Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Edging out of the domestic sphere
the United States for dealing with children deemed delinquent; its members included
Lady Ayers, Mrs Colton, and Mrs Davenport, all wives of wealthy public figures
in the colony. Their acquaintance was wide, and their social prominence might have
attracted social climbers as well as the genuinely philanthropic to the ranks of the
visitors. 36
Spence’s office as treasurer was not arduous: the Society’s funds came from subscriptions,
seldom amounted to more than £10 a year, and were spent on stationery.
For several years, she combined that office with Emily Clark’s as secretary: in l877-79
when Clark was abroad, and from 1883 to 1886, when Clark’s health compelled her
to resign. Spence also visited the industrial school and the girls’ reformatory quite
frequently. In the mid-1880s, she remarked that she ‘would visit it oftener if it were
not so far away, making a fatiguing day’. 37 It is possible that she walked the five or so
miles from her house in College Park to Magill. She undertook, too, a good deal of
visiting for the Society.
The children to be visited were divided into three groups. The first were children
under the age of 12, attending school, living with people who received an allowance
for them from the Destitute Board. These were the children who were, in Spence’s
and Clark’s view, properly ‘boarded out’. The second were children under 12 and at
school, who were referred to as ‘licensed for adoption’, because they were taken without
the Destitute Board’s allowance. The chairman of the Destitute Board, Thomas
Sadler Reed, preferred placing children with families to whom he did not need to
pay an allowance. Between the beginning of 1873 and June 1883, he arranged for
a total of 2239 children to be adopted. During the same period only 591 children
were boarded out under subsidy. 38 Emily Clark found Reed’s procedures most annoying.
‘Unfortunately’, she commented, ‘he afterwards made a great mistake in
trying to substitute adoption in place of boarding out, and we were extremely vexed
to find him taking them for nothing’. Spence, too, considered Reed’s parsimony
with government funds obstructive; she held that it was directly responsible for there
still being 103 children in the industrial school in 1885, suffering an epidemic of
ophthalmia. 39 The third group were adolescents between the ages of 12 and 16 who
were apprenticed to their guardians and received wages, most of which were put in
the bank for them. This practice dated from 1848, long before the formation of the
Boarding-Out Society. 40 The Society visited children in all three groups, but since
the government subsidy was paid for only those in the first group, it had little power
to affect the conditions of life of those in the second and third.
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