Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
She spent almost a year in the United States, and her reception there eclipsed
her success at home. 74 She cast a wide net, speaking on a host of topics in a variety
of places. Her chief object was to persuade America to adopt proportional representation,
but the Americans elicited from her a much greater range of performances,
not least in Unitarian pulpits. She complained to her brother, ‘One drawback to
these pulpit ministrations with regard to the Cause is that people are more interested
in the Children of the State than in Effective Voting which would benefit the
reformers of old abuses’. 75 She lectured on effective voting all over the country, and
to enough paying audiences to begin supporting herself on the proceeds. 76 By the
time she left in 1894 she had a gratifying list of achievements. In San Francisco she
claimed that she helped Cridge persuade the Pacific Coast Council of the Trades and
Labour Federation ‘to become actively interested in political questions’, and she induced
the Council to pass a resolution in favour of effective voting. The Proportional
Representation Congress she addressed founded the American Proportional Representation
League which agitated for several forms of the system. The League issued
a quarterly Review for three years after it was founded, then again from 1901-13.
During its last 12 years it was edited by Robert Tyson, a Canadian. Spence claimed
to have converted Tyson to the cause when she paid a visit to Toronto, so she could
regard the regular issues of the Review as the result of her influence. She made a considerable,
if delayed, impact on Toronto. Seven years later the Women’s Canadian
Historical Society opened a campaign for proportional representation with a lecture
on ‘Effective Voting: Its History as Developed by an Australian Woman’. She could
also claim to have influenced the growing female suffrage movement in the United
States. In Chicago, she said, she converted Susan B. Anthony, veteran of the suffrage
movement, to her cause. 77
However her principal achievement was her personal success as a speaker. This
gave her great satisfaction. She boasted to her brother, ‘I posted for Australia a number
of copies of the Boston Transcript with an Editorial on Miss Spence’s Crusade –
written after … the Editor had heard me speak extempore to the Nationalist Club at
Charlesgate the most swell hotel in Boston’. Later she added ‘I am really a Personage
in America out of New York at least’. 78
In April 1894, she left by steamer for Glasgow. In Britain she spoke only to the
converted, and their more sceptical friends, at a special meeting called by Hare’s
daughter and members of the inactive Proportional Representation Society. In London,
when avoiding being run over by a bus, she fell over and dislocated her right
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