Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
ought to be the habitual frame of mind of the true Democrat in a really
Democratic Society. 38
Just as arguing for greater economic equity could lead Spence to consider modes
of hospitality, so her discussion of the development of machinery led her through
George Howell’s arguments about unemployment, J. C. Morison’s nostalgic advocacy
of the abolition of machinery, and Alfred Marshall’s defence of increasing production,
to a stinging attack on funds ‘squandered on armaments’ and a wholesale
condemnation of war. 39 It also led her to expect greater value, and higher pay, to be
accorded to domestic servants as their numbers dwindled under the impact of ‘the
good pay and the comparative independence of factory life’. 40 However she did not
depict industrialization as a wholly unmixed blessing: ‘this steady wave of advance
had ebbs and flows. Things which should move simultaneously precede or lag behind
each other’. The object of her criticism was the sewing-machine, ‘born of the urgent
needs of the American housewife’, but ‘invented before the middle-class woman was
prepared for the leisure she might gain from it for better and wiser ends’. Sounding
a note which reverberated in the rational dress campaign, Spence observed:
when watching the yards, we may say miles, of flouncing, kilting, ruching,
puffing, and piping – the cutting up of stuff into smaller portions in
order to stick it on again … the covering of costly stuff with more costly
trimming – one feels for the moment really sorry that the irresponsible
machine should lend itself so fatally to the vagaries of fashion. 41
Her argument was clear: it was not technology itself which was at fault, but the purposes
to which technology might be harnessed.
Commercialisation of production for household consumption, running parallel
with industrialization, had led, she considered, to ‘English society … getting
filled up with idle gentlewomen for whom there is no work and no room’. That was
destructive. ‘Life all amusement is more intolerable than life all labour’. However,
she did not use such an argument to urge a return to any romanticised golden age;
rather, it was an explanation for ‘the widespread movement which is going on all
over the world for the admission of women to new fields of labour’. Even in South
Australia, she observed, ‘we see this band turning in the direction of education – for
one male teacher that offers there are three or four females’. Spence saw that movement
as having a greater variety of causes than technology and commerce, and she
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