Utopian Visions of Evolution and Race in

Feminist Fiction and Activism: Some Preliminary

Reflections on Catherine Spence, Henrietta
Dugdale and other late Nineteenth-century
Australian Writers
Jane Carey, Monash University

Abstract
Building on international scholarship that has demonstrated the importance of utopian
fiction within early western feminism, this article presents some preliminary reflections on
the first two feminist utopian novels published in Australia, Henrietta Dugdale’s A
Few Hours in a Far-off Age (1883) and Catherine Spence’s A Week in the Future
(1888-9). While these novels are relatively well known as significant early feminist
texts, they have not been the subject of any focussed scholarly analysis. Closer reading
reveals that the feminist futures presented in these works were fundamentally based in
evolutionary and proto-eugenic theories. Paradoxically, then, these visions relied on
biological determinism. They also reflected a racially exclusive worldview. When situated
alongside other feminist non-fictional writing and activism, these texts are thus
particularly suggestive in terms of understanding how ‘race’ operated within Australian
feminist thought and activism in this period.

At last I see a city in which are combined grandeur, cleanliness, order

and picturesque loveliness. Between this [city] and those of the
nineteenth century exists a difference as great, if not greater, than
between the latter and the loathsome lairs of our cannibal progenitors
… I know these graceful beings are human—yet how they differ from
my own poor self, and all others of our era … Grand creatures are
these! Benevolent, courageous and intelligent as only very numerous
generations of truth-loving ancestors could make them.
Henrietta Dugdale, A Few Hours in a Far-off Age, 5-7.

It was with this splendid vision of the future evolution of humanity that
Henrietta Dugdale opened her first, and only, foray into fictional writing. When
it appeared in 1883, A Few Hours in a Far-off Age became the first work of
feminist utopian fiction published in Australia.1 The following year Dugdale
became the founding president of the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society—the
first women’s suffrage group to be formed in Australia. The book was a
stridently feminist text. As the opening dedication outlined the fight against:
what has been, during all known ages, the greatest obstacle to human
advancement, the most irrational, fiercest and most powerful of our
world's monsters—the only devil—MALE IGNORANCE.2
Carey, Utopian Visions of Evolution and Race

