Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
Mill’s article showed Spence, she said, ‘how democratic government could be
made real, and safe, and progressive’. She saw in his account of Hare’s electoral system
a way of at once safeguarding the right of minorities like the religious minority
she had recently joined, and of preventing such bodies as the South Australian Political
Association (which, earlier called the ‘Working Man’s Association’, had campaigned
against continued immigration at public expense during the 1860 elections)
from returning a parliament like that in Victoria, which Spence considered to be a
bunch of incompetent demagogues. 11 Her perception electrified her:
I read Mill’s article one Monday night, and wrote what was meant for a
leader on Tuesday morning, and went to read it to my brother at breakfast
time, and posted it forthwith. 12
She sent it, as with so many other articles she had written under her brother’s name,
to the Argus, but the Argus, which had kept up an abusive editorial commentary on
the results of the 1859 elections in Victoria throughout August and September of
that year, nevertheless rejected her argument. They were, they told her, committed
to the representation of majorities. 13 Rebuffed, Spence fell silent on the issue for a
year or so.
In 1861, the South Australian press and parliament debated yet another electoral
act amendment bill, the fourth since the first Act was passed. During those debates,
Lavington Glyde MP offered the legislature a muddled exposition of Thomas Hare’s
scheme, without any success. 14 The Register discussed his proposals in a sub-leader,
acknowledging the justice of the scheme, but objecting to its effects. 15 The following
day, the paper printed a letter in which Spence supported the scheme, and a few days
later it carried another letter she had written refuting objections to Glyde’s proposals.
16 Once again, her arguments, and Glyde’s, encountered only rejection. The bill
to reorganise electoral districts and their numbers of representatives, a response to
population shifts and the small turn-out at the 1860 elections, did only what it was
designed to do. 17 However this time, Spence did not give up as easily as she had
before. At her brother John’s suggestion, she wrote a pamphlet urging the adoption
of Hare’s electoral system in South Australia. In preparing it she read Hare’s book,
probably for the first time.
Hare’s Treatise on the Election of Representatives was an expanded, reshaped version
of a pamphlet called The Machinery of Representation which he had published
after the 1857 general election in Britain. 18 It contained the detailed provisions of
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