Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Faith and enlightenment
of prestige in Adelaide. 42 Arthur Hardy and John Baker were not merely members,
but office-bearers, in the exclusive Adelaide Club. Furthermore, as David Hilliard
has pointed out, some of the more prominent politicians among them (John Baker,
for instance, and Sir William Morgan) also established close links with Anglican
churches. 43 Most of the church members were engaged in businesses – ranging
from hairdressing and photographic artistry, through wholesale grocery and ironmongery,
to the management of mining companies from city offices. 44 And they
prospered: the Simpson family’s rapid rise from a small safe and bedstead manufacturing
business to wealth and social prominence offered a Wakefieldian example to
their fellow worshippers. 45 These men may not have been members of the Adelaide
Racing Club, the Adelaide Hunt Club or the tennis, yachting and cricketing clubs
which the more muscular wealthy established for their diversion, but they were office-holders
in such bodies as the Municipal Corporation of Adelaide, the Chamber
of Commerce and the South Australian Horticultural and Floricultural Society. 46
These organisations contributed quite as much, if more formally, to the solidity
with which bourgeois hegemony was established in South Australia. Members of a
minority sect they might have been, but they had vested interests in maintaining
the freedom, not only of worship, but also of financial enterprise which they had
gained in a new society. Woods’s ‘Enthusiasm of Humanity’ could be exercised very
comfortably in Adelaide.
For the women of the congregation, Woods’s teaching could simply have blended
into the dominant conventions determining what women might and might not
do, held by church and dissenting communions alike. As Margaretta Grieg reflected
in England in the mid-19 th century: ‘A lady, to be such, must be a mere lady, and
nothing else. She must not work for profit, or engage in any occupation that money
can command …’. And Sarah Ellis, exhorting the Daughters of England in 1842,
announced that, ‘As women, then, the first thing of importance is to be content to
be inferior to men – inferior in mental power, in the same proportion as you are inferior
in bodily strength.’ 47 Unitarian women in Adelaide often did conform to such
a view. They taught in their church’s Sunday School, supported the Female Refuge,
and raised funds for the Adelaide Children’s Hospital. 48 Emily Clark and Catherine
Spence gave 20 years of voluntary work to a scheme designed to benefit destitute
children. But some women from this congregation also did more, denying the patriarchal
conventions with which such exponents as Ellis threatened their claim to
bourgeois respectability. In the later decades of the 19 th century, Annie Martin estab-
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