Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

The New Woman of South Australia: Grand Old Woman of Australia
Now that they were called upon to do something entirely outside their traditions
and education, they were ‘tormented with doubts and difficulties of a domestic, social
and ethical character’. The newly-enfranchised voters of South Australia were to
go to the polls for the first time in 1896. In March that year, Spence wrote an article
for the Register headed ‘A Few Plain Words to the Women Electors of South Australia’
in which she concentrated on the immediate need for information, indicating
ways of forming preferences for candidates, and giving simple instructions about filling
in voting papers. She also warned her readers against dependence on the advice
of husbands, fathers and brothers, and against yielding to a candidate’s solicitations
without finding out more about him. 74 It was sensible and timely advice, though it
probably underestimated the political education that women had given themselves
through the suffrage campaign; the press was to observe, with patronising approval,
the small number of informal votes cast. 75
Economic considerations loomed large in Adelaide in an election only three
years after the financial crisis sweeping Australia had become most acute in South
Australia. Kingston had been brought to power amid unemployment and poverty.
He was returned to power in 1896, but his majority may not have been as large as it
could have been. Writing nearly half a century later, in 1944, Dorothy H. Paynter
reported that:
A number of women in Adelaide wished to vote, but dared not to do
so. Their husbands were employed by certain large firms whose directors
were not pleased with events.
It was tacitly understood that employees’ wives were expected not to vote,
and it was significant that none of them even enrolled. Some of these
women knew that their husbands worked too hard and that their wages
were too low.
They knew that their homes were poor, and sometimes unhealthy, and
they wished to vote for the men who, they believed, had these matters
at heart. But they knew also that though one job was easily lost, another
was not easily found, and a poor home was better than none. Winter was
coming on, and political independence would be small compensation if
the children were cold and hungry. 76
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