Unbridling the Tongues of Women

Welcome to the electronic edition of Unbridling the Tongues of Women. The book opens with the bookmark panel and you will see the contents page/s. Click on this anytime to return to the contents. You can also add your own bookmarks. Each chapter heading in the contents table is clickable and will take you direct to the chapter. Return using the contents link in the bookmarks. The whole document is fully searchable. Avoid quote marks. You can print your own copy, but only for personal use. Enjoy! Photograph by Mick Bradley Susan Magarey AM, FASSA, PhD, was made a member of the Order of Australia for pioneering Women’s Studies as a field of academic endeavour. Her publications include four books: the prize-winning biography of Cathe- rine Helen Spence, Unbridling the tongues of women (1986) now being re-published; Passions of the first-wave feminists (2001); Looking Back: Looking Forward. A Century of the Queen Adelaide Club 1909-2009 (2009); and, with Kerrie Round, Roma the First: a Biography of Dame Roma Mitchell (2007, second, revised, imprint 2009). She has edited eight collections of articles – including Women in a Restructuring Austra- lia: Work and Welfare (1995) with Anne Edwards, and Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (1993) with Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan – and was for twenty years (1985-1995) the Founding Editor of the triannual journal Australian Feminist Studies. She is the Founder of the Magarey Medal for Biography and a member of the Board of History SA. She is writing a history of the Women’s Liberation Move- ment in Australia. For fun, she swims, gardens, cooks and listens to classical music. She describes her life in the words of Australian poet Jennifer Maiden: ‘Ambivalent, ambidextrous, ambiguous, androgynous, amorous, ironic’. In her next life she will be a trapeze artist. Catherine Helen Spence. Image courtesy of the State Library of South Australia, SLSA: B3675. Unbridling the Tongues of Women A biography of Catherine Helen Spence SUSAN MAGAREY Published in Adelaide by University of Adelaide Press Barr Smith Library The University of Adelaide South Australia 5005 [email protected] www.adelaide.edu.au/press The University of Adelaide Press publishes externally refereed scholarly books by staff of the Uni- versity of Adelaide. It aims to maximise the accessibility to its best research by publishing works through the internet as free downloads and as high quality printed volumes on demand. Electronic Index: this book is available from the website as a down-loadable PDF with fully searchable text. Please use the electronic version to complement the index. ____________________________________________________________________________ © Susan Magarey 1985, 2010 First published 1985 Hale and Iremonger, Sydney Republished 2010 by University of Adelaide Press with a new Introduction This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criti- cism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced, stored in a re- trieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission. Address all inquiries to the Director at the above address. ________________________________________________________________ Subject Keywords Women authors - Australian Biography - Women in Public Life Australia - Women’s rights Australia History For the full Cataloguing-in-Publication data please contact National Library of Australia: [email protected] ISBN 978-0-9806723-0-5 (electronic) ISBN 978-0-9806723-1-2 (paperback) Book design: Céline Lawrence Cover concept: Fiona Cameron. Drawing by Hugo Shaw. Paperback printed by Griffin Press, South Australia Preface uring her long life Catherine Helen Spence sought to make her voice heard Din a world dominated by men. She penned editorials, delivered sermons and spoke at public meetings both in Australia, in the United States and in Britain. Both by her own example and in her support for women’s cause, she sought ‘to unbridle the tongues of women’. Although she was well-known in her day, indeed renowned as the ‘Grand Old Woman of Australia’ at her death in 1910, knowledge of her life of achievements slipped in subsequent years. When in 1985, Susan Magarey published her prize-winning biography of Spence, Unbridling the Tongues of Women, Spence had become largely forgotten. Unbridling did more than recover the story of Spence’s life and work, it suggested new approaches to Australian history. It was the first biography of a first-wave Australian feminist written by a second-wave feminist historian. As such it inspired and set an example of feminist biography and history which has seen a great outpouring of feminist historical and literary scholarship in biographies of Australian feminist activists and of Australian women writers; Spence herself was of course both a writer and a political activist. Unbridling must also be located as an influential early text in the development of