Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Prophet of the effective vote
Glynn, a liberal conservative, Elizabeth Nicholls, president of the local Women’s
Christian Temperance Union and former suffragist, and T. H. Webb, president of
the Free-Trade and Liberal Association. 86 However while effective voting enjoyed
support from the whole range of the party-political spectrum, it found committed
support from nowhere. When yet another bill for proportional representation was
brought into the South Australian parliament in 1905, by a Labour man, even Tom
Price slid out from under. He was, by then, leading the first Lib-Lab coalition to have
achieved government in South Australia; members of his own party opposed the
measure: his Liberal-Country Party deputy disliked it so much that he had written
a pamphlet against it. A Labour member repeated an argument he had been using
for at least five years: ‘The method proposed was too philosophic for the everyday
requirements of ordinary people’. 87 It is difficult to understand. Nevertheless, Spence
was probably right when she observed at her 80 th birthday party: ‘If the measure
promised any decided advantage to any party, that party would take it up and work
for it, but it has the advantage of being perfectly equitable. “Too damned fair,” I have
heard it called by the profane’. 88 Moreover, her claim that it would enable labour and
capital to co-operate was, by then, easy to counter. The uneasy coalition government
of 1905-10 in South Australia was achieving that co-operation without it.
Catherine Spence’s campaign for effective voting may not have won committed
support from South Australian political parties, forming and jostling for parliamentary
representation, in the decades on either side of the turn of the century. However
she made for it a distinct place in the Reform Movement of the 1890s, contributing
importantly to the Utopian visions which linked those disparate groups into a social
movement, inviting belief in a radically different future, and offering inspiration to
the labour movement. Moreover, Spence’s appearance on public platforms to plead
her cause, face to face with anyone who came to hear her, must have done more than
any argument she could present to convince people that the social order was really
changing.
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