Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Round woman in her round hole
Four years later she had abandoned both her own and Pearson’s remedies for
economic inequality to argue for the introduction of a single tax. She was cautiously
enthusiastic about Henry George’s proposal. It ‘first takes the startling shape of confiscation
of land’ she wrote, ‘then softens down to confiscation of rent; and finally
settles down to the drawing of all taxation from the land, and the land alone’. She
did not ‘anticipate such glorious results’ from this measure as George did, but she did
‘anticipate a greater amount of benefit than from any other reform in the world’. 36
Spence was to claim that she had pioneered the single tax movement in Australia in
the Victorian Review in 1881, but her claim does not hold. Progress and Poverty had
been serialized two years earlier in a Sydney newspaper, and George did not tour
Australia until 1890. The vociferous single tax movement in South Australia, which
developed out of the Anti-Poverty Society in the wake of George’s tour, had not noticed
her article, printed nine years earlier, in another colony. 37
By the time Spence visited the United States in 1893, her argument for greater
economic equity was broader, vaguer, and far more sweeping. Against the competition
and monopolies of a society dominated by the ‘plutocrat’ she asserted the
spirit of ‘the true Democrat’. She considered her attack, itself, the first step towards
reform. ‘The diagnosis of the disease’ she argued ‘is … an important part of the
physician’s work, and for the ailments of society it is necessary first to see how we
stand and then to endeavour to discover in what direction we should move’. The
direction she proposed was co-operation. In ‘social intercourse’ this meant ‘welcoming
a friend to such a dinner as we eat everyday, and as he eats everyday’, instead of
collecting ‘a number of people to whom we owe dinners, for something which is the
daily set-out of people three or four times richer than we are but which costs time,
money, and fatigue for us’. It substituted ‘evening receptions’ where husbands and
wives might meet each others’ friends, and where young men and women might
become acquainted, in place of the ‘one-sided … one-sexed’ social intercourse of
clubs and afternoon calls, and ‘courting … done no one knows exactly where’. In
industry, co-operation meant joint labour and enterprise for mutual benefit, instead
of competition. In politics it meant equitable representation and co-operation of ‘the
party of order and the party of progress’ for the benefit of the whole people. Such
recognition of mutual dependence and service should engender a sense of security
and create genuine democracy. The ‘true democratic spirit’, she contended,
is that of activity, yet also of repose. Not eager to rise, not fearful lest it
fall, it plants its foot firmly on the daily task. This sense of security is what
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