Set tens of thousands of years in the future in Alethia, a new continent which
arose in the vicinity of Australia after a long glacial period, the book recounts
how the first step towards this future perfection was the granting of women’s
suffrage. The evolutionary process was initiated after women entered parliament
and introduced educational reforms, which in turn allowed ‘Woman’s inventive
faculty’ to be unleashed. Then ‘As universal study went on, more talented people
were born to bless human kind to distant ages, and thus continue to the higher
and purer future’.3 Dugdale’s future utopian vision was thus based on specific
understandings of the operations of heredity and humanity’s evolutionary
potential.
Five years later Catherine Helen Spence, the Adelaide-based writer,
reformer, feminist and one of the country’s most well known women, produced
a far more coherent and readable feminist utopian novel, with similar
evolutionary themes. A Week in the Future was published in serial form over eight
issues of the short-lived Centennial Magazine, with the first instalment appearing in
December 1888. In 1987, to coincide with Australia’s imminent bicentennial
celebrations, it was published in book form for the first time.4 This was
particularly apt since Spence’s book was set in 1988 in London. Although Spence
looked only a century ahead, she too depicted the evolution of a near-perfect
society in Britain in this time. Her utopian future was based on the application of
rational principles, and to a lesser extent technology, to the organisation of
everything from food production, to domestic arrangements, to economics, to
marriage, to clothing. Women’s equality is just one aspect of this rational
organisation.
But the major foundation upon which this ideal future has been built is
the rationale approach to reproduction. As various characters of the future
explain, ‘the whole of our present happiness and prosperity depends on the
population remaining stationary’.5 To achieve this, married couples are only
allowed to have three children. This was indeed ‘the keystone of our whole
system’.6 This approach, however, went beyond merely controlling quantity.
Quality was an equally important factor: ‘it was considered disgraceful not only
to have too many children, but to bring into the world the progeny of the
immature or the sickly’.7 On the rare occasions when ‘defective’ children were
born they too were rationally dealt with. As one woman of the future explained:
One [of my children] was born an idiot … of course, it was destroyed
at birth … It is really the best thing to do to put such imperfect and
helpless beings painlessly out of existence.8
Population control had thus resulted in a dramatic, and rapid, increase in the
‘fitness’ of the British people. They now were ‘very well and evenly developed.
The race, generally, [is] taller and heavier’.9 England was now ‘a small but
vigorous nation’.10
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This article, then, presents some preliminary reflections on what these two
texts might reveal about the links between feminist and hereditarian, evolutionary
thought in late nineteenth-century Australia. It will then, briefly, situate these
works in relation to other feminist non-fictional writing and activism, which
similarly engaged with emergent eugenic and evolutionary ideas. Focussing
predominantly on Spence’s text, I will explore how these feminist visions of the
future were, paradoxically, often linked to biological determinism, even if this
was defined by plasticity rather than fixedness. As I outline further below, these
visions were also based in a racially exclusive worldview, which placed
white/British/Anglo-Saxon people at the pinnacle of this evolutionary triumph.
They are thus particularly significant in terms of suggesting how ‘race’ operated
within Australian feminist thought and activism in this period.
My linking of fiction and feminist activism is certainly not new—in the
Australian context or elsewhere. The relationship between women fiction writers
and western feminist activism has attracted considerable attention—from both
feminist historians and literary scholars. Indeed, there is a large body of
scholarship on this theme, much of it focussed on ‘new woman’ writing in the
US and UK in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.11 There is also a
substantial body of scholarship specifically on women’s utopian writing in the
US, UK, and, to a lesser extent, Europe, which has stressed the close relationship
between this genre and feminist activism, both historically and in more recent
times.12
Closer to home, Susan Lever observes in her literary study of Australian
feminist fiction, ‘it is surprising how many women in the late nineteenth century
used fiction as a medium for speculation about the possibilities for a more
liberated future’. She suggests that ‘While women were denied access to public
office and even to public platforms, the novel [became] an accepted way for
women to enter the debate about social chance and women’s rights’.13 More
broadly, Susan Sheridan argues that ‘Since at least the 1840s, women have been a
significant presence in the white Australian cultural scene; they were never the
silenced outsiders that later historians and critics rendered them’.14
Undoubtedly the most substantial study of the important links between
fiction and feminist activism in late nineteenth-century Australia is Susan
Magarey’s Passions of the First Wave Feminists. Indeed, although neither Spence’s
nor Dugdale’s writing is highlighted, this work is centrally based around an
examination of these connections. The primary aim of Magarey’s book is to
demonstrate that, contrary to popular perceptions, Australian first wave feminists
were neither wowsers nor puritans, but rather were passionate and radical.
Magarey argues that, far from being repressed, they were ‘utopian visionaries’.15

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Looking more specifically at the genres of fantasy and science fiction,

Lucy Sussex has suggested that utopian novels were a key medium for Australian
feminist fiction writers:
For feminists, science fiction and fantasy offers an index of
possibilities, a means of exploring the potential of women. Such
fictional activism has a history: nineteenth and early twentieth
century feminists were speculating about women's future even
before science fiction and fantasy was formally defined as a genre.
These precursors were inspired by the agitation for women's
suffrage, and worked within the literary form of the Utopia.16
The utopian texts by Dugdale and Spence have, however, received remarkably
little attention. Although they are frequently invoked in existing literature, often
just the titles of the works are presented as early landmarks of Australian
feminism. Their content is rarely analysed in detail. The fullest discussion of
Spence’s work appears in Lesley Durrell Ljungdahl’s introduction to the 1988
republication of the complete text.17 This focuses almost entirely on its feminist
themes. The most sustained, albeit still brief, discussion of Dugdale’s book
appears in Audrey Oldfield’s history of the Australian women’s suffrage
movement. Oldfield observes that in the text ‘Utopian progress’ is initiated when
women are given the vote. From this, all other reforms towards a perfect society
flow’.18 Oldfield too only outlines the feminist aspects of the text. It’s central
Social Darwinian themes are not mentioned.19
In an article on 1970s feminist utopian writing, Susan Magarey
subsequently, however, invoked both Dugdale’s and Spence’s texts noting that
they should be considered together. Here, Magarey briefly emphasised how
Dugdale’s ‘largely neglected novella’ presented education as the key to women’s
emancipation. More broadly, she argues that these late nineteenth century
‘specifically feminist utopias/science fictions emerged from an activist women’s
movement’, and that they presented ‘visions of wholly new modes of living in
which one of the central and crucial changes from the present was the character
of difference between women and men’.20 In her earlier work Magarey also
briefly discussed how late nineteenth-century feminists, in Australia and
elsewhere, drew on evolutionary ideas. She argued that theories of ‘“Evolution”
gave the Woman Movement its optimism, its vision of a new social order in
which the specifically “womanly” would be valued, while, simultaneously,
women would enjoy equal right with men. “Evolution” required … utopianism’.
She highlights how the support for contraception and/or reduced reproduction
within these emerging scientific models was particularly important for feminists,
and cites Spence’s A Week in the Future as a key example here. Magarey further
briefly notes how ‘the concept of evolution carried a eugenicist baggage … of
population, nation, and race’.21 It is this ‘baggage’, which I seek to centralise here.
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Despite the absence of detailed analysis of their content, the feminist

