Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
Of course, Catherine Spence, like everyone else, knew that ‘one cock suffices to
keep fifteen hens in fertile eggs and chickens’, observes Barbara Wall; this story is
not about the mechanics and economics of the fowl-yard. Rather, what the cock is
talking about is ‘pleasure and power’. ‘And if the mainspring of life is pleasure and
power, then why not, as the hen sings, one hen to fifteen cocks? It is a joke of course,
but a remarkable joke for a woman to publish in a newspaper in 1886’, writes Wall.
That was the year in which Edward Stirling – one of Miss Spence’s pupils in his
youth – introduced into the South Australian House of Assembly his Bill in favour
of enfranchising women. The Woman Suffrage League had formed and begun its
campaign within the following two years. When, towards the end of 1894, a new
Bill to give women the vote was before the South Australian parliament, Catherine
Spence’s ship finally arrived home in Adelaide. Rose Birks, Treasurer of the Woman
Suffrage League, hastened to Glenelg to find her and urge her to speak to various
members of the parliament, proposing that there be a party at which Miss Spence
should speak ‘to show that we are in concert about the reform’. The author of that
cheeky challenge to the patriarchal assumptions of the fowl-yard, promised all her
help: ‘Mrs Birks thinks I have come back in the nick of time’, she told her diary.
There were, of course, efforts to commemorate ‘The Grand Old Woman of Australasia’
soon after she died in April 1910. The Autobiography was supplemented
by a portrait painted posthumously by no less a talent than the artist later known
as Margaret Preston; it hangs in the Art Gallery of South Australia. A scholarship to
support women’s sociological research was founded and, after a time during which
its funds had shrunk too far for it to be awarded, it is once again healthy and supporting
women’s research. But more recent years have seen Miss Spence far more
thoroughly recognised. A statue was commissioned for the sesqui-centenary celebrations
of the foundation of the colony of South Australia in 1986; sculpted by Ieva
Pocius, it stands in Light Square. A wing of the State Library of South Australia has
been named after her. A street in Adelaide is named after her, and there is a plaque
in front of the library on Norwood Parade in the local council district where she
last lived. In 2001, her picture appeared on Australian five-dollar notes to mark the
centenary of federation, a national celebration.
Now, a century after her death, Catherine Spence also appears far less alone than
she did when I first began researching her life. There were other women who would
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