Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Edging out of the domestic sphere
could not touch it until they retired. Spence reiterated approval for such a scheme
when she addressed the second Australasian Conference on Charity in 1892. 52 She
considered, too, Sidney Webb’s neo-Malthusian observations about the necessity of
altering ‘the economic incidence of child bearing’, by ‘deliberate volition in the regulation
of the married state’ as a means of reducing the number of the destitute, though
her fragmentary note did not say whether she considered such a proposal either possible
or desirable. 53 In 1906, she wrote a pamphlet on The Elberfeld System on Charity
which she endorsed because its ‘measures for the destitute are preventive rather than
curative’. 54 This system, implemented in a textile town in Germany and copied by
such philanthropic interventionists as Octavia Hill in London, recruited a number of
middle-class men in a municipality or housing settlement to be ‘fathers’ to some four
families whom seasonal casual employment had reduced to appealing for poor relief.
The ‘father’ was supposed, through intimate and personal supervision, to exert a morally
uplifting influence on each family, and to provide practical help in the search for
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Caroline Emily Clark.
Image courtesy of the State Library
of South Australia SLSA: B47543