Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
Spence did not seek this distinction but she did seize the opportunity when it
was presented to her. One day in 1878, Woods was ill, and there was no layman
available to take the service. Spence had, some seven years earlier, given two lectures
to the South Australian Institute, so the congregation knew that she was capable of
speaking in at least a semi-public forum. Some of its members suggested that Miss
Spence might step into the breach by reading one of James Martineau’s sermons. She
complied, and followed that up by offering to preach a sermon of her own. On 24
November 1878 she preached an original sermon in the Wakefield Street pulpit for
the first time. A dream fulfilled? Spence’s own account would suggest a happy circumstance
rather than an aspiration realised. But it is difficult to forget Clara Morison
scribbling in her journal. Spence knew the power attached to the pulpit in her
society; she could not have been unaware of the symbolic power, both for herself and
for that society, of her presence – a woman’s – in it. Once started she never looked
back. In her autobiography she reported, ‘I suppose I have preached more than a
hundred times in my life, mostly in the Wakefield Street pulpit; but in Melbourne
and Sydney I am always asked for help; and when I went to America in 1893-94 I
was offered seven pulpits’. 60
Preaching gave her great pleasure. She recalled, ‘The preparation of my sermons
… has always been a joy and a delight to me, for I prefer that my subjects as
well as their treatment shall be as humanly helpful as it is possible to make them’.
They enabled her to make use of the wide knowledge of scripture which Miss
Phinn had commended. She could express in them the ideas she drew from her
wide reading. She preached on the parallels between different branches of Buddhism
and the congregational and hierarchical Christian churches, on Luther, on
Milton’s unjust concept of God in Paradise Lost, and on Tolstoy as a prophet. She
could exhort the congregation to pursue each new reform that caught her attention.
She preached on the merits of the work of William Booth and the Salvation
Army, and on child welfare in Britain. She could expound her own views on the
best attitudes and virtues to be developed: she preached recognition that Jews
– who were, she announced with unquestioning prejudice, all capitalists – were
also a pro-liberal influence in politics because they had always been oppressed;
she preached that ‘Experience is an education and not a snare’; she preached that
‘meliorism’, rather than optimism or pessimism, was the attitude that would assist
human progress most. Moreover, in Unitarian congregations, she could expect
a sympathetic hearing when she protested against traditions that repressed indi-
74