rebecca and Donald Sinclair’s story. The exegesis consists of an introduction (including an examination of my research process) and three separate essays about aspects of Rebecca Sinclair’s experience. The first essay details the rise of the Women’s Reformatory movement within the conceptual framework of Foucault’s work on prisons, and the creation of Long Bay Women’s Reformatory as the first purpose built women’s prison in Australia. The second looks at the demand for abortion in the early twentieth century and the medicalisation of abortion as traditional midwife providers were legislated against and replaced by doctors profiting from the illegal market. The essay examines how this also led to inexperienced criminal abortionists with no medical training (like Rebecca and Donald Sinclair) filling the gap left by experienced midwifes. The final essay examines the representation and expectations of working class women, and how often the most vivid representations of working class women at the time exist because their subjects have failed to fulfil traditional expectations and have come under public scrutiny as a result.	en_US
dc.format	Thesis (DCA)	en_US
dc.language.iso	en	en_US
dc.relation	https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/36972/2/02whole.pdf
dc.rights	The author owns the copyright in this thesis including all reproduction and reuse rights for the work. The work may not be altered without the permission of the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from this thesis.
dc.rights	au.edu.uts.lib/ppc
dc.rights	info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
dc.title	Long Bay : prison, abortion and women of the working class	en_US
dc.type	Thesis
utslib.copyright.status	open_access	*

Abstract:

In 1909 Rebecca Sinclair and her husband Donald Sinclair were found guilty of manslaughter in Sydney’s Central Criminal Court. She was sentenced to three years Hard Labour at Long Bay Women’s Reformatory and he to five years penal servitude. Rebecca and Donald Sinclair had been performing illegal abortions with Epsom Salts and a syringe when their patient – a mother of three children – died. After six months in prison Rebecca was taken to the Royal Hospital for Women in Paddington where she gave birth to a daughter. When her daughter was two weeks old, they returned to prison together. Long Bay is the story of how Rebecca Sinclair became involved in the burgeoning illegal abortion racket and how she was drawn into Donald Sinclair’s world. Her husband’s mother was a known abortionist called Nurse Sinclair who advertised her services in the back of the newspapers, and always managed to escape conviction. The creative portion of my Doctorate of Creative Arts is an 86,000 word novel Long Bay, based on Rebecca and Donald Sinclair’s story. The exegesis consists of an introduction (including an examination of my research process) and three separate essays about aspects of Rebecca Sinclair’s experience. The first essay details the rise of the Women’s Reformatory movement within the conceptual framework of Foucault’s work on prisons, and the creation of Long Bay Women’s Reformatory as the first purpose built women’s prison in Australia. The second looks at the demand for abortion in the early twentieth century and the medicalisation of abortion as traditional midwife providers were legislated against and replaced by doctors profiting from the illegal market. The essay examines how this also led to inexperienced criminal abortionists with no medical training (like Rebecca and Donald Sinclair) filling the gap left by experienced midwifes. The final essay examines the representation and expectations of working class women, and how often the most vivid representations of working class women at the time exist because their subjects have failed to fulfil traditional expectations and have come under public scrutiny as a result.

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