Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Prophet of the effective vote
electoral districts bill. In the same year, debate over an electoral bill in New South
Wales prompted the Sydney Morning Herald to pronounce the Hare system the
only one capable of achieving really proportionate representation. In 1882 Spence’s
brother John, in debate in the Legislative Council on another electoral districts bill,
argued for making Adelaide a single electorate and asserted that interests attached
to people not places. In 1884 the British Proportional Representation Society was
formed to agitate for the introduction of proportional representation in the Representation
of the People Act. 30 Spence allowed these opportunities to pass, probably because
her work for the press and the Boarding Out Society kept her extremely busy,
and perhaps because she hoped that her brother, elected to the Legislative Council in
1881, would achieve more than she could, and possibly because she thought the current
state of politics in South Australia made the task either needless or fruitless. The
Acts amending electoral divisions revealed the power of entrenched interests: men
occupying the treasury benches were able, despite or perhaps because of, unequal
electoral divisions, to retain the constituencies that had elected them. 31
127
John Brodie Spence.
Image courtesy of the State Library of
South Australia SLSA:B22103/80.