Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
bour movement once again demonstrated its support for the feminist cause in a
move which the historian, Helen Jones, has discovered recently. Taking advantage of
a clause added to the suffrage bill in committee, in an attempt to wreck it, unions
nominated both Spence and Mary Lee for selection as candidates for the election to
the House of Assembly in 1896. They both declined the honour. Mary Lee did not
want to be bound ‘by pledge or obligation to any party whatever’, and nor did Catherine
Spence whose effective voting campaign had established that fact publicly. 69
But how warmed Spence must have felt at such a signal mark of favour from the
people who stood most firmly for democracy in South Australia.
At the gathering in the Café de Paris, Spence observed: ‘When women receive the
right to vote then work would only just begin’. 70 She was not alone in recognising
that institutionalising formal political equality between women and men would
highlight rather than eliminate the continuing social subordination and economic
inequality of women. The boundary between the sphere of domestic and public
life might have shifted but it had not removed the boundary between the separate
spheres of women and men, nor the domination that the world of men enjoyed over
the world of women; that was, indeed still is, sustained by a widespread belief that
while the economic order may change, a society’s patriarchal social order is grounded
in immutable biological difference, and therefore may not alter. 71 A petition arguing
against female suffrage in 1894 had mustered 2,000 signatures asserting that women
are ‘not fitted by nature’ to vote. 72 The belief that women are similarly unfit for particular
kinds of work is still with us. 73 For the activists of the Women’s Movement in
South Australia in the decades on either side of the turn of the century, there seemed
to be three avenues for further action. One was to offer to women opportunities
to learn as much as their brothers had learned about events and procedures in the
public sphere, so that they could vote responsibly and independently. Another was
to form organisations which would promote solidarity among women and work for
change in matters which particularly concerned women. The third was to undertake
activities which, in themselves, would provide women with ways of learning independence
and self-determination. For the last 15 years of her life, Spence worked
strenuously for all three.
Initially the first appeared the most urgent. Women knew little and cared less
about public matters because, Spence explained, they ‘had been kept out of politics’.
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