Spence, Catherine (1825–1910)

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Spence, Catherine (1825–1910)

Australian writer, journalist, reformer, and public speaker. Born Catherine Helen Spence near Melrose, Scotland, on October 31, 1825; died in Australia in 1910; fifth of eight children of David Spence (a lawyer and banker) and Helen (Brodie) Spence; completed formal schooling in Melrose at about age 14; never married.

Became first successful woman novelist in Australia with publication of Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever (1854); was active in work with destitute children, the women's suffrage movement, and electoral reform; wrote first social studies textbook used in Australia, The Laws We Live Under (1880); was the first woman in Australia to run for public office (1897); statue in her memory placed in Light Square, Adelaide (1986).

Catherine Spence was a woman of enormous talent who poured her considerable energy into supporting both political and social causes. Her work was a major catalyst in creating a more progressive environment in Australia in the late 19th century. She was born in 1825 and raised in Scotland until 1839, when her father David Spence moved the family to Australia after his failed wheat speculations bankrupted them. This financial disaster also ended Spence's hope of attending the advanced school for girls in Edinburgh as she had planned. At 17, Spence became a governess and felt great satisfaction in having her own earnings. This desire for self-sufficiency, plus her unhappiness with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, turned her against marriage and motherhood.

In 1854, Spence anonymously published Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia during the Gold Fever, becoming the first Australian woman to publish a novel. She followed this with a second anonymous novel in 1856, Tender and True: A Colonial Tale. After these successes, she began writing serialized novels that appeared in newspapers under her own name, including Mr. Hogarth's Will (1865), The Author's Daughter (1867), and Gathered In. Her utopian novel Handfasted was submitted for a prize offered by the Sydney Mail, but was rejected as "too socialist and therefore dangerous." Spence's writings consistently offer valuable social and political insights into colonial life in the 1850s and 1860s, extending beyond the conventional domestic romances of the day. She wrote fiction for the next 30 years, producing, among other titles, An Agnostic's Progress (1884) and A Week in the Future (1889).

Spence also wrote as a journalist, anonymously or under a pen name, covering a wide range of topics. In 1878, after 30 years of publishing articles anonymously, she was appointed to the daily South Australian Register as a regular outside contributor, and finally obtained a byline. She became a well-known journalist and literary critic for newspapers in South Australia and Victoria and in major British reviews such as Cornhill and Fortnightly, often drawing criticism as a radical feminist. Spence wrote about a wide range of contemporary issues, and welcomed the opportunity to promote her favorite causes. Among these, the three most important to her were the plight of destitute children, election reform, and votes for women.

In 1872, Spence worked with Caroline Emily Clark to establish the Boarding-Out Society. Essentially a fostering program, the society placed children from the government industrial school with families and monitored their development. Spence backed up her beliefs with personal action by raising three successive families of orphaned children herself. Her work with destitute children merited her appointment to the new State Children's Council in 1887 and to the government Destitute Board ten years later. As a member of the school board in East Torrens, she argued strongly for a state-run Advanced School for Girls, which was opened in 1879. At the invitation of the government, she wrote the first social studies textbook used in Australian schools, The Laws We Live Under (1880), 20 years before such a course was introduced in any of the other colonies.

Spence considered election reform to be one of the most important issues of her day. She spoke in favor of proportional representation, which she called "effective voting." As early as 1861 she published A Plea for Pure Democracy in support of her ideas. When asked to present a lecture for the South Australian Institute, she rejected the convention that required she write the speech and give it to a man for presentation. Instead, she insisted on reading it herself, saying that she wanted "to make it easier for any woman who felt she had something to say to stand up and say it." Her invitation to preach by the Unitarian Church, to which she was a convert, led to further speaking engagements. In 1892, she launched a campaign for effective voting by speaking on public platforms throughout South Australia, in Melbourne, Sydney, and across the United States, addressing a series of conferences at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. In promoting this cause, she stood for election to the Federal Convention of 1897. Although she was unsuccessful, she was the first woman in Australia to run for public office.

During this time, Spence was also working hard for suffrage for women. She became vice-president of the Women's Suffrage League in 1891 and did not slow her suffrage activities after the vote was won in 1894. South Australia was the first colony to grant female suffrage, and Spence spoke about it in Great Britain and the United States, befriending like-minded women such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman , Susan B. Anthony , Jane Addams , and Millicent Garrett Fawcett , and supporting the Melbourne suffragist Vida Goldstein , the Sydney suffragist Rose Scott , and the feminist journalist Alice Henry . From 1901 until her death in 1910, Spence was chair of the Co-operative Clothing Company, a shirt-making factory owned and operated exclusively by women, with both owners and workers holding stock. The year before she died, she presided at the formation of the Women's Non-Party Political Association.

When Catherine Spence died, she was mourned as "The Grand Old Woman of Australia." A statue in her memory was erected in Light Square in Adelaide in 1986. Interest in her fiction was revived a century after it was written, and Clara Morison appeared in three new editions after 1971.