Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
The pamphlet ‘did not set the Torrens on fire’. 24 It might have attracted more
attention had she lived further east: the Argus discussed Mill and Hare on the representation
of minorities in 1861, and in 1862 a proportional representation bill was
passed by both houses of parliament in New South Wales, but was not implemented
because the government resigned. 25 However colonists in South Australia saw no
need to seek moral and intellectual elevation by changing the electoral law. With the
ballot inhibiting electoral bribery they may not have considered such elevation wanting.
Nor did they find it necessary to take special measures to secure electoral equality.
Districts based, more or less, on population, and multiple electorates, already
provided a semblance of equality. Moreover, they seemed safe from any tyranny by a
majority. Even in the Assembly returned after the Political Association’s efforts, there
was no consistent majority. 26
Emily Clark sent copies of Spence’s pamphlet to the English relatives and to
Henry Parkes asking him to give it to J. S. Mill. The English relatives and their
friends responded: Spence received compliments from Hare, Mill, Rowland Hill
and Professor Craik, and they welcomed her when she visited London in 1865.
Describing her visit to England she boasted, ‘It was the little pamphlet rather than
the novels that procured me introductions into the best society, or what I call the
best, the most intelligent in London’. 27 That included both Thomas Hare and John
Stuart Mill. The friendship extended to her by Hare and his family added personal
loyalty to her enthusiasm for proportional representation. Hare’s concurrence with
her insistence that proportional representation made manhood suffrage both safe
and desirable allowed her to boast: ‘I took this reform more boldly that Mr Mill …
I was prepared to trust the people’. 28 Mill’s courteous interest in what she could tell
him about South Australia, and his earnest advocacy of women’s suffrage, in their
one conversation, suggests that he was impressed with Spence more for her potential
value in the struggle for the rights of women than with her urgency for proportional
representation. 29 Spence was not, she maintained, to be distracted. Perhaps she was
more so than she was prepared to acknowledge later in her life; she did little more
for her cause for over a quarter of a century.
She did not lack occasion. In 1871, Glyde, as a member of a select committee on
electoral districts, again raised the question of proportional representation of minorities.
In 1872 a bill proposing proportional representation with the single transferable
vote was introduced in the House of Commons. In 1880 one of the members for
Burra made a plea for the Hare system of representation during debates on another
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