Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
employment for those family members willing to work. He also had thoroughly paternalist
punitive powers; it needed only his report to condemn the idle, the gambler
or the drunkard to a term of imprisonment with hard labour. Octavia Hill translated
the ‘fathers’ into Lady rent collectors; Spence turned them into gender-neutral ‘Helpers’.
55 It was her support for the idea of the Elberfeld system which provided Daniels
with the key point in her analysis of Spence’s voluntary welfare work as assisting the
extension of middle-class interference in the lives of the working class. 56
Yet the other main point in Daniels’s argument maintains that the attitudes
which Spence expressed in such work derived from her identification with Adelaide’s
urban intelligentsia. This is less easily sustained. Her later refusal to align
herself, as Daniels notes, with the political parties of either capital or labour, and
her advocacy of political rights for minorities, certainly may have taken colouring
from her membership of the educated Unitarian congregation. Unitarians were well
represented in her initial venture into welfare work: four of the eleven members of
the first Boarding-Out Society committee were members of that church, and ten
of the Society’s first 18 subscribers were connected with it. 57 But by the 1880s and
1890s, Spence’s views had already moved away from those of at least some of the
members of her church. It seems quite as likely, if not more so, that Spence’s concern
with minority interests was, during the last decades of her life, an expression of her
identification with a minority interest to which she had belonged all her days. Her
concern with compulsory providence can be seen as a response to the needs of aged
married women who had spent their lives being economically dependent on wageearning
husbands. Her endorsement of the Elberfeld system focused not so much
on its interventionary aspects as on the criticism for which her account of Elberfeld
serves as introduction: of the South Australian government’s meanness with the rations
provided as out-relief, of its policy of refusing rations to the families of men out
of work, and of the problems that women in paid work faced in supporting families.
Her work with the Boarding-Out Society and the State Children’s Council was intended
to provide strong cohesive bonds, as she explained, between ‘the unfortunate
members of the working-class’ and ‘the comparatively prosperous of that class’. 58 She
was hostile to the idea of boarding out children from Magill with wealthy families,
and she considered it worthy of not only notice, but approval, that in the boarding
out ‘movement’, ‘the rich and the great of the colony have taken a very subordinate
place’. In both cases it was the solidarity, cohesiveness and mutual responsibility of
sections of the working class that she saw at stake. 59
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