Two kinds of women live in Sakhalin's settlements: those exiled for criminality, and those freewomen who’ve voluntarily followed husbands sentenced to katorga labor there.

There's an enormous difference between them.

The exiled woman, very often morally depraved by her time with other criminals in transfer prisons along the way, soon recognizes her power on Sakhalin. She's needed there. However she is— good or bad, healthy or sick, young or old, beautiful or ugly— she can always find a cohabitant. And as soon as she enters a muzhik's home, the administration immediately releases her from katorga labor.

In 1893, exiled women were freed from the humiliation of corporal punishment.

Because the island's entire regime is founded upon the lash and the birch rod, the abolition of these brutal punishments for women essentially placed them beyond the law. The Sakhalin administration was rendered powerless against them. When corporal punishment is abolished, it should be for the island's entire population, men and women alike, with alternative punishments being immediately devised to prevent the repetition of crimes. I will say several words about this elsewhere.

“Well, Katka, we won't suffer the Devil now!” one unbridled gal shouts to another, vulgarly waving her arms from side to side.

There are indeed examples of striking impudence. It's said one female convict murdered her cohabitant then bragged nothing could be done to her:

“Slap me with ten years katorga? Go ahead! Better for me: I’ll get another ten years of rations.”

Whereas women have been released from cohabitating with exile-settlers and from katorga labor, they have, at the same time, not been deprived of food provisions and government clothing until the end of their designated katorga terms.

Just as there are many haughty, unbridled, flashy katorga gals, there are many crushed, beaten, pitiful freewomen who have gone there, either out of love for their husbands or because of poverty and humiliation back home in the village. They are so distinct that sakhalintsy can, at a single glance, tell whether a convict or a freewoman is going by.

“Ah, you whore,” a settler mutters to herself in the wake of a female convict. “In Russia, you’d be going around in bast shoes, but here, it's as if you’re strutting it: high boots with brass heels!”