Why
didn't she stand for Parliament?
> View our Catherine Helen Spence Library Guide for more information.
In considering why Catherine Helen Spence, and indeed May Lee,
would not stand for Parliament, we know some of their reasons
for not standing and can guess at others. Associate Professor
of Women's Studies at the University of Adelaide, Susan Magarey
has written an erudite 17 page analysis on 'Why didn't they want
to be Members of Parliament: suffragists in South Australia' which
bears complete reading. It is chapter 4 of Suffrage and beyond;
international feminist perspectives: edited by Caroline Daley
and Melanie Nolan (Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1994)
held in the Bray Reference Library. An extract is adapted here
with kind permission from Susan Magarey.
"When Mary Lee and Catherine Helen Spence were invited to stand
for election in South Australia in 1896, both of them declined.
There are a host of reasons for these two suffragists to have
refused even to consider becoming Members of Parliament. Two were
personal and practical: their relative lack of the means to finance
an election campaign, and their age. Mary Lee’s last years were
blighted by poverty, and the income that Catherine Spence earned
from her journalism was generally less than 300 pounds a year.
Moreover, in 1896, Catherine Spence was 71 and Mary Lee was 75.
Yet this second is not an entirely convincing reason; they were
not the only suffragists who could have been nominated, but there
is no evidence that either they or anyone else, considered suggesting
younger women in their place. Age did not deter them from continuing
in the public life of the colony/state. Mary Lee took her responsibilities
as official visitor to lunatic asylums very seriously. Catherine
Spence went on not only to campaign for election to the 1897 Federal
Convention, in which she scored 7,383 votes, coming 22nd out of
33 candidates, but also to continue her campaign for effective
voting which lasted until she was on her death bed in 1910.
A third reason for their refusal to consider becoming Members
of Parliament was their 19th Century faith in other,
non-parliamentary, means of bringing about change leading to greater
social justice. They were far from being alone in this. After
all, substantial elements in the labour movement had been seeking
social justice by direct industrial action, rather than parliamentary
representation, only a few years earlier, and were to do so again
in the future.
But the principal reason for both Mary Lee and Catherine Spence
declining their nominations for election lay in their commitment
to forming organisations that would enable women to work, collectively,
in the interests of women, and their recognition that such a commitment
conflicted with the very different priorities of the newly emerged
political parties based on the competing economic interests of
labour and capital. Mary Lee explained her refusal of nomination
in 1896: she did not want, she said, to be ‘bound by pledge or
obligation to any party whatever’. Catherine Spence’s campaign
for 'effective voting' and her commitment to the principle of
co-operation rather than competition, cut across the lines dividing
the new political parties. Rather than accepting nomination for
election to Parliament, she went on to attempt to found a South
Australian branch of the National Council of Women; to help establish
the Co-operative Clothing Company—in which the workers held shares
just as the investors did, all women—and to chair its board of
management; and to preside over the meeting that founded the Women’s
Non-Party Political Association. The development of political
parties based on economic class, and the competition between them
was anathema to her.
Over the ensuing fifty-odd years, only fifteen women even contested
seats in South Australian elections, and they were not successful.
Not until 1959 did a South Australian woman gain a seat in the
South Australian legislature.
So we have a paradox. Women were proud of having gained this right,
even if they had not sought it. But they were then not able to
exercise it successfully for a further half century. Yet this
should come as no surprise. After all, as North American feminist
historians Nancy Cott and Joan Scott have both noted, in Joan
Scott's words, 'The history of feminism is the history of women
dealing in paradox, and of the radical impossibility for women
of resolving the paradoxes with which they are presented.' I want
to explore two paradoxes raised by the question presented to the
South Australian suffragists of women becoming legislators. The
first is a paradox of establishing equal rights between bodies
of different sexes. The second is a paradox of liberal democracy
itself, a form of government that aspires to egalitarianism in
profoundly unequal economic and social conditions.
For Mary Lee, the paradox presented by the campaign for votes
for women, and its logical extension, women taking their places
in the houses of Parliament, was the paradox of claiming equal
rights with men, while simultaneously recognising, and promoting,
difference between women and men. Like many proponents of female
suffrage, she believed that women and men were intellectual equals:
'mind has no sex' she asserted. But experience has. The experience
of the majority of women was the experience of working as wives
and mothers, experience that emphasised essential bodily differences
between women and men—the experience of motherhood, for women.
Mary Lee went on to draw analogies between the necessity for class-based
political representation and representation grounded in difference.
'How can men raised above the workers, living on a totally different
social plane.... represent working men?' she asked. She answered
her own question: They cannot think for working men because they
cannot think as working men. They cannot think as working men
because they are not working men. Thus, too, how can men represent
women? Men cannot think for women because they cannot think as
women, and they cannot think as women because they are not women'
(Voice 21 April 1893 page 77).
The conceptual factor that for Mary Lee, as for many other suffragists..,
resolved this paradox was a concept of evolution, derived, at
several removes, from Darwin. Evolution required both.
'Masculine and feminine influence must be wedded, co-ordinated,
in order to fairly round out the moral and spiritual functions
of men and women.'
For Catherine Helen Spence, the paradox presented by the campaign
for citizenship for women was a two-fold paradox at the heart
of liberal democracy in a capitalist economy and a patriarchal
gender order, the paradox of demands for egalitarian and altruistic
government amidst profoundly unequal economic interests and the
continuing subjection of women in their most intimate as well
as their most public relationships.' (Analysis indebted to Carole
Pateman The disorder of women.)
Two of her six novels, Clara Morison and Mr Hogarth's
will, contain passionate depictions of the difficulties for
women trying to earn their livelihoods in a gender-segmented market.
Two other novels, Gathered in and Handfasted,
advanced powerful arguments for change to the laws and customs
governing marriage as one of the principal means of keeping women
financially dependent and hence subordinate to men. If women were
to continue to be subjected to the authority of fathers, husbands
and brothers, then how could they exercise their votes independently
and in their own interests?
In 1986 historian Carol Bacchi noted the paradox of South Australia's
achievement of the right for women to stand for election and the
long wait before they were able to do this successfully. Bacchi's
explanation of this paradox is of 'prevailing attitudes... towards
women and their appropriate roles', and the contradictions between
them. Mary Lee resolved the paradoxical claims of equality and
difference by adding a third term—'evolution'. Others since, including
Bacchi, have deconstructed the binary opposition between the terms
'equality' and 'difference' showing that claims for equality are
not necessarily assertions of sameness, so that recognition of
difference does not necessarily prohibit granting of equal rights.
Such an explanation ignores the double-edged paradox enacted and
written about by Catherine Spence throughout her life: equality
for women will require a sweeping re-negotiation of the 'sexual
contract' at the heart of liberal democracy; change to the gender
segmentation of the labour market; to power relationships within
marriage; and to the sexual division of labour within households,
if the formal achievement of votes for women, and the rather accidental
achievement of the right for women to stand for election, can
possibly achieve greater equality for women."
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