A study of Catherine Helen Spence, 1825-1910

Abstract

Catherine Helen Spence was born in Scotland in 1825, six years after the birth of Victoria and ten years after the Battle of Waterloo. She died in South Australia in 1910, nine years after the death of the Queen, four years before the outbreak of the Great War, and seven years before the Russian revolution. Her life spanned an era characterised by Sir Keith Hancock as an 'epoch of the stupendous energies let loose by the Industrial Revolution, which originated in Britain, and the Democratic Revolution which blazed and spread from France', and, one might perhaps add, the beginning of the movement for the emancipation of women which flared early, though feebly in South Australia. Her life's work, developing out of her Scottish childhood and South Australian youth and maturity, involved some of the central issues raised by all three movements. Making a study of her life is like looking at those issues through a microscope - the whole is lost to sight but the detail of the fragment is clear. But the detail offers 'micros1ices' of social history as well as 'idiosyncratic knowledge', so that to achieve some understanding of the minutiae of the fragment may contribute to a closer understanding of the whole. Show more