Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Eleanor Wren.
Image produced with kind
permission of Mrs Marjorie Caw,
1970.
Unbridling the tongues of women
notes’ which Catherine Spence had made as preparation
for her own writing, and Jeanne Young valiantly set about
the final eight chapters. All of the chapters were published
in the Register, week by week, beginning in the week that
she died. The completed book was published in December
1910. The Libraries Board of South Australia published a
facsimile edition in 1975, to mark International Women’s
Year. Excerpts from it were published in 1987 in Helen
Thomson’s edited collection of some of Catherine Spence’s
writings. It was published again, in full, in Ever Yours, CH
Spence in 2005 with helpful and informative annotations
by Barbara Wall.
Readers of the whole Autobiography will have no difficulty in distinguishing the
hand of Catherine Spence from that of Jeanne Young. Years after its first appearance,
novelist Miles Franklin was to write rudely of ‘that Young person’: ‘She doesn’t know
how to make paragraphs even’. Later still, historian Helen Jones remarked:
The sections on proportional representation, which dominate this part of
the book, are strong and studded with anecdotes. The remainder varies:
some parts are thin, lacking background … [She] ignores other causes,
episodes and people of importance.
Any comparison between Jeanne Young’s chapters and the richly-textured record that
Catherine Spence kept of her work and travels in 1894 could suggest that Jeanne
Young, too, may have found Catherine Spence’s atrocious handwriting difficult to
read – even if she had recognised any of the names of the politically progressive
people amongst whom Miss Spence won such affection and admiration.
That record of 1894 is a diary, the only one of Catherine Spence’s diaries ever to
have been recovered. It seems that Jeanne Young discarded all the others after she had
completed her book, Catherine Helen Spence: a study and an appreciation, in 1937.
It is possible that this diary escaped the same fate because it was especially detailed,
and that is probably because it concerns her travels. It begins when Miss Spence is
in the east of the United States, following her attendance at the Great World Fair
and Congresses held in Chicago from August to November 1893, and it records her
activities there, then in Scotland, England, Europe including Italy, and finally back
in Adelaide, just in time for the passage of the legislation giving South Australian
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