Unbridling the Tongues of Women
A biography of Catherine Helen Spence
Ìý
FREE | 2010 | Electronic (PDF) | 978-0-9806723-0-5 | 214 pp
DOI:Ìý
Originally published in 1985, this revised edition with an updated Introduction, is being published by the ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥ 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 ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥n colony to win votes for women.
She was also much moreÌý–Ìýa 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 ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥; ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥â€™s first female political candidate. A ‘New Woman’, she declared herself. The ‘Grand Old Woman of ÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥â€™ others called her.
Review
'Magarey, a distinguished historian and feminist, shaped Catherine Spence’s life story into a triumphant narrative of female liberation without in any way distorting its facts or indeed Spence’s own estimation of her life’s direction and its steady enlargement of opportunities.'
Helen Thomson,ÌýÐÓ°ÉÖ±²¥n Book Review, September 2010, pages 23-24