Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
Her appointment to the paper invited her to contribute not only literary but also
‘social’ articles. ‘Leading articles’, she remembered, ‘were to be written at my own
risk. If they suited the policy of the paper they would be accepted, otherwise not’. 18
Spence ‘felt as if the round woman had got at last into the round hole which
fitted her’. 19 She was employed in the public sphere, in a world occupied exclusively
by men. She was at last earning her own living. Her articles for the Register were not
the first to bring her payment – she had earned £12 from the Cornhill Magazine,
£10 from Wilson, and £8.15s. from Fraser’s Magazine – but now, for the first time
in her life, she was her own independent breadwinner. By the 1880s she considered
that she was bringing in ‘a very decent income’ with her pen. ‘I don’t think the said
income was ever more than £300 a year’, observed Lucy Morice, ‘and generally less’.
But it meant independence. And she had access to an established public forum –
the colony’s oldest newspaper. She rejoiced in ‘the breadth of the canvas’ on which
she could draw her ‘sketches of books and life’. 20 She had had to wait a long time
for such a break in the solidity of the patriarchal order of her society; she was in
her 53rd year. It was possible, undoubtedly, only because her appointment did not
require her presence among the men in the offices and around the press in Grenfell
Street. Spence’s appointment was as a regular ‘outside’ contributor. That meant that
she worked at home, but it meant, as well, that while she was working in her ‘little
study’ with her books, pigeon holes, and her mother knitting in the rocking chair
by the low window, she was reaching out into the world beyond the domestic sphere
that she inhabited. 21 She had made a real breach in the barrier dividing the domestic
and public spheres.
Spence did more, too with her journalism. Her articles
ranged widely, treating matters such as land legislation,
wages, agricultural machinery, quite as much as
questions about marriage, domestic labour and forms of
hospitality. Simply by writing about them, she was asserting
women’s right to hold views about the concerns of the
public sphere, and to have those views heard. Likewise,
she was claiming, in the public sphere, the propriety of
attention to the concerns of the domestic. Just as her decision
not to marry evinces a resolution to encounter the
whole world directly, not only part of it, so her journalism
shows her regarding the whole world with two eyes, not
110
Bay window in the house in
Trinity Street, College Park,
where Catherine Helen Spence
lived and wrote.
Photograph by Susan Magarey.