Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
Visitors’ reports described the conditions of the children as ‘good’, ‘tolerable’,
and ‘unsatisfactory’. Spence explained that ‘The reports marked “tolerable” and “unsatisfactory”
are for the most part so designated on account of the behaviour of the
children, indifferent health, or irregular attendance at church or school. Very few of
them are so marked on account of the badness of the home’. 41 Perhaps she disliked
the thought of passing judgment on anyone else’s domestic arrangements.
This was, as Margaret Barbalet has pointed out, a period in which there was no
old-age pension, no widow’s pension, no deserted wives’ pension, no child endowment,
no supporting parent’s allowance. 42 That consideration makes the processes by
which children arrived in the Industrial School appear less a policy directed towards
breaking up those families whose poverty might be thought to constitute a drain and
a danger to the state, than a piecemeal practice of preserving life and health. Emily
Clark’s alarmist rhetoric derived from publications in England where the disreputable
poor could more seriously be regarded as a threat to the stability of a social
order prized by the middle class. It found little echo in public opinion in South
Australia. In any case, the Boarding-Out Society was not concerned with the prosecutions
which committed children to the Industrial School. Rather, it wished to
rescue those children from institutional living and secure for them satisfactory family
homes. Certainly the members of the Boarding-Out Society considered that only in
domestic environments could those children learn to become docile and competent
domestic servants, but their practice was also designed to augment the families of the
respectable working class.
Yet the very possibility of judging a household respectable or not, and the criteria
used in making the judgment, offer support to Daniels’s argument: that Spence’s
work with the Boarding- Out Society was an aspect of the extension of middle-class
domination of the domestic lives of the poor, and, since the quality of ‘the home’ was
held to be a woman’s responsibility, simultaneously the formation of a patriarchal
state apparatus for regulating the lives of at least some working-class women.
However, two other possibilities may complicate the story a little. One springs
from the Society’s vexation with Reed for disrupting the lives of households and
children in order to save government funding for the boarding-out subsidies. Their
annoyance undoubtedly expressed their frustration at the way such interference removed
their power as supervisors. But it may also have reflected a recognition that
the subsidies offered a real, if small, financial advantage to some households, so that
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