By the 1890s, Spence's voice already had an established place in South Australia's public affairs. She could, on occasion, be heard by anyone worshipping in the Unitarian Christian Church in Wakefield Street. A member of a district school board, and of the State Children's Council, she could ask questions and proffer advice in committee meeting rooms. As a regular contributor to one of the colony's daily newspapers, the Register, her ideas could reach far more people than she was likely to encounter face-to-face. Yet, at that time, most South Australians heard her voice indirectly, through her articles in the press, or muffled by the sheltering walls of the church and committee room. She was still susceptible to descriptions like Geoffrey Blainey's, delivered from a vantage point in the public sphere, as ‘the veiled maid of Adelaide’.

To have made even as much of an inroad as Spence had by that time into the world of men, might well have seemed enough to anyone in their sixties, but it was far from enough for Catherine Spence. Her voice was to be heard on platforms, in meeting halls throughout South Australia – indeed across south-eastern Australia, and the United States. She was to speak where people could hear her directly, where she risked the immediate impact of interjections, scoffing and jeering, but where, instead, she would win love and acclaim for her persuasiveness and her power as a public speaker.