Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
guided by a lofty sense of duty and reasoning powers of no mean order,
she was an ideal pioneer.
It was a fitting tribute. ‘An ideal pioneer’, or, as Jeanne Young celebrated her, ‘a “Pioneer
Woman” of the world, opening new paths for her sisters to tread’. It would be
easy, in the late 20 th century, to underestimate both the courage of pioneer women
like Catherine Spence, and the extent of their achievements. It is salutary to recall
that it was little more than a decade before Spence’s death that Beatrice Webb,
visiting Australia, exclaimed in irritation at the women of Sydney who thought it
‘unwomanly’ to take an interest in public affairs. It was still necessary at the beginning
of this century for Vida Goldstein’s monthly journal to carry the motto: ‘I
am a human being and nothing is outside my sphere’. True, that is a claim we still
have to make. But we make it today in a social order which has been significantly
shaped by the struggles of the women who set Catherine Spence in the forefront of
their campaigns. The patriarchal ordering of gender relations into the public world
of men and the domestic world of women was never the same after the struggles in
which they engaged. The claims that we make now, we make from vantage points
which their work won for us. And their work drew inspiration, and strength, from
the remarkable battle that Catherine Spence had waged already, for decades before
they were born, to wrest from patriarchal provincialism a hearing for the voices of
women. All of us who speak, and expect to be heard, today, owe a tribute to Catherine
Spence.
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