Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
van. She was sixty-nine when she undertook this journey: it must have required
considerable courage, as well as stamina to overcome all of these accidents. Listen to
how she writes to her brother about arriving in New York.
I landed in N.York in the dark – I went to the baggage room to recheck my
big trunk – I was directed to a street car which took me straight to Long
Island Station. I sat there … for an hour and a half and I reached Rockville
Centre at 11 o’clock and the station was closed – there I was with my
Gladstone and my tin hatbox both heavy with a handbag, an umbrella and
a parasol – Nobody who came out of the train knew anything about Mrs
Sanger [with whom she was to stay] and I felt a somewhat forlorn if not
despairing little woman – But out of the darkness came a young man …
He said he knew Mrs Sanger and he was going that way … Mrs Sanger
had been three times to the depot to meet me and had gone to bed. But
she knew who it was when the knock came and hastened down to meet
me and her welcome was as warm as you could imagine – Now do not
you think that – idiot that I am ab[ou]t localities – I managed the trials
through arrivals in such cities as … New York wondrous well.
There are other moments of doubt and anxiety in the diary, too, moments not to
have been guessed at from the Autobiography. The culmination of her visit to Britain
was to be a great meeting at the River House, Chelsea, on 10 July, at which Catherine
Spence was to speak in company with the most notable supporters of proportional
representation. Unlike the friends whom she made in the United States, these
were English people; they might look askance at her Scottish burr, and besides many
of them had titles, even if they were predominantly liberal reformers. They included
the philanthropist Nathaniel Rothschild, the first Jewish peer in England; John Lubbock,
first Baron Avebury; Leonard, Baron Courtney; John Westlake, Professor of
International Law at Cambridge University, and his wife Alice, one of the daughters
of Thomas Hare, English inventor of this voting system; and Sir John Hall, formerly
Prime Minister of New Zealand, subsequently a leader of the women’s suffrage cause
in the British Parliament. It was a daunting prospect, and her diary shows her becoming
more and more anxious as the date approaches.
‘I feel strangely stupid’, she notes on 3 July. ‘Oh! It is a plunge’, she exclaims
two days later, arriving in London and being ‘bothered about luggage’ as she goes to
stay with the Westlakes: ‘This is a very beautiful house for two very busy people’, she
xvi