Catherine Helen Spence - Infinite Women

Born: 31 October 1825, United Kingdom
Died: 3 April 1910
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: NA

This biography is republished from The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia. Written by Shurlee Swain, Australian Catholic University. See below for full attribution.

Catherine Helen Spence was born in Scotland in 1825, the fifth of eight children of lawyer and banker, David Spence, and his wife Helen. She was educated in Scotland and migrated to Adelaide with her parents in 1839 and took employment as a governess. In nineteenth century Adelaide she became a published author, a Unitarian preacher and an advocate of electoral reform. With her friend Caroline Emily Clark she persuaded the South Australian government to introduce boarding-out for state children and was a member of the State Children’s Council and the colony’s Destitute Board. She was also a leader in the campaign that saw the enfranchisement of South Australian women in 1894. Susan Magarey credits Spence with pioneering ‘a place for herself – hence for other women – outside the domestic sphere to which custom and convention confined’ them (Magarey 2009, p.196).
Spence consolidated her reputation as one of Australia’s leading women in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1901 she established a women’s collective clothing factory and was appointed the chair of its board (Hammond, pp. 14-15). She continued her work for electoral reform and moved the resolution that brought the South Australian National Council of Women into existence, although she found the organisation too cautious and resigned from the executive in 1906. The NCW in Australia, she argued, had not engaged ‘the working women’ who would both benefit from and contribute to their campaigns to improve women’s lot (Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 13 November 1906). She was more satisfied with her continuing work with the State Children’s Council, ‘this splendid work for the benefit of humanity’ (Autobiography, ch XXIII). An admirer of Vida Goldstein, she also supported the establishment of a South Australian branch of her Women’s Non-Party Political Association (Autobiography, ch XXIV).
Spence had travelled widely and maintained an extensive correspondence with like-minded reformers interstate and overseas. The press struggled to comprehend such a forthright, intelligent woman. A 1909 account described her of displaying ‘the kind of intellectual strength which everybody calls masculine’ and of being ‘manlike’ in her absorption in her work (Register, 10 June 1909), but she understood herself as a precursor of things to come. She urged women to ‘learn as much as they could and not be such nervous and timid individuals (Advertiser, 9 July 1906). The state, she argued, ‘was losing much through not enlisting the aid of women to a greater extent in the working of its institutions’ (Advertiser, 4 April 1910).
On her eightieth birthday in 1905, Spence was acclaimed as the ‘most distinguished woman in Australia’. In response she declared ‘I am a new woman … awakened to a sense of capacity and responsibility, not merely to the family and the household, but to the State’ (Register, 31 October 1905). Reluctant to claim individual credit for her many achievements, she argued that change came through ‘association with a band of cultured and earnest women interested in social, political and other public questions’ (Autobiography, ch XXIII). She described herself as ‘a clear-brained commonsense woman of the world’ who was entitled to have her views heard and proud to live in a state in which women had made such progress during her lifetime (Autobiography, ch XXIV).
When Spence died in 1910 one obituarist concluded that if she ‘had been a man, that man might have commanded the most important position among Australian statesman. As it was she greatly elevated the status of her sex in public life’ (Register, 4 April 1910). Spence is commemorated in a statue in Adelaide’s Light Square and her image appeared on Australia’s five dollar note.

The following is excerpted from The Dictionary of Australian Biography by Percival Searle, published in 1949 by Angus and Robertson and republished by Project Gutenberg.

