Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
Much of that activity emanated from Hull House which Jane Addams and Ellen
Starr had founded in 1889 on the model of Toynbee Hall in the east end of London.
It was intended to provide occupation for the earliest generation of female college
graduates in the United States by inviting them to live among the poor and labouring
classes, participating in their daily lives and industrial struggles. Through her
work at Hull House, Jane Addams became known as the founder of modern American
settlement work, and the centre of the people who would come to be labelled
‘the social feminists’; women who were also active in labour and socialist struggles
referred to them as ‘the allies’. 6 Spence visited Hull House and developed considerable
admiration for Jane Addams’s work. 7 At the World Fair in Chicago, she may
not have been aware of the links being forged between Hull House and the garment
workers’ struggle, but there she met Susan B. Anthony, five years older than she was,
and by that time president of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association. 8
I have not found any evidence to support Spence’s claim that she converted Susan B.
Anthony to effective voting. 9 Anthony was an extremely single-minded campaigner
for women’s suffrage. 10 As had John Stuart Mill nearly 30 years earlier, she may well
have considered that Spence’s energies would be more fruitfully focussed in the suffrage
struggle, a struggle which was increasingly preoccupying all of the groups and
individuals of the Women’s Movement.
Further east, Spence met Harriet Tubman, who was, wrote Jeanne Young, ‘called
the “Moses of her people” – an old black woman who could neither read nor write,
but who had escaped from slavery when young, and had made 19 journeys south
and had been instrumental in the escape of 300 slaves’. 11 Those journeys and escapes,
‘the Underground Railroad’, together with her stand on the rights and dignities of
black women, made Tubman the heroine of a convention assembled in Washington
three years later to form the National Association of Coloured Women. 12 North
America clearly challenged some of Spence’s assumptions about race. In Boston she
spent three weeks staying with the family of William Lloyd Garrison, son of the famous
crusader for the abolition of slavery, and there she began ‘to be a little ashamed
of being so narrow in my views of the coloured question’. She admired Tubman,
whose ‘shanty was a refuge for the sick, blind and maimed of her own people’, 13 but
she seems not to have thought of bringing her broadened views to any consideration
of racial dispossession and exploitation at home in South Australia.
In New England, Spence spent time with a woman factory inspector, with a
woman pastor in the Unitarian Church (Anna Garlin Spencer), 14 with the president
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