Catherine Helen Spence was a powerful and persuasive public speaker. She had, in a sense, been practising speaking for most of her adult life. She recalled a moment in the 1850s when she was in her late twenties – a wonderfully backhanded moment – when she began to sing while she was doing the ironing. Her four year-old nephew ‘burst out with “Don't sing, auntie; let me hear the voice of your words.“’ So she abandoned melody and recited Wordsworth. But this was, as she herself was to observe, exercising her gifts exclusively for ‘home consumption’. Law and custom, she continued,
have put a bridle on the tongues of women, and of the innumerable proverbs relating to the sex, the most cynical are those relating to her use of language. Her only qualification for public speaking in old days was that she could scold, and our ancestors imposed a salutary check on this by the ducking stool in public, and sticks no thicker than the thumb for marital correction in private.
Historian Marilyn Lake has observed, ‘Oratory was a masculine performance; womanliness demanded a soft voice and winning smiles’. Perhaps Catherine Spence was the exception which proved the rule.
Once launched in the 1870s, Miss Spence won acclaim and affection for her ‘rare gifts of speech and intellect’. At home in Adelaide, a reporter was to praise a sermon he heard her deliver, approving her slight Scots accent, her clear, firm voice and her unselfconsciousness.