SPENCE, CATHERINE HELEN (1825-1910), advocate of proportional representation, novelist, journalist and sociologist, daughter of David Spence, writer to the signet, and Helen Brodie, was born at Melrose, Scotland, on 31 October 1825. Her schoolmistress, Miss Sarah Phin, was a “born teacher in advance of her own time”. Miss Spence had a happy childhood but in her fourteenth year her father met with heavy financial losses and emigrated with his family to the new colony of South Australia. Miss Spence carried with her a letter from her schoolmistress certifying that she was able “to undertake both the useful and ornamental branches of education–French, Italian and music you thoroughly understand”. Some years of privation followed her arrival in South Australia at the end of 1839. The family lived in a tent near Adelaide, some cows were bought, and the milk was sold to the townspeople. Her father was then appointed town clerk at £150 a year, but in a little while the position was temporarily done away with. At 17 years of age Miss Spence became a daily governess at sixpence an hour, and spent several years in teaching. She refused one offer of marriage on account of the Calvinistic creed of her admirer. Her own views were recorded in her volume, An Agnostic’s Progress, published anonymously many years afterwards. She also began to take an interest in politics and took part in the controversy on “State Aid to Religion”. Her brother, John Brodie Spence, was the Adelaide correspondent of the Melbourne Argus, and Miss Spence began her journalistic career by writing his letters for him. In 1854 her first novel, Clara Morison, was published, which was followed by Tender and True (1856), Mr Hogarth’s Will (1865), and The Author’s Daughter (1867). These volumes, like other early Australian books, are practically unprocurable. There are probably not more than two or three complete sets of them in existence. Another novel, Gathered In, appeared in the Adelaide Observer, but was never published in book form. Her novels are sincere, well-written stories but only one attained much circulation, and their author appears to have received little more than £100 from the four of them. Miss Spence, however, took no little comfort from the fact that the reading of Mr Hogarth’s Will by Edward Wilson (q.v.) suggested the founding of the great Edward Wilson trust that has meant so much to the charities of Melbourne. The greatest interest in the life of Miss Spence came to her in 1859 when she read an article by John Stuart Mill which appeared in Fraser’s Magazine supporting Thomas Hare’s system of proportional representation. She wrote a pamphlet on it, Plea for Pure Democracy, published in 1861, which received the approval of Hare, Mill, Rowland Hill and Professor Craik, who considered it to be the best argument on the popular side that had appeared. Until near the end of her life she continued to fight for this system.
By the kindness of a friend Miss Spence was able to visit Europe in 1865. In England she met Mill and Hare and revisited the scenes of her childhood. Returning at the end of 1866 she began to take an interest in the question of destitute children and the gradual development of the boarding-out system, doing much work on the committee of the Boarding-out Society. In 1871 she began public speaking with a lecture on the Brownings, the first of many she was to deliver, and in 1878 became a regular contributor to the South Australian Register. For a period of 15 years she wrote many social and political articles for its columns. Miss Spence also wrote many reviews for the Sydney Morning Herald, and articles for the Melbourne Review, the Victorian Review, and the Cornhill Magazine. She began writing sermons and delivered many in Unitarian churches at Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. She had an excellent voice and her evident sincerity had a great effect. In 1880 Miss Spence published a little volume for schoolchildren, The Laws We Live Under; she had been the first woman appointed on a board of advice by the South Australian education department and realized the necessity for children learning something about civics. Many years later she was much interested in the kindergarten movement. She was making a good income as a journalist but a great deal was spent in charity, not always wisely as she herself said. In the early eighteen-nineties she found herself able to give much time to lecturing on proportional representation, and in 1893 visited the United States as a government commissioner and delegate to the great World’s Fair congresses at Chicago. A visit to Europe followed, and soon after her return to Adelaide at the end of 1894 she welcomed the success of the women’s suffrage movement.
In 1895 Miss Spence became first president of a league formed for the furtherance of effective voting, and fought hard without success for its inclusion in the Australian constitution. She was also a candidate for the federal convention of 1897 but was not elected. She paid a visit to Sydney in her seventy-fifth year and then went on to Melbourne, giving addresses in both cities, and a year later in 1901 became president of the South Australian Co-operative Clothing Company, formed for the benefit of operatives in the shirtmaking and clothing trades. In 1903 Miss Spence had the first serious illness of her life, but recovered and continued her many activities. Her State Children in Australia; A History of Boarding-out and its Developments was published in 1907. She died on 3 April 1910.
Miss Spence was short, in later life stout, and homely in appearance. She brought a thoroughly reasonable, wise and acute mind to the social problems of her day, and in private life was full of the kindliest human nature, with a charity that enabled her “to help lame dogs over stiles” all her life. Proportional representation, the dearest wish of her life, has been adopted to some extent in Tasmania, Western Australia and New South Wales, and the system of preferential voting now generally in force in Australia may be regarded as a step towards the effective voting she so ardently fought for. A great public-spirited citizen she spent her life in working for her country. After her death a fund was raised by public subscription so that her portrait could be painted and presented to the national gallery at Adelaide, and the government founded the Catherine Helen Spence scholarship in her memory. This scholarship is awarded every four years, and one of the conditions is that the winner shall spend two years abroad in the study of social science.

This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Australasian Biography: Comprising notices of eminent colonists from the inauguration of responsible government down to the present time. [1855-1892] by Phillip Mennell, F.R.G.S., published by Hutchinson & Co., 25 Paternoster Square and 1892. The text was reproduced via Project Gutenberg.

A lady of great cultivation, who has contributed numerous articles to Australian and English periodicals, and was a friend and correspondent of the famous George Eliot. Miss Spence contributed a valuable literary essay on the genius of the great female novelist to the Melbourne Review, and also wrote on Daudet and the later French school of fiction. She is connected with the State Children’s Department of South Australia, and is the authoress of “The Laws we Live under, with some chapters on Elementary Political Economy and the Duties of Citizens,” which was published in 1881, under the direction of the Minister of Education of South Australia. Miss Spence was born at Melrose in 1825, and went to South Australia with her parents in 1839. In 1854 she published “Clare Morrison, a Tale of the South Australian Gold Fever”; in 1856 “Tender and True”; in 1865 “Mr. Hogarth’s Will”; and in 1868 “The Author’s Daughter.” “Gathered In,” another novel from her pen, appeared in the Adelaide Observer and the Queenslander. In 1884 Miss Spence published anonymously in London “An Agnostic’s Progress,” written from a theistic point of view. She is a strong advocate of the Hare system of representation, and thirty years ago published a pamphlet in Adelaide entitled “A Plea for Pure Democracy,” arguing for its adoption in South Australia. Miss Spence has taken a practical interest in the working of the boarding-out system as applied to the neglected children of South Australia, and is a warm champion of the outdoor relief system wisely administered.

Work cited
Shurlee Swain, ‘Spence, Catherine Helen’, in The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia, Australian Women’s Archives Project, 2014, https://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0129b.htm, accessed 16 January 2022.