Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
She knew well how deeply embedded in custom and lore were the conventions
she flouted. As she reflected, at the end of her life:
law and custom have put a bridle on the tongue of women, and of the innumerable
proverbs relating to the sex, the most cynical are those relating
to her use of language. Her only qualification for public speaking in old
days was that she could scold, and our ancestors imposed a salutary check
on this by the ducking stool in public, and sticks no thicker than the
thumb for marital correction in private. The writer of Proverbs alludes to
the perpetual dropping of a woman’s tongue as an intolerable nuisance,
and declares that it is better to live on the house-top than with a brawling
woman in a wide house.
Against such an armory, we might marvel that she, or any other woman in that period,
dared open her mouth, even within her own household. However Spence went
on to note:
A later writer, describing the virtuous woman, said that on her lips is
the law of kindness, and after all this is the real feminine characteristic.
As daughter, sister, wife, and mother – what does the world not owe
to the gracious words, the loving counsels, the ready sympathy which
she expresses? Until recent years, however, these feminine gifts have been
strictly kept for home consumption …1 By the early 1890s she had resolved that those gifts, the product of a specifically
feminine education, should be taken into the heartland of public life – the electoral
platform. For however much Spence may have believed that women had a specifically
woman’s contribution to make to public life, she had also believed for most of
her life that women could speak on behalf of all people quite as well as men could.
The cause which propelled her into the glare of the public sphere was, characteristically,
not one automatically associated with anything particularly feminine or
feminist. At her 80 th birthday party, she proclaimed: ‘Injustice in England is not rectified
by injustice in South Australia, nor does injustice in Alexandria rectify injustice
in Torrens. Injustice rectifies nothing. It is an evil everywhere and always’. She was
not talking about votes for women. She went on: ‘I who speak here tell you that Proportional
Representation is the hope of the world’. 2 In that powerful, but peculiar
assertion she expressed her life’s major conviction and mission. Reform of electoral
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