Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
porter of her campaign for proportional representation. 72 Alice Henry, like Jeanne
Young, shared many of Spence’s political views and regarded her as a mentor. Rose
Scott and Vida Goldstein looked to her as the pioneer of much that they aspired to
themselves. 73 These people were probably her closest friends, outside her household,
and her friends were as important to her as she was to them: ‘no woman in Australia’,
she declared toward the end of her life, ‘has been richer in friends’. 74 Yet those friendships
were characterised by a kind of professionalism: they were important to her
primarily as a means of sharing her opinions, her enthusiasms, and gaining support
and recognition for her work; any emotional bonds seem to have arisen from this,
rather than generating it. Most unusually for a woman of her period, she identified
her fulfilment and happiness not with any private and personal relationship, but
with her ambition and work, her ideas and ideals.
If her aspirations and her work were her greatest passions, one of her strongest
emotions was admiration for people whose work and ideas informed her own. She
revered J. S. Mill, Thomas Hare, George Eliot, and later and less expressly Samuel
Butler, Henry George, Edward Bellamy, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. 75 She prized
her acquaintance with Mill, Hare and George, recounted her meetings with them,
and strove for the implementation of those of their ideas that she had grasped most
strongly. In doing so, she encountered the conventions and prohibitions which restricted
her achievement, not because she lacked ability, but because she was a woman.
Catherine Spence worked throughout her life to overcome the patriarchal conventions
which threatened to thwart her ambition, restrict her self-fulfilment and
prevent the achievement of her ends. She protested against social prohibitions chiefly
because they hampered her work, work she considered to be directed as much
towards the greater welfare of society as towards her own fulfilment. Yet in doing
so she expressed, by example as much as by precept, her opinion that women could
take a place in the world beyond their households, and accept responsibility in the
public affairs of the community. By venturing into such exclusively masculine preserves
as journalism and politics herself, she expressed her conviction that women, so
inclined, could contribute quite as usefully as men to any field of human endeavour.
It was far from easy even to express such a conviction during the 19 th century, much
less to act upon it. Much of Spence’s assertiveness and self-importance probably grew
out of the necessity of claiming the hearing and attention automatically accorded to
most men. But her self-confidence supported her in such a claim, and by making it
on behalf of other women she became Australia’s first feminist.
20