Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

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Round woman in her round hole
‘Y
ou may try, but you can never imagine, what it is to have a man’s force of
genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl’. This cry of anguish
blazes from the pages of George Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda. Spence quoted it in
an article on Eliot’s life and works; she paused at several points which suggest parallels
with her own life, observing that the sentiment best expressed the condition
Mary Ann Evans experienced in her youth. Since Spence considered ‘the province
of genius’ to be not so much superlative creativeness, but rather ‘to call forth a responsive
spark from the souls with which it is in communion’, Deronda’s mother’s
outburst could stand as her own. 1 For 30 years, Spence defied social convention to
work as a journalist, but she did so without acknowledgement, recognition, or even
much in the way of financial return.
The patriarchal social order which so constrained her attempt to maintain her
independence – to become her own breadwinner, while retaining freedom from the
double subjection of women of the working class – made a ‘lady journalist’ a contradiction
in terms. Margaret Stevenson, wife of one of the Register’s earlier directors,
might have contributed not only poems but also political articles to that paper;
Spence might have had occasional pieces printed in her brother-in-law’s South Australian;
but both sheltered behind initials and pen-names. 2 The daily and bi-weekly
press required news-hounds, and that was deemed an occupation unsuited to a lady.
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