Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
nevertheless appears in the pages of Australian histories as different as H. M. Green’s
History of Australian Literature and Geoffrey Blainey’s A Land Half Won. 10
Such attention is an acknowledgment of her cultural and political significance
in Australia’s history. But it is also, often, an acknowledgment of the work of an exceptional
woman, and from that she can suffer at the hands of both her admirers and
her detractors. Blainey’s chapter on Spence is called .’The Veiled Maid of Adelaide’.
There is usually implicit in such acknowledgment the patronising attitude expressed
by Samuel Johnson when he likened a woman preaching to a dog walking on its
hind legs – ‘it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all’. 11 Yet it is
impossible to ignore the fact that negotiating her way to a public career in the pulpit,
in the press and on the platform in a period when ‘a woman’s ethic’ was ‘duty and
renunciation’ 12 constituted Spence’s most remarkable achievement. Like Mary Wollstonecraft,
Florence Nightingale, Rose Scott, Vida Goldstein – to pick fairly random
examples – she presents us with not one subject but two. 13 As a novelist, journalist
and electoral reformer she deserves no manner of condescension because she was a
woman. But her years of anonymity as a journalist and the nature of her earliest overt
engagement in public life show how constantly she was reminded, as we are, of her
gender, and of the patriarchal ordering of gender relations that should circumscribe
what she could think, say and do. ‘No-one’, she announced in 1893 as she departed,
unaccompanied, for the United States, ‘has gone out of “woman’s sphere” more than
I have during the last twelve years … and yet I believe I am as womanly as ever’. 14
Early developments in capitalism in Britain had begun defining social existence
into the ‘separate spheres’ of public life and domestic life long before Catherine
Spence was born. During the period in which British colonists were establishing a
foothold in South Australia, that definitional distinction was becoming synonymous
with a distinction between the world of men and the world of women. One of the
principal signs of a man’s prosperity, among middle-class Britons, was his ability
to support a wife and children who did not, themselves, need to venture into the
public sphere to contribute to the household’s income. Campaigns to exclude working
women (and children) from particular kinds of paid work – in coal-mines and
textile factories – were establishing gender divisions in the paid labour market, and
contracting the range of occupations in which working women could earn wages.
One of the avenues to a wage for women that expanded, rather than contracted, was
domestic service. That, and the increasing idealisation of the middle-class domestic
sphere as a haven in a heartless world for men, reinforced the distinction between
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