Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Edging out of the domestic sphere
In 1905, Spence told the National Council of Women that:
My work on the State Children’s Council I look on not as benevolence,
but as justice … Sympathy transfers this keen sense of your own personal
rights to the rights of other people. Without sympathy says Herbert
Spencer there can be no justice. 60
Spence’s sense of personal rights was predominantly bound up with her life-long
struggle, as a woman, to earn a living and win recognition in a world that was the
almost-exclusive preserve of men. Such a struggle may not have led her to identify
with the impoverished, or even the prosperous of the working class. But it did not
lead her to identify with their oppressors either. In 1907 she told a ‘State Children’
Convention held in Adelaide that ‘above all things… [the visitors] must love the
children. There was a terrible objection nowadays to kissing, on the ground that it
was unsanitary. Every child she visited, except the big boys, she kissed, because she
wanted them to feel that they were of the same flesh and blood, and that she loved
them’. 61
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