themes and significance of these texts has been broadly established and
recognised, as has their direct relationship to feminist activism of the time. The
centrality of evolutionary, hereditarian and racial thought to these works,
however, remains neglected.22 By contrast, the strong presence of proto/eugenic
themes in feminist utopian and ‘new woman’ writing has been comparatively
well-recognised in the North American and British contexts, even if the
implications of this in terms of feminist invocations of race are still often
elided.23 While some scholarship remains locked in the mode of celebratory,
feminist recovery, in relation to Britain, Sally Ledger has observed that, ‘a Good
deal of the New Woman writing was thoroughly enmeshed with eugenic and
imperialist discourses’, and Ann Heilmann notes that ‘most New Woman
narratives, in fact, contain eugenicist undertones’.24 Indeed, in a study specifically
focussed on eugenics and British ‘new woman’ fiction, Angelique Richardson has
(controversially) argued that ‘the most sustained expression of eugenic ideas were
to be found in fiction and, in particular, in [this] body of late nineteenth-century
feminist fiction’. Revisiting the work of ‘New Women’ writers, she suggests,
reveals both ‘the role played by women in the early history of eugenic thought’
and ‘the intimate relations between early feminism and eugenics’.25
My aim, in part, is thus to explore whether drawing on this international
scholarship might provide new insights into late nineteenth-century Australian
feminist writing and activism. But I am also seeking to push this analysis further
in relation to feminist invocations of race. In doing so, I am particularly building
also on Susan Sheridan’s excellent study of (white) Australian women’s writing
from the 1880s to the 1930s, which was one of the first to highlight the
importance of ‘race’ in Australian feminist writing. Sheridan herself observes that
scholars had ‘paid little attention to the racist dimensions’ contained in this
writing. Of particularly relevance is the way Sheridan not only examined
discussions of Aboriginal peoples, but highlighted the importance of whiteness
too as race. She notes that, while references to ‘the race’ are pervasive in
women’s writing of this era, ‘feminist historians have only glanced in passing at
the fact that these discourses address white women only’. When they deployed
the term ‘race’, Sheridan argues, ‘the specification of “white” race is not made
but is taken for granted … [but] “race” is definitely white and usually also
northern European, if not specifically British’.26

Henrietta Dugdale
To return firstly then to Henrietta Dudgale and her evolutionary, feminist vision.
Born in London in 1927, she married a merchant navy officer J. A. Davies, and
migrated to Australia in 1852.27 After Davies died, she married ship’s captain
William Dugdale in Melbourne in March 1853. The couple settled in Queenscliff
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and had three sons. In the late 1860s, Dugdale separated from William and
moved back to Melbourne. It was from this time that she began to engage in
politics. By the 1880s, Dugdale was certainly a radical in many ways. A member
of the Eclectic Society and the Australasian Secular Association, a vegetarian,
and, separated from her husband, she formed an ‘irregular’ relationship with
Frederick Johnson, who she finally married in 1903.
Her first (probable) activism for women’s rights was in 1869, when she
wrote a letter to Melbourne’s Argus newspaper, under the pseudonym ‘ADA’,
commenting on the Married Women's Property Bill. In it she declared that ‘the
bill to secure property to married women is but a poor and partial remedy for a
great and crying evil’. As the letter went on to explain, this greater evil was the
fact that, even in the most extreme cases of desertion, there were no legal means
of divorce. The innocent victims of desertion, both women and men, were thus
left with little choice but to fall into ‘evil’ relationships.28 It was this letter that
formed the basis for Dugdale’s claim to have been the first person to agitate for
women’s suffrage in Australia, even though the letter did not explicitly mention
this issue.
A Few Hours in a Far-off Age is primarily set in a great ‘palace of learning’
tens of thousands of years in the future. The plot revolves around a description
of a mother of the future leading ‘her only two children’ though this great
repository of knowledge. She is instructing them on the early history of their
‘progenitors’, beginning in the nineteenth century, and the how ‘the law of
evolution’ began to take effect on ’these primitive people’. For reasons that are
never explained, a woman of the present (1880s) is able to perceive this future
and it is her description that the text presents.
The ‘display of antiquities’ in this great hall allows the evolved future to be
continually contrasted with the ‘primitive’ and ‘barbaric’ past—that is, the
present in which Dugdale is writing. Even so, the mother cautions her children
not to judge the past too harshly: ‘[eventually] you will perceive that primitive
wrong-doing was entirely from the vanity and prejudice born of ignorance’.29
The examples given revolved primarily around the evils which resulted from the
power wielded by (ignorant) men.
The people of this era have evolved into near perfection, physically,
mentally and socially. Everything is beautiful. There are no jails, no pollution, no
drinking dens:
No ill-fed barefooted, unclean children, learning the probationary
steps to scoundrelism. No suffering animals … No decrepitude in
age. No careworn faces. All are lovely with the light of
knowledge—knowledge not in the capabilities of our lower natures,
but towards which we are surely tending.

