Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Edging out of the domestic sphere
Reed’s policy inhibited even the tiny measure of re-distributing the colony’s wealth
which the government allowances for boarding-out children could have constituted.
It is possible, too, that they saw the boarding-out subsidy as financial assistance given
specifically to the women responsible for those households. I have not found any
evidence to support such a suggestion, but both possibilities are at least consistent
with Spence’s eagerness to claim that the Society’s supervision seldom led to reports
that were derogatory about the households where children were boarded out.
The other possible complication arises from the same source. Clark’s and Spence’s
annoyance with Reed clearly reflected indignation at bureaucratic action denigrating
the importance of the society’s work: at a man undervaluing a group of
women working on his own patch of the public sphere. Clark and Spence wanted
acknowledgment of the kind that they saw Clark’s cousins, Frances Power Cobbe,
Louisa Twining, Mrs Nassau Senior, Octavia Hill – to name only a few – gaining for
similar work in England. 43 In this they were successful.
The Society’s work achieved for it, eventually, inclusion among the government’s
instrumentalities. A parliamentary commission, appointed to examine the operation
of legislation concerning the destitute, passed in 1881, and to investigate allegations
of mistreatment and proselytising in the state’s reformatories, found the evidence
that Emily Clark and Catherine Spence submitted to it impressive. The Commission’s
report, made in 1885, recommended that a council be appointed to take over
those functions of the Destitute Board that were concerned with children, and the
functions of the Boarding-Out Society. It also recommended specifically that members
of the council include Miss Clark and Miss Spence. If such recognition was a
goal in the sub-script of Clark’s and Spence’s endeavours, then their appointments
were a triumph. The State Children’s Council, gazetted in December 1887, had 11
members, seven of them women, among them Miss Spence and Miss Clark. 44 Its
first president was Edward Charles Stirling, a young man Spence had known well
during his boyhood in South Australia, recently returned to the colony with a string
of degrees from Cambridge, and by then teaching physiology at the new University
of Adelaide. 45 But Stirling did not remain on the Council for long: throughout 1888
the voluntary Council quarrelled with the government’s chief secretary; it resigned
in a body in January 1889; and, when after Spence recalled, ‘great searchings of
heart’, its members resumed their voluntary offices, Stirling and one other member,
refused reappointment. 46 The Council met monthly to direct the work of its
small government-appointed paid staff, whom Spence considered grossly underpaid.
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