Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Acquiring a room of her own
This meant that she had, first of all, to find a way of making a living. And that
was far from easy. Just as the patriarchal ordering of gender relations ensured that
Jessie and Mary could gain their livelihoods by marrying men who would be breadwinners,
so the same social order prohibited Spence, as a woman, from becoming
her own breadwinner. As Elaine Showalter has observed, ‘Victorian women were not
accustomed to choosing a vocation; womanhood was a vocation in itself’. 80 There is
no record of the school that Spence opened in 1846, and it probably did not last
long. The colony’s reviving economy resuscitated earlier schools and encouraged the
foundation of others. She may have had difficulty finding pupils. 81 During the late
1840s, she contributed, anonymously, items to Murray’s South Australian. But it is
unlikely that they earned her anything, and she preserved her anonymity with care. 82
Those years must have been particularly hard for the Spences remaining in their
mother’s household – for they had only John’s and David’s salaries to live on. Of
course, Spence could have found work as she shows the heroines of Clara Morison
and Mr Hogarth’s Will doing, in some kind of domestic service. And she did: in 1850
she reluctantly accepted a live-in post as a nursery governess and house counsellor.
But such a position was even more of a check on her independence than marriage
would have been, as she was to show in her depiction of Clara Morison’s domestic
service. It is unlikely that she persisted with it for long; she recorded in her autobiography
that she gave up teaching in that year, when she was twenty-five. 83
The cultural conditions of her life improved. The colony which had been founded
with an already-established Literary Association, meeting in London to hear papers
like Robert Owen’s on ‘The Influence of Literature on the Institutions of Nations
and the Habits of People’, whose first newspaper printed its first issue even
before any settlers left Britain, proved culturally richer than Spence’s early experience
anticipated. 84 As productivity and profits recovered after 1844, the Mechanics’ Institute
was re-opened, the Book Society and Subscription Library was formed and
then amalgamated with the Institute, and – ironically, since the mechanics institutes
were supposed to serve the educational needs of the labouring classes – for two years
‘the joint conversaziones attracted all the beauty, fashion and respectability of Adelaide’.
85 The Spences, despite their poverty, paid the full annual subscription which
enabled them to use the Institute’s library and reading room, and Murray passed on
to Catherine Spence the newspapers and journals that he received from a reading
club. 86 Spence did not immediately throw off her difficulties with her religion but in
the households of women and children that she and her mother established, which
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