Spence was in her mid-50s when she composed A Week in the Future, her vision of a co-operative society in 1988, a century from the year in which she wrote. Her dream of its educational practices owed something both to discussions she had listened to in England in the 1860s, and to developments in education in South Australia, but she had carried those ideas much further than many of her contemporaries would have considered possible, or even desirable. In a period when South Australians were still arguing about whether or not parents who could afford to educate their children should be allowed to send them to government-funded schools, and had just established, as a separate institution, the government-funded Advanced School for Girls, Spence's vision depicted an organisation of learning which sought to eliminate intractable hierarchies of class, gender and authority from education.