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The people themselves:

appear luminous with integrity and benevolence. Both sexes are
bewitchingly graceful. Women are rather taller that the generality of
the present generation, but the men are not such fine animals as
those of my century, though far nobler looking. Their ambition has
evidently been to attain efficiency of intellect and benignity in
preference to the retention of tiger muscle. Another link to the
brute fast disappearing.30
This development, however, had taken tens of thousands of years, and
including a long period of struggle when: ‘Nation after nation fell. Whole races
dwindled in intellect, and sunk irrevocably … male vanity was so strong that it
required the extinction of many people before the real reason could be
understood by men’.31 Nevertheless, as noted above, with the introduction of
‘universal study … more talented people were born to bless human kind to
distant ages, and thus continue to the higher and purer future’.32 All of the major
evolutionary advances are attributed to women.
Dugdale’s work was certainly no literary masterpiece, and indeed its prose
for the most part is quite awkward and uninspiring. It was transparently written
primarily as a polemic intended to spur the women of her own time into action.
Indeed, at several points the text reverts unambiguously to this mode. The future
setting disappears and Dugdale speaks directly to her readers in the present,
calling them to action. For example, during a description of the need for rational,
healthy clothing, Dugdale switches to an impassioned exhortation to the present,
‘Abandon your injurious style of clothing! Allow your physical organs to have
room for healthy life, that your minds may expand’. Moving on to other topics,
she argues ‘it is woman’s duty to try to save, help and raise woman—it matter not
how fallen’. After continuing for several more pages, she concludes with her own
commitment to strive for the benefit of other women, ‘for the progress of all
human kind’.33
As far as I have been able to ascertain, Dugdale’s book received little
notice in the local Australian press and it was certainly not widely reviewed.
Dugdale herself, however, was a figure of some notoriety. As the regional
Gippsland Times reported in 1886, in a column on Melbourne news, describing a
new journal the Woman’s World which was about to appear, ‘The periodical will
be principally literary, feminine in tone, and possessing no leaning towards the
masculine claims of Mrs Dugdale, women’s rights, or radical politics’.34 Similarly
the ‘Melbourne Ladies’ Letter’ in the Hobart Mercury in 1886, reporting on the
high achievements of women in the recent university examination results,
observed ‘We believe in the higher education of woman, but only as a means of
fitting her for the better training of her children, and also for companionship
with man … But I must not write in this strain, for if I do Mrs. Dugdale, and her
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associates in the assertion of “women’s rights”, will be taking me to task’.35

