Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Prophet of the effective vote
injustice had been, she wrote later, ‘the foremost object of my life’. 3 Spence was 66
when she first mounted a platform to explain to South Australians why they should
demand the introduction of proportional representation. She was 67 when she set
out for the United States to teach North Americans how to vote, but ‘this subject is
not with me one of to-day or of yesterday’ she told a meeting in London in 1894. 4
She dated her interest in electoral methods from her childhood in Scotland,
where her mother urged the benefits of the Reform Act of 1832 in the local press. 5
That concern had developed during her early years in South Australia, when the
municipal council which employed her father was elected by quota representation.
The provision had been introduced into the legislation by Rowland Hill, copying
the system that his father had devised for electing committees in his school in Tottenham,
6 so Spence’s acquaintance first with Emily Clark, subsequently with Clark’s
uncles and cousins in England, undoubtedly reinforced her interest. The Adelaide
Municipal Council did not use Hill’s electoral system again; the South Australian
declared it a ‘novel but very absurd principle’, 7 and, for once, most of the colonists
must have agreed with the paper’s judgment. When Spence sustained a thoroughly
anti-labour, anti-urban argument in favour of the principle throughout those and
subsequent early electoral campaigns, her arguments found no favour anywhere. 8
She may have shifted her allegiances a little after she had joined the Unitarians and
encountered doctrines less elitist than those of the Shorter Catechism, but the chief
factor in changing the way in which she regarded manhood suffrage came from her
wide reading. In 1859, she read J. S. Mill’s review, ‘Recent Writers on Reform’, in
Fraser’s Magazine, and that gave her, she wrote later, her ‘strongest political inspiration’.
9
Mill was considering three books about parliamentary reform in England. The
third was Thomas Hare’s A Treatise on the Election of Representatives, Parliamentary
and Municipal, which Mill acclaimed as ‘the most important work ever written on
the practical part of the Subject’. By developing ‘what is commonly called the Representation
of Minorities’, wrote Mill, Hare showed opponents of ‘purely democratic
suffrage’ how they could accord to ‘the most numerous class, that of the manual
labourers’, the majority representation which justice to their numbers demanded,
without conceding total representation. Hare’s electoral scheme ensured that minorities
would retain a representative voice in the legislature. It would also, Mill
considered, ‘prodigiously improve the personnel of the national representative’: ‘An
assembly thus chosen would contain the elite of the nation’. 10
123