Unbridling the tongues of women : a biography of Catherine Helen Spence

Abstract

A pioneer for women - Originally published in 1985, this revised edition with an updated Introduction, is being published by the University of Adelaide Press to commemorate the anniversary of Catherine Helen Spence's death on 3 April 1910. Catherine Helen Spence was a charismatic public speaker in the late nineteenth century, a time when women were supposed to speak only at their own firesides. In challenging the custom and convention that confined middle-class women to the domestic sphere, she was carving a new path into the world of public politics along which other women would follow, in the first Australian colony to win votes for women. She was also much more – a novelist deserving comparison with George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; a pioneering woman journalist; a ‘public intellectual’ a century before the term was coined; a philanthropic innovator in social welfare and education, with an influence reaching far beyond South Australia; Australia’s first female political candidate. A ‘New Woman’, she declared herself. The ‘Grand Old Woman of Australia’ others called her.