Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Prophet of the effective vote
upon my soul that in the co-operative spirit and the co-operative method applied to
politics instead of the competitive, we may find deliverance from many evils that are
eating into the heart and lessening the happiness of humanity’. 57
Yet for all its appearance of moderation and eclecticism, effective voting would
ensure to each of the major political opponents accurate representation of its relative
strength. That meant, automatically, greater representation for labour. Co-operation
was a cry likely to win her support from all but out-and-out reactionaries. One
of her first invitations to speak publicly in Adelaide came from the Adelaide Cooperative
Society, a body of share-holders in a non-political, moderately profitable
venture in co-operative farming. 58 Spence insisted on her independence from any
political group or party, but her appeal for co-operation was made, not on behalf
of moderate conservatives, but in the spirit of the Reform Movement. She had already
demonstrated her support for Henry George’s single tax, and her readiness at
least to domesticate ideas like Bellamy’s. Her belief in the elevated social and moral
order which effective voting would bring was identical with the Utopianism of the
reformers. The Reform Movement made her cause part of their own, supplied her
most vocal supporters, and publicised her activities. In June 1893, papers on ‘Effective
Voting’ and ‘New Australia’ were read from the same platform. 59 As late as April
1896, Elsie Birks was writing to a friend about ‘ “Professor” Gilmour’ and his lecture
on effective voting in Renmark. ‘Does not Miss Spence speak well and clearly’, she
exclaimed, ‘she is indeed a wonderful woman’. 60
Spence made no original contribution to ways of calculating the quota for proportional
representation, that is the smallest number of votes necessary to elect a
candidate. In 1861 she described only Hare’s quota, calculated by dividing the number
of formal votes to be cast by the number of seats to be filled. But by 1892 she
had adopted ‘Sir John Lubbock’s mathematical quota’, devised in 1868 by H. R.
Droop and adopted by Lubbock, a leading member of the British Proportional Representation
Society. 61 The Droop quota, calculated by dividing the total formal votes
cast by the number of seats to be filled plus one, and adding one to the quotient,
was supposed to prevent parties achieving majority returns, where the Hare quota
only hampered such a result. 62 In 1893, Spence decided, mistakenly, that the Droop
quota left even more of the votes unused, and returned to the simple Hare quota. It
was, in any case, easier to understand: ‘popular audiences prefer the simple quota of
Thomas Hare’s’, she noted a year later. 63
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