Dugdale’s key role in founding the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society,
the first women’s suffrage group to be formed in Australia also received some
attention. As the Argus reported in a column devoted to various meetings around
Melbourne, on 7 May 1884, Dugdale took the chair at the initial meeting called
to ‘inaugurate a suffrage society, intended to advocate the extension of voting
power to women’. This brief report, which expressed no opinion on the society’s
objectives, did not even note that this was the very first society of its kind to be
formed in Australia. An equal, and more engaged, amount of space in the
column was devoted to the recent formation of the Kalizoic Society of Victoria,
for ‘the encouragement and cultivation of the beautiful’.36
A longer article the following month reported on a meeting held by the
Victorian Women’s Suffrage Society with ‘about 50 ladies and 20 gentlemen
being present’. This revealed that evolutionary thinking was indeed prevalent in
the discussions. The meeting was chaired by the Rev. Dr. Bromby, who observed
in his opening remarks that ‘In barbarous times might prevailed over right, and
consequently the weaker vessel came off the worst, but as civilisation advanced
women had achieved good deal for themselves. In barbarous countries men won
their wives by violence or otherwise, but in the western civilised countries
chivalry had prevailed … Still they had been kept in the background, and not
allowed to occupy the position they were entitled to in public and political
affairs’. Dugdale would certainly have applauded such his evolutionary outlook,
echoing as it did some of the major themes of her book. So too Mrs Parker
argued that women should be given the vote not on the basis of wealth of
property, but rather ‘because she was rich in that inestimable wealth which would
tell to the benefit of future generations’. And in a long speech near the end of the
meeting Dugdale herself went on to describe how she had ‘known many
women’s lives utterly wrecked by the barbarous laws of a barbarous age … The
country which was the first to grant the suffrage to women would be the
grandest and brightest in the world, and would be the foremost on the road to
real progression’.37 Even if Dugdale’s book did not gain a wide readership, her
views were widely circulated in her extensive activism.

Catherine Helen Spence

Catherine Helen Spence was born in Scotland in 1825 and migrated to South
Australia with her family in 1839.38 As a journalist, novelist, reformer and
feminist, she became one of the country’s most well-know women. Her first
novel, Clara Morrison, appeared in 1854. She is particularly associated with the
foundation of the Boarding-Out Society (1872-), which sought to place
orphaned, destitute and reformed delinquent children in the homes of ‘good’
families, and visit them to check on their behaviour and treatment. Her
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book, The Laws We Live Under (1880), was the first social studies textbook used in
Australian schools. In 1891 she became a vice-president of the Women's
Suffrage League of South Australia and in 1897 she became Australia's first
female political candidate after standing (unsuccessfully) for the Federal
Convention set up to consider the proposed new Australian Constitution. Never
married, she raised several orphan children. A Week in the Future was her last
major work of fiction. Spence’s far greater writing talents make her text a far
more successful work of fiction, although it still suffers from her obvious desire
to educate readers, evidenced by the lengthy descriptions and minute details she
includes about the social, domestic, economic and political systems of her future
utopia. This detail reveals how hereditarian principles are equally if somewhat
differently central to Spence’s text are they are to Dugdale’s.
In Spence’s novel an elderly, Adelaidean spinster, Emily Bethel, is offered
the opportunity to visit the future for a week by her doctor. It is her dying wish.
She is convinced that ‘we are on the eve of a great social and industrial
revolution’ and wants to see ‘some outcome from the groaning and travailing of
all creation, and from the efforts of so many earnest and devoted men and
women for the amelioration of the conditions under which the toiling masses
live and labor’.39 It is not completely explained how the physician is able to
perform this feat, beyond a fleeting reference to the occult, the transcendental
and the ‘drink of mandragora’, but he gives her a choice of location: ‘In
Melbourne, in London, in your Scotch ancestral home, in New York, or in
Pekin?’ Her choice is revealing on several levels. She replies ‘Every place has its
charms, but as the older countries are those where the greater need of change
exists, let me be located in or near to London’. While her doctor argues that
Pekin is an older civilisation, Miss Bethel explains that it would be:
too unfamiliar to be as interesting as the British metropolis. I need
all my past knowledge to throw light on the new revelations. The
language, the literature, the history, and the traditions of England
are among my most cherished possessions.40
Thus it is not the of the more progressive South Australian colony, or the
mysterious East, that she wishes to see, but rather what she sees as the older
centre of ‘civilisation’.
In choosing to take this journey so, Miss Bethel is also performing a type
of self euthanasia, since the price of this trip will be her immediate death, rather
than a lingering illness. As she explains, ‘I feel I have had a good share of life
hitherto, but that has been because I have taken an active part in it … but I
should not like to linger on the scene when I can be no longer serviceable’.41
The eugenic basis of this utopia was made explicitly clear. As in Miss
Bethel relates, the future England (or Britian) of 1988 had overcome:

