Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

The New Woman of South Australia: Grand Old Woman of Australia
democratic change that the Reform Movement generated had brought the Liberal
Kingston government to power in 1893, the political temper of the suffragists was
bound to find favour in government circles.
It had also enticed Catherine Spence into their ranks. Spence had not been involved
in the early mobilisation of the suffrage campaign. During 1887 she had been
entirely taken up with nursing her mother. Grief at her mother’s death, followed by
her sister Jessie’s, overshadowed 1888. In 1889, since her nephew Charles Wren and
his wife were to move into Mrs Spence’s house, she moved herself and Ellen Gregory
into the ‘little community’ that they set up with Rose Hood and her three children,
in a smaller house Spence owned in East Adelaide. 52 Spence might have hesitated to
join the suffrage struggle, even if she had not been so wholly occupied with loss and
disruption in her family and household. At the end of her life, she observed:
For myself, I considered electoral reform on the Hare system of more
value than the enfranchisement of women, and was not eager for the
doubling of the electors in number, especially as the new voters would
probably be more ignorant and apathetic than the old. I was accounted
a weak-kneed sister by those who worked primarily for woman suffrage,
although I was as much convinced as they were that I was entitled to a
vote, and hoped that I might be able to exercise it before I was too feeble
to hobble to the poll. 53
She may, too, have founded the strongly evangelical tenor of many of the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union’s arguments less than wholly congenial. The assumptions
lying behind those arguments was that women were not only in essence, entirely
different from men, but also better – higher-minded, less selfish and more
virtuous. Elizabeth Nicholls’s speaking manner, in consonance with her message,
was ‘inspirational’. Spence’s attitude to the question of difference between men and
women had taken shape from the doctrines of the church she had joined in her early
thirties. They were grounded in Enlightenment rationalism, which regarded the differences
between women and men as socially constructed, rather than being innate
or ‘natural’. 54
Nevertheless, the suffrage campaign’s growing strength proved irresistible. She
attended a meeting of the Women’s Suffrage League for the first time in 1891. The
suffragists must have been pleased to have won such a prize; they invited her to preside
over the meeting. 55 By May of that year she had agreed to become one of the
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