Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
Hartley was made the Council’s permanent, salaried president, so that the regulations
were very largely his work. In 1878 parliament passed another Education Act
which, while it reorganised the central administration and its relations with the
government, did not materially alter the provisions of the 1875 Act. 24 Hartley, with
the new title of Inspector-General, remained in executive control of the colony’s
public education. As chairman of the Board in 1874, he drew criticism for his attempts
to make the education system more efficient. As president of the Council,
which controlled courses of instruction and standards of education within schools,
appointments, removals, examinations, certification and salaries of teachers, he was
widely and emphatically criticised as authoritarian and centralist. 25 After reading
a particularly violent attack on him in the press, Spence was so distressed that she
could not sleep. She did not, then, know him personally, but that did not stop her:
at one o’clock in the morning she got out of bed and wrote to him offering her
sympathy and support. 26 Hartley responded, and their subsequent friendship led
to Spence’s active involvement in South Australia’s public education. It led, too, to
her first official appointment to a public office, to a recognised place in the public
world of men.
The Education Act of 1875 made elementary education compulsory, and provided
for appointment of local boards of advice to supervise school attendances and
to inform the Council of local requirements. 27 Implementation was slow, but in
November 1877, Spence wrote triumphantly to C. H. Pearson, a professor of history
who had emigrated from London to South Australia, and had then gone on to
Melbourne to lecture at the university and, as headmaster, to rule over the Presbyterian
Ladies College. 28 ‘I am a member of the Board of Advice for the School District
of East Torrens’, she boasted, ‘and I hope in time to have a seat on the Council of
Education itself’. 29 She had every reason to be proud. She was the first woman in
South Australia to gain such a public appointment. 30 However, while she announced
this at the beginning of a chapter in her autobiography, she made less, there, of this
achievement than of her work with the Boarding-Out Society and, subsequently,
with the Register. Perhaps she saw her work for a local school board, rightly, as less
central to the development of a state instrumentality than the work she was engaged
in with Emily Clark. Perhaps she was to see it, again rightly, as making far less of
an inroad into the public sphere than her work for the Register would carve. But it
is most likely that she learned to dislike the work that her membership of the East
Torrens School Board involved.
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