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The mournful population checks of the past—cannibalism,

infanticide, war, pestilence, and prostitution … The old
Malthusianism of the past, which delayed the marriage of the
prudent and thoughtful, while the reckless and improvident
multiplied all the more, had resulted in the survival of the unfittest’.
The text then condemned the way that, in 1888, ‘humanity and philanthrophy
[sic] were eager to save the lives of the sickly and the defective, but took no steps
to check their parenthood’.42 These were central tenets for emerging eugenics
movement in Britain.
In 1988, however, as our heroine explains ‘Science has put it into the
power of the married people to regulate their families’.43 Although it had taken
some time ‘to establish the rule that no married couples should have more than
three children … Now it is felt to be as disgraceful to exceed the number, as in
old times it was to have a child born out of wedlock’.44 As noted in the
introduction, is was considered equally ‘disgraceful’ for weak or sickly parents to
have any children at all. When Bethel observes that ‘You make short work with
one class, the congenital idiots, but these are few’, she receives swift
confirmation in reply ‘Very few. Healthy parents rarely have idiot children’.45
This is not a totally heartless regime. It is explained that ‘except when
there is idiocy, we preserve, by all means in our power, the most delicate
children, and often find they have rare gifts. We object to delicate adults
becoming parents, but where life is, we try to make the most and the best of it’.
Even unreformable criminals and ‘dangerous lunatics’ are ‘fed, clothed and
employed, even amused’. However, they are not permitted to ‘perpetuate the
species’:
In direct contrast to mediaeval celibacy, which prevented the
parenthood of some of the sweetest and wisest of the race, the
mischievous and morally diseased are debarred from it.46
And the practice of birth control has had other happy effects. Small families,
combined with ‘the severest restriction of charity’, had also eliminated the
‘idleness’ of ‘tramps, vagrants and loafers’ among the lower classes. Since mental
illness was assumed to be hereditary, the numbers of ‘lunatics’ had also rapidly
and dramatically decreased. Of the few who remained, ‘Criminal lunatics, such as
those suffering from homicidal mania, were put to painless death’, while
‘harmless lunatics’ were allowed to live in the community.47 Even after only a
century of such practices, statistics proved that the population was ‘larger and
finer’. The old population of ‘ill-fed, hereditary poor’ had died out and now ‘the
physique was altogether finer. Both men and women were taller, larger, and
stronger than our old average’.48
Other themes in the book make its racial preoccupations even clearer.
While Britain, Europe, and the former British colonies in Australasia and North
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America have made great strides, the ‘East’ still lags behind. India, China and
Japan ‘have not the aid of machinery, and invention, and effective association of
labor to any great extent yet … [but] they are learning from the West to demand
more, and, as the first step towards this, they now limit their population’. This
last reform had been difficult since ‘The religion of India, and that of China also,
favored the reckless multiplication of the species’.49
Moreover, although the opening of the book had implied that the ‘old
country’ of England was in great need of reform, at numerous points in the text
the superiority of Britain, and the British people is asserted: ‘The British Islands
have a great history … Mother of nations planted by all waters, and, in India, the
administrator and educator of a foreign empire’. Reflections on empire recur
throughout the text. Indeed, the book opens with the main character reflecting
on what the future might hold, for Britain and her empire:
Was there to be federation or disintegration? Was the homogeneous
yet heterogeneous British Empire to be firmly welded together, or
were the component parts to be allowed peacefully to separate and
form new states? … Was Britain to remain mistress of India, and to
keep that dependency? Was she to annex all territory which might
be supposed to preserve her open route towards it? What struggle
was there to be in central Asia between Britain and Russia?
When she arrives in the future she finds that the colonies are now all self-
governing. However, although ‘England no longer had the power and prestige of
a vast empire, it had ‘succeeded in replicating itself across the globe’. Now, ‘As in
the case of our ordinary families, the children have become independent. They
still love their parent State, and honor her; but they do not depend on her.’ This
family connection was especially strong between:
The English-speaking communities … the feeling between England and
her daughter States, including the great Republic of America, was of the
friendliest. Literature and laws, manners and customs, history and
traditions were identically similar.
She reflects at length on the glorious British history that has produced this
wonderful future:
dating from before the Norman Conquest … the long growth of
civilisation, liberty and orderly Government, which had been
transplanted, with some modifications, to the ends of the earth. The
mother-city of the van had not lost her historic glory through
throwing off her surplus population.50
Britain now also practices informal immigration restriction, and moves are
being made for legislation to make this official. One of the main characters, Mr
Oliphant explains: ‘Fancy coolies and Chinese coming to destroy all we have
struggled for!’51 Miss Bethell attends a parliamentary debate on the issue where it
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is observed that ‘To allow free access to all-comers, who might take all risks and
compete with the advanced society and bring down the standard of living, was
dangerous’. Miss Bethel, while recognising the logic here, simultaneous worries
about the loss of openness:
England had reached her old pre-eminence by being open to all-
comers. A larger mixture of races than any continental nation
possessed, had evolved a composite character with many of the best
qualities of each, which liberty had strengthened by its being the
refuge for the oppressed, where the most despotic Powers in
Europe could not touch their political refugees … [this] had been a
great factor in the triumph of free thought, free speech, and free
action all over the civilised world.52
The racial mixture she is referring too, however, is clearly and most definitely
limited to European peoples.
When the first installment of ‘A Week in the Future’ appeared in the
Centennial Magazine in January 1889, a reviewer in the South Australian Advertiser
observed that ‘Miss C. H. Spence, who invades all departments of literature with
considerable success begins a story … which, from the introduction, will
probably deal with the occult and spiritualist doctrines’.53 Its feminist themes
were not highlighted here, or in most other reviews. Many reviews gave only
fleeting mention to Spence’s contributions. One review even represented Spence
as a man, observing, ‘In this number Mr C. H. Spence continues his peculiar
speculative story’.54
Its Malthusian ideals, however, did receive attention. As one, quite
dismissive, overview in the Brisbane Courier described how in the chapter in the
June edition ‘we learn that in another century Britain will be governed by a
Senate of twenty members, with of course Home Rule for Ireland, and the other
divisions. We note also that everybody marries early, but that somehow Malthus
rules’.55 Referring to the limitation of family size, an earlier review of the
February issue in the Queenslander opened by noting:
There is nothing very profound in this number, but there are some
things that are interesting, especially to Australians …. [in the
second installment of ‘A Week in the Future’] The reader may
perhaps be startled to find that the wiser coming generations will,
among other innovations, destroy imbeciles and other incompetents
in their infancy; it is not said that they will bury the old and useless,
but possibly is coming in the next chapter.56

