Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Round woman in her round hole
fied me by that comprehension of my meaning – that laying of the finger
on the right spot – which is more precious than praise, and forthwith he
went to lay The Melbourne Review in the drawer he assigns to any writing
that gives him pleasure. 52
A series of four articles that Spence wrote for the Register so impressed Finlayson that
he had them reprinted as a pamphlet called Some Social Aspects of South Australian
Life. H. G. Turner reviewed it in the Melbourne Review, praising ‘its clear simplicity
of statement, its picturesque homeliness, and its direct applicability to ourselves and
our surroundings’, and proclaiming it an ‘excellent contribution to the social history
of colonial life’. 53 Those articles contained many assertions of the desirability of
greater equality of the sexes, and a suggestion that women might be given the vote,
so that praise from the man who wrote a verse dialogue mocking women’s suffrage 54
suggests that her contemporaries found her pen persuasive.
Spence considered newspapers and journals to be the principal means available,
in her time, of expressing public opinion, commenting on public affairs, and
urging new measures upon the community. ‘The newspaper’ she told South Australian
school children, ‘partly leads and partly follows public opinion’, a responsibility
properly fulfilled only by ‘the wisest and best people whom the common folk can
understand’. 55 She was not merely making a recommendation. Her admiration for
Howard Clark must have reinforced her view; she considered that Andrew Garran
had enriched Australia’s intellectual life with his work for the Adelaide and Sydney
press; 56 and she prized her own access to the columns of the Register as a means of
influencing the community. In her religious allegory she presented her pilgrim as the
‘commander-in-chief’ of the reformers in the City of Vanity Fair, because he could
urge not one but a variety of reforms upon the whole city, in the articles he wrote
for ‘the broadsheets that come out day by day in thousands’. 57 In her autobiography
she remarked, ‘When I recall the causes I furthered, and which in some instances
I started, I feel inclined to magnify the office of the anonymous contributor to the
daily press’. 58
Her experience largely justified her claim. Her major concerns, electoral reform,
destitute children, education and the position of women, were all assisted by the
influence she exerted as a contributor to the press. Her later fame and prominence
were advanced by the press, and her social and literary articles probably contributed
to the climate of opinion in which she won that fame. A memorialist was even pre-
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