Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Introduction to the New Edition
- Catherine Magarey
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Acquiring a room of her own
- 2 The line of least resistance
- 3 Faith and enlightenment
- 4 Edging out of the domestic sphere
- 5 Learning for the future
- 6 Round woman in her round hole
- 7 Prophet of the effective vote
- 8 The New Woman of South Australia: Grand Old Woman of Australia
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Round woman in her round hole
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Introduction to the New Edition
- Catherine Magarey
- Contents
- Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Acquiring a room of her own
- 2 The line of least resistance
- 3 Faith and enlightenment
- 4 Edging out of the domestic sphere
- 5 Learning for the future
- 6 Round woman in her round hole
- 7 Prophet of the effective vote
- 8 The New Woman of South Australia: Grand Old Woman of Australia
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘You may try, but you can never imagine, what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl’. This cry of anguish blazes from the pages of George Eliot's novel, Daniel Deronda. Spence quoted it in an article on Eliot's life and works; she paused at several points which suggest parallels with her own life, observing that the sentiment best expressed the condition Mary Ann Evans experienced in her youth. Since Spence considered ‘the province of genius’ to be not so much superlative creativeness, but rather ‘to call forth a responsive spark from the souls with which it is in communion’, Deronda's mother's outburst could stand as her own. For 30 years, Spence defied social convention to work as a journalist, but she did so without acknowledgement, recognition, or even much in the way of financial return.
The patriarchal social order which so constrained her attempt to maintain her independence – to become her own breadwinner, while retaining freedom from the double subjection of women of the working class – made a ‘lady journalist’ a contradiction in terms. Margaret Stevenson, wife of one of the Register's earlier directors, might have contributed not only poems but also political articles to that paper; Spence might have had occasional pieces printed in her brother-in-law's South Australian; but both sheltered behind initials and pen-names.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Unbridling the Tongues of WomenA Biography of Catherine Helen Spence, pp. 105 - 120Publisher: The University of Adelaide PressPrint publication year: 2010