Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

The New Woman of South Australia: Grand Old Woman of Australia
of the New England Women’s Club, and with a number of women writers. 15 Even if
she had not been sympathetic to its concerns, she could not have avoided being impressed
with the strength and variety of the Women’s Movement in North America.
Catherine Spence was, though, far from unsympathetic. She had, like Charlotte
Perkins Gilman (who was more than a generation younger), deliberately chosen
to try to make her living independently, and was therefore familiar with anxieties
about where the next week’s housekeeping expenses were to come from. She had responded
to such worries with a passionate and carefully reasoned outburst against a
gender-divided labour market in her third novel, Mr Hogarth’s Will. She had lived at
the centre of a predominantly female household, bringing up children and forming
strong views – views to be found more widely spread in the kindergarten movement
towards the end of the 19 th century than among the shapers of educational policy
in South Australia in the 1870s – about ways of cultivating independence of mind
and self-reliance in children. She had, like Barbara Leigh Smith and her friends in
England, argued for and given warm support to the development of advanced education
for young women. For some years, by 1893, she had been trespassing out of
the domestic sphere of hearth and home, not only into the realm of voluntary welfare
work, like that of the South Australian Boarding-Out Society or like Rosamond
Davenport Hill’s with the London School Board or Jane Addams’s work at Hull
House. She had cautiously built herself a firm and favourable reputation as a writer
for the daily press, and had more recently achieved fame as a persuasive speaker in
the public sphere.
Moreover, Spence was ready to help other women achieve similar goals. Charlotte
Perkins Gilman remembered, more than thirty years later, a ‘strong, liberalminded
woman, Miss Catherine Spence of Scotland [sic]’, who took Gilman’s first
published book with her to England. There Spence left the volume of satirical verses
with a publisher who later brought out the edition which founded Gilman’s transatlantic
reputation. 16 Campaigners like Susan B. Anthony were bound to meet Catherine
Spence with delight, for not only could she tell of having met such pioneers of
suffrage campaigns in England as Barbara Leigh Smith, Rosamond Davenport Hill
and Frances Power Cobbe, but she could also boast of an active Women’s Movement
in South Australia, proclaim her own credentials as vice-president of the South Australian
Women’s Suffrage League, and bring tidings of an optimistic struggle there
for the vote. She gave ‘fourteen paid lectures chiefly for Women’s Clubs’ during her
time in North America, speaking on ‘Equal Suffrage mostly’, 17 and found when she
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