Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
Once launched in the 1870s, Miss Spence won acclaim and affection for her
‘rare gifts of speech and intellect’. At home in Adelaide, a reporter was to praise a
sermon he heard her deliver, approving her slight Scots accent, her clear, firm voice
and her unselfconsciousness. Another observer exclaimed over her speech to a public
meeting: ‘Does not Miss Spence speak well and clearly’. Abroad, too, in 1893-4, she
elicited enthusiasm. Even in the United States, where a woman speaking in public
was not such a rare phenomenon by the end of the nineteenth century, Catherine
Spence’s public address at the World Congress of Charities & Corrections in Chicago
gained, she reported, ‘a most attentive hearing, and was frequently interrupted
by applause, which is not such a common thing in America as it is in Australia’. A
charismatic speaker, she was: further east she presented, she was told, ‘the finest political
address given in Boston for ten years’.
Catherine Spence knew that she was carving out a new path along which other
women would follow her. When she insisted on giving her own lecture to the South
Australian Institute, an unprecedented innovation in 1871, she did so, she said, ‘to
make it easier henceforward for any woman who felt she had something to say to
stand up and say it’.
Unbridling the tongues of women: a biography of Catherine Helen Spence began life
as a thesis for a Master of Arts degree at the Australian National University,
completed in 1971. Subsequently, I was advised to send it to Melbourne University
Press, the principal publisher of Australian historical work. It came back with a letter
saying that they thought it was very well written, but that there was no market for
books about women. This was in 1973, just two years before International Women’s
Year and the appearance of Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police, Beverley
Kingston’s My Wife, My Daughter, and Poor Mary Ann, and later, Miriam Dixson’s The
Real Matilda, so Melbourne University Press missed out on what might have been a
small scoop. My thesis was eventually published by Hale & Iremonger in 1985.
At the heart of the researches that I carried out was Catherine Spence’s Autobiography,
a work that she wrote during her last months, sometimes in indelible pencil
because she was writing in bed, and, she said, ‘A nice state I and the sheets would be
in if I used ink’. Following it fairly closely, I depicted her on a journey which brought
her, at the celebration of her eightieth birthday in 1905, to the declaration, ‘I am a
New Woman, and I know it’.
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