Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
Spence’s two sisters gained livelihoods in the way that was most usual and most expected
in a patriarchal society, indeed in a way expressly linked to incentives to thrift
and industry in Wakefield’s plan: they married. Jessie married Andrew Murray in
1841 and over the next 15 years bore ten children, five of whom died in childhood. 68
In 1844 Murray bought the South Australian and made himself its editor; it was a
conservative paper which took care to support the local representative of the British
government on most issues. But it folded in 1851 when he went to Melbourne to
become commercial editor of the Argus, taking Jessie and the children with him. 69
Jessie outlived Murray, but died in an accident at Gippsland in 1888, when she was
sixty-seven. 70 Mary, or May, married in 1855 when she was twenty-five. Her husband,
William Wren, was a clerk on the way to becoming a partner of James Boucaut
(a lawyer, subsequently three times premier of South Australia). Mary had three
children, two of whom survived. But her husband was sickly. In 1864, when she had
been married fewer than nine years, Wren died. Mary herself died in 1870, at the age
of 40. 71 It appears that Wren left enough for Mary and the children to live on, and
Mary left that to the children. When Wren died, Spence, her mother and presumably
Ellen Gregory, moved in with Mary and the children, so that they could ‘put
two small incomes together’, and share the work of caring for the children. When
Mary died, those children remained with Spence and her mother. 72
For Catherine Spence, gaining a living was more complicated, for she chose to
remain single. In the 1840s and 1850s it was a most unusual choice, particularly
in a society whose members had been selected at least partly because of their marriageable
ages. Moreover, in a patriarchal culture, spinsterhood carried, as it has
continued to carry the stigma of being considered unattractive to men. Spence was
not prepared to acquiesce in such labelling; she made it clear that not marrying was
a deliberate choice. In her autobiography she recorded that she had two offers of
marriage.
The first might have been accepted if it had not been for the Calvinistic
creed that made me shrink from the possibility of bringing children into
the world with so little chance of eternal salvation, so I said ‘No’ to a very
clever young man, with whom I argued on many points and with whom,
if I had married him, I should have argued until one of us died! I was 17,
and had just begun to earn money. I told him why I refused him and that
it was final. In six weeks he was engaged to another woman. 73
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