Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Faith and enlightenment
in Australia. She was licensed to solemnise marriages and to consecrate children. She
had, her brother noted, a ‘special aversion, to the ordinary pastoral supervision of a
flock’. But in the pulpit, Emily Clark’s cousins observed:
Miss Turner’s quiet and deeply reverent demeanor, her sweet voice and
her excellent delivery are favourable to the satisfactory discharge of her
solemn office while she seemed also to possess the intellectual and spiritual
gifts still more essential to success. 57
It is not difficult to imagine her impact upon the novelist, who, 20 years earlier, had
depicted her heroine drawing solace against the difficulties and powerlessness of her
position by composing sermons in her journal.
Spence was electrified. She was, she recalled, ‘thrilled by her exquisite voice, by
her earnestness, and by her reverence’. She was not shocked. She said that George
Eliot’s description of Dinah Morris preaching in Adam Bede had prepared her. But,
she exclaimed:
When I heard a highly intelligent and exceptionally able woman conducting
the services all through, and especially reading the Scriptures of
the Old and New Testaments with so much intelligence that they seemed
to take on new meaning, I felt how much the world had been losing for
so many centuries. 58
She was able to hear Martha Turner again, when Woods exchanged pulpits with
Melbourne. But in 1878, Turner married a banker called John Webster and tendered
her resignation to the church. As Dorothy Scott noted, ‘In Victorian society it was
unusual for a single woman of the middle class to pursue a career, except that of a
governess. For a married middle-class woman to be paid a salary for working was
extremely rare’. Nevertheless, her congregation unanimously urged her to continue
her work until they could find a replacement, so she did this until 1883. Perhaps
her position disturbed her less than it did her extremely conservative brother; the
Woman Voter described her, in an obituary early in the 20 th century, as ‘reserved, and
simple, conceding little to fashion and conventions of the time. She like “quiet loafing”
… was a good conversationalist, decidedly humorous and sarcastic yet withal
kindly’. 59 Spence must have relished opportunities to listen to her, both in Adelaide
and more often later in her life when she went to Melbourne herself. By then she,
too, had become and eloquent preacher.
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