Convict Maids explodes many myths surrounding the forcible transportation of female convicts from Great Britain and Ireland only New South Wales. Rejecting the notion that these were worthless women recruited from a professional criminal class, Deborah Oxley argues that these women helped put the New South Wales economy on its feet.

Oxley's analysis of 7000 convict indents shows that the women were mostly first offenders transported for crimes trivial by today's standards. Convict women arrived with a range of skills, most were literate, and nearly all were young and healthy. All of these qualities made them exceptional immigrants available to be exploited by the new colony, which needed them both in the labour market and in the domestic sphere as wives and mothers.

Oxley exposes how women have been downgraded in Australia's history by a misplaced focus on issues of sexuality and prostitution.

Every woman transported between 1826 and 1840 is included in this first major quantitative study of female convicts in New South Wales. Deborah Oxley examines English and Irish, rural and urban women, revealing their criminal profiles and work histories within the context of a rapidly changing legal system and two volatile economies undergoing immense transformations as England became the first industrial nation.

But convict women workers were neither a straightforward cross-section of the population, nor were they simply the 'sweepings of the gaols': above all they had found employment as domestic servants. Quite literally, they were convict maids, and the demand for them was high.