Catherine Helen Spence's diary

Diary kept by Catherine Helen Spence in 1894.

This diary was given by Catherine Helen Spence's niece Eleanor Wren to Mrs Jeanne Forster Young, an admiring friend of Miss Spence and herself a supporter of voting reform in Australia, for the purpose of completing Spence's autobiography after her death in 1910. From Mrs Young, it passed to her daughter, Alfreda Dorothy Brock (nee Young) and finally to her grandson Robert J. Brock who looked after it and maintained it with the assistance of his wife Julie Vonda Brock (nee Julie Vonda Lodge-Davis) until it was purchased by the State Library of South Australia in 2006.

Catherine Helen Spence was born on 31 October 1825 in Melrose, Scotland. Her family migrated to South Australia in 1839.

Spence became Australia's first truly professional woman journalist and first female political candidate. She was a dedicated social and political reformer in her home colony. Spence's influence on suffrage, culminating in South Australia being the first Australian colony to grant the vote to women, and the first in the world to give women the right to stand for Parliament, extended beyond Australia. In later years she was known as the 'Grand Old Woman of Australia'. She died on 3 April 1910.

The Spence archival materials held at the State Library of South Australia include her 1894 diary, letters, manuscripts of sermons, articles written for publication, lectures, scrapbooks, and newspaper clippings. The text of the novel Handfasted, reminiscences of and by Spence, and literary manuscripts are also held, along with a framed point-lace collar made by her in 1910 as a present for the marriage of Janet Doris Hubbe and Alfred Allen Simpson.

Permission to use this item for any purpose, including publishing, is not required from the State Library under these conditions of use.

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