Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

8
The New Woman of South Australia:
Grand Old Woman of Australia
The populism flourishing in South Australia in the early 1890s when Catherine
Spence first took to the colony’s platforms was but a brief and distant echo of
the populism that she encountered in the United States in 1893. 1 In this period there
were close and extensive links between populism and the multifarious activities and
organisations of the Women’s Movement that mushroomed throughout the capitalist
industrial, and industrialising, world in the late 19th century. 2 Spence encountered
a number of prominent representatives of the North American Women’s Movement
during that year.
In San Francisco she met ‘that celebrated journalist, poetess and economic writer,
Charlotte Perkins Stetson’. In 1893, the feminist thinker we now know as Charlotte
Perkins Gilman was not so much celebrated as struggling against unwanted
notoriety, because she had left her husband. 3 Jeanne Young, writing the last section
of Spence’s autobiography for her, accorded to Gilman a recognition which
she acquired somewhat later, but Gilman was already active in feminist circles. To
her, Spence owed ‘one of the best women’s meetings I ever addressed’. 4 In Chicago,
Spence was in the heartland of the North American women’s labour movement. In
1893, a time of severe economic depression in Chicago and elsewhere, members of
the Working Women’s Union, the Ladies’ Federal Union and the Illinois Women’s
Alliance all helped in organising and supporting a strike of 3,000 garment workers. 5
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