Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Prophet of the effective vote
Spence did not simply spring fully-fledged on to public platforms to urge the
preoccupations of her youth the moment opportunity offered. Her preparedness
to risk taking a stand on the hustings had developed, like the cause that she took
with her, over several decades. It began 25 years earlier; after Howard Clark had so
bungled his delivery of the lecture she had written for the South Australian Institute,
Spence said, ‘I mentally resolved that if I was again asked I should offer to read my
own MS’. 47 That opportunity arose five years later with the Institute’s request for
two lectures on the Brownings. As the occasion approached, Spence was clearly very
nervous. She arranged for a young lawyer friend to raise his hand if he could not
hear, and, as she took her place to read the first lecture, she felt, she recalled, ‘as if my
knees were giving way’. 48 As might have been expected, nobody guessed that she was
nervous, and her lawyer friend (later Chief Justice Samuel Way) had no occasion to
indicate that he could not hear her. Spence undertook to read her own lecture, she
told the Institute’s audience, because she wanted ‘to make [it] easier henceforward
for any woman who felt she had something to say to stand up and say it’. 49
It was undoubtedly her success with the Institute which generated the Unitarians’
willingness to hear her preach her own sermons. That experience, and her participation
in Adelaide’s governmental committee rooms, led her to the platform at the
Australasian Charities Conference in Melbourne in 1891. She read her own paper to
that conference. Women had been reading their own papers to such gatherings as the
annual congresses of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science in
Britain since the early 1860s, but women in similar circles in Australia had been slow
to follow suit. At the Melbourne Charities Conference, Vida Goldstein’s father read
the paper that his wife had written. 50 The charitable in Melbourne seem to have been
impressed with Spence: Dr Charles Strong, a former Presbyterian minister, founder of
the ‘Australian Church’, invited her to speak to his Workingmen’s Club. 51 She cannot
have had much time for preparation, but for the purpose she resorted to her life-long
preoccupation. She spoke to the workers that Strong assembled about proportional
representation, building on the demand, current in the Victorian working-class, for
‘one man, one vote’, her own demand for ‘one vote, one value’. 52 Spence was launched:
she had spoken on the thoroughly unwomanly subject of electoral methods, in the
equally unfeminine environment of a workingmen’s club where she could expect far
less protection than in the South Australian Institute or the Unitarian pulpit. She
must have gone home to Adelaide feeling not only jubilant, but restless. The political
temper there, no less than in Melbourne, offered her cause unparalleled opportunity.
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