Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
one Sunday evening in 1895 to hear her preach on ‘The Democratic Ideal’. The
church was well filled, he observed, and the congregation included ‘men who belong
to no religious party or sect, but men who have been actively associated with Democratic
movements, and who were anxious to hear what Miss Spence had to say’. They
impressed him: ‘Earnest faces they were too; faces which had grown lined puzzling
over the problem of existence. And throughout the entire service there was manifest
a rapt attention’. With them, he watched Spence climb the steps to the high pulpit,
giving a glimpse ‘of a somewhat stout, rather bent form, the movements of which
were indicative of suppressed energy’: a grey head ‘crowned by a black bonnet, which
was fastened under the chin by black ribbons’, and ‘a dress with no pretensions to
fashionable cut’. When she stood up to announce the opening hymn, he observed a
‘rounded face, somewhat white of complexion and little marked by the usual disastrous
effects of age’, and blue eyes, he said, which ‘flashed through the spectacles’. He
liked the slight Scots accent of her clear, firm voice, and her unselfconsciousness: ‘the
whole tone is that of a cultured woman’. He even felt slightly shamed by her ‘vigorous
incisive’ attack on the growth of monopoly and luxury in the United States, and
her appeal against any social organization which left some people in poverty. ‘Truly’,
he concluded, ‘all who were present must have gone away impressed with the idea
that Miss Spence is one of the most remarkable women of the day’. 68 But none of
the regular congregation publicly identified themselves with the causes which, by
then, she represented. The founding fathers may well have agreed with Woods when
he grumbled: ‘The discourse was more political than I like in a place of worship and
I object more because I think her politics bad’. 69 Nevertheless, their daughters were
still rallying to the Girls’ Literary Association over which she presided, 70 and learning
a great deal of independence of mind from the example of Miss Spence.
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