Australian feminist history in the last three decades. In this and her other work, Susan Magarey has achieved much in the on-going campaigns to ensure that women’s voices and perspectives are heard in public debate. v Unbridling the tongues of women It is important that women’s issues and women’s history be kept to the forefront and it is highly timely that this book should be re-published now. Susan Magarey’s new introduction sets the original study in the context of more recent research on Spence. It will bring to a new generation of readers the importance of unbridling women’s tongues. Margaret Allen 17 September 2009 Gender Studies University of Adelaide vi Introduction to the New Edition atherine Helen Spence was a powerful and persuasive public speaker. She had, Cin a sense, been practising speaking for most of her adult life. She recalled a moment in the 1850s when she was in her late twenties – a wonderfully back- handed moment – when she began to sing while she was doing the ironing. Her four year-old nephew ‘burst out with “Don’t sing, auntie; let me hear the voice of your words.”’ So she abandoned melody and recited Wordsworth. But this was, as she herself was to observe, exercising her gifts exclusively for ‘home consumption’. Law and custom, she continued, have put a bridle on the tongues of women, and of the innumerable proverbs relating to the sex, the most cynical are those relating to her use of language. Her only qualification for public speaking in old days was that she could scold, and our ancestors imposed a salutary check on this by the ducking stool in public, and sticks no thicker than the thumb for marital correction in private. Historian Marilyn Lake has observed, ‘Oratory was a masculine performance; wom- anliness demanded a soft voice and winning smiles’. Perhaps Catherine Spence was the exception which proved the rule. vii Unbridling the tongues of women Once launched in the 1870s, Miss Spence won acclaim and affection for her ‘rare gifts of speech and intellect’. At home in Adelaide, a reporter was to praise a sermon he heard her deliver, approving her slight Scots accent, her clear, firm voice and her unselfconsciousness. Another observer exclaimed over her speech to a public meeting: ‘Does not Miss Spence speak well and clearly’. Abroad, too, in 1893-4, she elicited enthusiasm. Even in the United States, where a woman speaking in public was not such a rare phenomenon by the end of the nineteenth century, Catherine Spence’s public address at the World Congress of Charities & Corrections in Chi- cago gained, she reported, ‘a most attentive hearing, and was frequently interrupted by applause, which is not such a common thing in America as it is in Australia’. A charismatic speaker, she was: further east she presented, she was told, ‘the finest political address given in Boston for ten years’. Catherine Spence knew that she was carving out a new path along which other women would follow her. When she insisted on giving her own lecture to the South Australian Institute, an unprecedented innovation in 1871, she did so, she said, ‘to make it easier henceforward for any woman who felt she had something to say to stand up and say it’. nbridling the tongues of women: a biography of Catherine Helen Spence began life Uas a thesis for a Master of Arts degree at the Australian National University, completed in 1971. Subsequently, I was advised to send it to Melbourne University Press, the principal publisher of Australian historical work. It came back with a letter saying that they thought it was very well written, but that there was no market for books about women. This was in 1973, just two years before International Women’s Year and the appearance of Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police, Beverley Kingston’s My Wife, My Daughter, and Poor Mary Ann, and later, Miriam Dixson’s The Real Matilda, so Melbourne University Press missed out on what might have been a small scoop. My thesis was eventually published by Hale & Iremonger in 1985. At the heart of the researches that I carried out was Catherine Spence’s Autobi- ography, a work that she wrote during her last months, sometimes in indelible pencil because she was writing in bed, and, she said, ‘A nice state I and the sheets would be in if I used ink’. Following it fairly closely, I depicted her on a journey which brought her, at the celebration of her eightieth birthday in 1905, to the declaration, ‘I am a New Woman, and I know it’. viii Introduction to the new edition In Australia the New Woman was a composite figure, associated with the appearance of the bicycle (with women riding astride them), the democratisation of smoking in the form of cigarettes (and women smoking), campaigns for rational dress for women, and, most scandalously, women’s challenge to the double standard of sexual morality and their assertion of a specifically sexual autonomy.

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