Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
have assisted women’s independence of men. Child endowment furnishes only one
example. 12 Further, views such as Daniels’s derive from analyses of welfare states that
were more developed than the state was in South Australia in the 1870s and 1880s.
It is probably more fruitful, and more accurate, to consider the state in that period of
the colony’s history as a site of struggle – responsive, within the limitations imposed
by a capitalist economy and a patriarchal gender order, to pressure. Besides, there
are discrepancies between the events in which Clark and Spence were involved and
the account which Spence gave of them in her book State Children in Adelaide. 13
This should prompt us to ask questions about Spence’s perception of the constraints
and opportunities which Emily Clark’s project offered, and what she did with them.
Spence’s introduction to philanthropic work coincided with her introduction to
women deliberately trespassing into the world of men, along a line of rather more
resistance than novel writing. If we consider the work that she did in this field, and
the ways in which she wrote about it, we may find that there are more than two ways
to tell this story.
Paradoxically, the systematic colonisers’ attempts to found a society in which
the economy, religion, education, even poor relief, would operate freely, unhampered
and unassisted by government, engendered instead a society in which primary
responsibility for poor relief became centralised in a department of the colonial government.
No doubt this irony owed something to the high degree of centralisation
of South Australia’s financially and politically powerful in Adelaide. Clearly it
owed much to traditions established in the early days of settlement, when colonists
clung so fiercely to the foundations of the fortunes they were making from land
speculation, that Gawler was unable to raise the subscriptions necessary to build an
infirmary. His successor, Grey, found it necessary to allocate funds from the general
revenue for minimal provision for the destitute, lest they starve. And Grey’s successor
Robe, felt compelled to make grants-in-aid to religion and education. 14 The
government agencies established to administer such funds – the Destitute Board,
for instance, and the Education Board – were, in accordance with the founders’ voluntaryist
principles, voluntary bodies, even though they were appointed by government.
Their members gave their services gratuitously so they were not open to the
charges of indifference, place-seeking or corruption that voluntaryists might level at
paid government officers. 15 Further, those boards were administering funds from the
general revenue. Until late in the 19 th century, that came largely from indirect taxation
and land-sales, so the major profit-makers undoubtedly considered that they
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