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Significance of Catherine Helen Spence to South Australia

The life and works of Catherine Helen Spence are of immense significance to the people of South Australia. She is part of the South Australian non-conformist tradition of free-thinking and social equity. She would be seen in the present day as a non-partisan public figure, a social reformer and campaigner for women's rights, a great literary figure and educator, with a particular interest in proportional representation as a way of ensuring political rights for minorities.

Spence was engaged in civic debate, in the struggle towards women's suffrage which strengthened Australia's democratic tradition, in education and self-education, and in writing and public speaking. She became a symbol of what women could achieve.

She loved South Australia, and was herself in the hearts and minds of ordinary South Australians. In 1900 the United Australia magazine referred to her as a household word. In her later years she was referred to as 'The Grand Old Woman of Australia', and today a website on South Australian history, Flinders Ranges Research, refers to her as 'Australia's greatest woman'.

Spence is a part of the South Australian environs

A memorial statue to her was placed in Light Square in 1986
There is a footpath plaque outside the library of the City of Norwood, Payneham and St Peters, since she lived in the St Peters area from 1870 to 1899. There is also a wall plaque on a building at the corner of Queen Street and The Parade, near her last place of residence
In 1912 the government established a Catherine Helen Spence Scholarship to 'encourage a deeper interest in sociology', with provision for overseas study
The Library of the City West campus of the University of SA is named the Catherine Helen Spence building
A group of buildings at Brighton Secondary School was named the Spence Centre in 1997, and a campus of Aberfoyle Park Primary School was named the Spence School in 1982
The State electorate of Spence was created in the western suburbs in 1969, although it was changed at a later redistribution
The Advertiser on 20 December 1999 included Catherine Helen Spence in its list of the ten greatest South Australians of the 20^th century, as chosen by its senior journalists. She was subsequently ranked as fifth greatest by public vote
The Art Gallery of South Australia has two portraits of Spence, one by Margaret Preston and the other by Annie Laura Vernon Gee
And at her birthplace, now a hotel in Melrose, Scotland, a commemorative plaque was attached to the hotel in 1999. The local newspaper called her a 'legendary figure in her adopted country'.

Spence has close associations with The State Library of South Australia

She was a popular and successful public speaker, lecturing in the Institute Building, part of the State Library complex, for the Mechanics Institute, an early adult education program. She was the first woman to read a paper to the South Australian Institute
She was a member of the Destitute Board , which was responsible for the Destitute Asylum, part of the Library precinct
The Library holds the papers of Catherine Helen Spence as Private Record Group (PRG) 88, including her handwritten autobiography, manuscripts of sermons, and an unpublished novel. Because of the fragility of the original material, there is a microfilm set for public use
There are no known recordings of the voice of Spence. However, there is a 1997 recording in the J.D. Somerville Oral History Collection in which Launcelot Crompton remembers her
In 1859, with other women from the Unitarian Church, she established a longstanding juvenile library which is now housed in the Children's Literature Research Collection.

Spence's main loves were children and their education and welfare

She became a governess at the age of 17, and was in charge of a school at 20. She also took responsibility for three families of orphaned children in succession
With Caroline Clark she founded the Boarding-Out Society, which was far ahead of its time in placing destitute children in the homes of families, and following up on their progress. She was an official of the Society for 14 years and worked strenuously as a visitor
In 1880 Catherine's school textbook The laws we live under was the first social studies textbook used in Australian schools, covering topics from land ownership, tariffs, family and marriage, building societies, insurance, patent law, and censorship
She helped found the Kindergarten Union of South Australia, and it became the most passionate commitment of her niece and protegee Lucy Morice, after whom the Lucy Morice Kindergarten in North Adelaide was named. Spence's role in urging education for women also resulted in the establishment the Advanced School for Girls, the first government secondary school for girls in Australia. It also resulted in women being admitted at Teacher's Training Colleges and finally at University in 1881

Spence was one of the great figures of literature in Australia, then and now

She was heavily involved with literary life, and if she had lived in recent times would have been an active participant in Writers' Week, part of the Adelaide Festival. She wrote novels, short stories, stories for children, acting charades, puzzles, poems and many articles about literature and children's literature
She was one of the key contributors to the literary pages of The Register, forerunner of The Advertiser, for many years. Her book reviews distinguished artistic and literary values from social or moral values, the latter being her prevailing concern
A Bibliography of Catherine Helen Spence (Adelaide, Libraries Board of South Australia, 1967) was compiled by Elizabeth Gunton as part of the Bibliographies of Australian writers series.

Spence was a popular and powerful communicator and commentator

She used her experience on social welfare boards to comment on relevant issues. In particular she was a publicist for the emancipation of women and for electoral reform. In those pre-electronic days her presence in so many places would have made her the equivalent opinion-former of talk-back radio and television current affairs
She was Australia's first truly professional woman journalist, publishing stories, poems, literary puzzles, articles and letters in newspapers and magazines - around 2,000 items! Spence declared that 'a great deal of my very best work was given to the daily press - that ephemeral channel' and she also recognised that a newspaper 'partly leads and partly follows public opinion'. She was a regular paid contributor to The Register (the forerunner of The Advertiser), for many years, writing leaders, articles and book reviews. She wasn't just a provincial writer - her work appeared interstate and overseas
She provided a window on the world for people through her extensive reading, and writing about her travels in America, Canada, and Great Britain, and about the ways they differed from Australia
She was a Unitarian preacher, writing and delivering her own sermons in Melbourne and Sydney as well as Adelaide.

Spence campaigned long and effectively for women's issues and suffrage

She was active in the fight for woman's suffrage, becoming a vice-president of the Women's Suffrage League of South Australia in 1891, and founding the Woman's League in 1895. She was in Parliament House when the suffrage bill was discussed in the days before it was passed in 1894
She was an advocate of social reform in areas affecting women and families, such as prostitution, domestic violence, the treatment of servants, destitution the drink question and gambling, and she wrote advisory articles about health issues
She did not write 'women's pages' as such. Whenever she wrote about and for women, as she did frequently, she set women's needs and interests in a social or political context
Her first novel, Clara Morison, was also the first novel written about Australia by a woman. It is a passionate depiction of the difficulties for women trying to earn their livelihoods in a gender-segmented market. Other novels advanced powerful arguments for change to the laws and customs governing marriage as one of the principal means of keeping women financially dependent on men.

Spence was strongly involved in the political and administrative life of South Australia

She had a continuing interest in politics, but refused to align herself with the political parties of either capital or labour. For 50 years she pursued the cause of proportional representation, which she called effective voting, and which is a central platform of the Australian Democrats today
She was a member of most of the reforming boards of the colony
She addressed the Australasian conference on charity on the advantages of her state's centralised administration for the provision of welfare services, in 1891 and 1892, to great acclaim
Rather than accepting nomination for election to Parliament, she preferred to work toward forming organisations for women, such as the Co-operative Clothing Company, which was designed to protect women from the 'sweating' system.