Catherine Helen Spence

Catherine Helen Spence was a writer and activist who sought to improve educational and welfare programs in Australia and to reform the country’s voting system. An immigrant from Scotland, she was a major progressive force for women’s voting rights in Australia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was also the first woman to be a political candidate in Australia.

Early life in Scotland and immigration to Australia

Catherine Helen Spence was born in Scotland on October 31, 1825, near Melrose in Roxburghshire. She received her education there at a time when the ideals of the Scottish Enlightenment still had some influence, and they contributed to her belief in social progress. She immigrated with her family to the newly established colony of South Australia in 1839 after her father’s business failed, and they eventually settled in Adelaide.

About age 17, Spence began supporting her family by working as a governess. In the hope of earning more money for her family, she opened a small school in 1846, at a time when South Australia was emerging from the lingering effects of a financial crisis. Her school met with initial success, but that was short-lived because of competition from other schools as the colony experienced a mining boom and began developing rapidly.

Novelist, journalist, and social critic

Spence transitioned to journalism, writing and publishing articles starting in her 20s. In her 30s she also began publishing novels. Her first novel was Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever, which was published anonymously in two volumes in 1854. It is generally considered the first novel written by a woman of European descent about, and in, Australia, although it was not well known at the time. It tells the story of Clara Morison, a young woman who moves to South Australia during the 1840s and navigates rapidly changing colonial society. Spence’s Tender and True: A Colonial Tale (1856) was also published anonymously. Her subsequent novels, published under her own name, include Mr. Hogarth’s Will (1865) and The Author’s Daughter (1868) as well as A Week in the Future (1889), in which the main character, Emily Bethel, explores a week in the future, which is envisioned as a socialist-feminist utopia. Written later in her career, A Week in the Future reflects her concerns as an activist and a political reformer. Spence’s novels did not achieve broad popularity when published, though they continue to be of scholarly interest.

In the 1860s Spence began to turn away from writing fiction and toward social commentary. Though her early journalism showed her to be engaged with social issues, she was particularly inspired by John Stuart Mill’s assessment of Thomas Hare’s system of proportional representation. In response, Spence published A Plea for Pure Democracy (1861), a pamphlet that advocated for women’s suffrage and direct democracy in South Australia. Electoral reform thereafter became Spence’s work, and in the 1890s she developed the so-called Hare-Spence system of proportional representation, which was put before South Australia’s parliament for many years.

Advocating for women’s right to vote and other social issues

In 1891 Spence became a vice president of the influential Women’s Suffrage League in South Australia, which was led by Mary Lee and Mary Colton, two key drivers of the women’s suffrage movement. The organization was instrumental to securing passage of the Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act in December 1894 in the South Australian Parliament; the law enabled all citizens of South Australia to vote, which meant that women could vote and stand for public office there. In 1893−94 Spence went on an international tour, visiting the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago before advocating for electoral reform in the United States, Great Britain, and Switzerland.

Spence encouraged the turnout of women in South Australia’s elections by forming the Effective Voting League in 1895. Given financial backing by the colony’s Labour Party and other small political parties, Spence herself ran as one of South Australia’s delegates to the Australasian Federal Convention that began in 1897 and sought to push forward efforts to draft a constitution that would bind Australia’s colonies into a federation. Spence thus became the first female political candidate in Australia, though she was not elected. She continued to fight for the right of all women in Australia to vote; that right was granted to women of European descent in federal elections when the Australian Parliament passed the Commonwealth Franchise Act in 1902.

Though Spence’s major focus was electoral reform, she also worked on other social issues, including unemployment, education, and welfare. In 1872 she and fellow reformer Caroline Emily Clark founded the Boarding-Out Society, one of Australia’s first foster-care systems. Spence stayed with the organization until 1886, finding homes for orphaned and impoverished children and evolving social welfare practices. In 1886 the Boarding-Out Society was incorporated into the new State Children’s Council, of which Spence continued to be a member until her death. Spence also helped to establish the Advanced School for Girls, considered the first government-supported secondary school in Australia, in 1879. In 1897 Spence joined the Destitute Board of South Australia, which supported adults experiencing poverty; she was its first female member since its formation in 1849.

Spence wrote The Laws We Live Under, which was the first social-studies coursebook for Australian schools; it was in use for more than two decades after it was first published in 1880. Her An Agnostic’s Progress from the Known to the Unknown, a collection of essays in which Spence describes her personal intellectual development, was published in 1884.

Death and legacy

Spence died on April 3, 1910, in Norwood, South Australia. She was lauded then as “The Grand Old Woman of Australia.”

In Adelaide a bronze statue of Spence was dedicated in 1986, and a wing of the State Library of South Australia was named for her in 2003. Spence’s portrait appeared on Australian five-dollar banknotes printed between 2001 and 2016. Since 1912, the South Australian government has offered the Catherine Helen Spence Memorial Scholarship, which is awarded every four years to a woman studying social problems in Australia and abroad.