A W eek in the Future, Co-authored by Jane Hume Clapperton

The major reason why Spence’s text should be read though the lens of racial
hereditarianism, however, is that it was heavily based on the work of Scottish
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 Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Nos. 17 & 18, 2012

writer and reformer Jane Hume Clapperton. Indeed, the evolutionary vision
which informed it had a very specific origin. As Lesley Durrell Llungdahl has
demonstrated, A Week in the Future was not simply a novel of Spence’s own
imagination. It was extensively based on Clapperton’s (non-fictional) book
Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness which was published in 1885.
Indeed, some passages are direct transcriptions from this text. Although others
have noted the extent to which A Week in the Future is based on Clapperton’s
work, they have not drawn out the significance of the fact that Scientific Meliorism
was not a simply or even primarily a feminist work. Rather it was not only an
evolutionary text, but a proto-eugenic manifesto.57
Born in 1832, Clapperton led a fairly conventional life as an unmarried
woman living with and then looking after her mother. After her mother’s death
in 1872, however, she started to become more publicly active in social reform
and to publish articles in journals such as the Westminster Review.58 She was an
associate of the Men and Women's Club (1885-89), a group founded by Karl
Pearson who later held the first Galton Chair of Eugenics at the University of
London (1911-33), and which brought together Annie Besant, Olive Schreiner
and Elizabeth Blackwell, among others to debate sexual morality.59 Clapperton
also supported birth control and became a member of the Malthusian League,
which, as I have discussed elsewhere was not primarily a feminist organisation.60
Scientific Melorism was her first book, and it attracted considerable attention.
Spence wrote an extended glowing review of it in the Adelaide Observer in 1887.61
At nearly 500 pages, Scientific Melorism was a weighty tome that established
Clapperton as an ardent social Darwinian, who by the early twentieth century
evolved into an influential socialist eugenicist.62 The term ‘eugenics’ had only
been coined by Francis Galton in 1883, and Scientific Meliorism was among the
first major books to directly deploy this word. However, as Clapperton’s text
itself demonstrates, theories about the evolutionary potential of selective
breeding for producing a higher race were widespread well before ‘eugenics’
emerged as the descriptor for these ideas. Clapperton both drew on Galton and
sought to add her own critiques and contributions:
Mr. Galton has already brought before the public a scheme for
race regeneration … to elevate the intellectual, moral, and physical
standard, and keep up the numbers of his race, by increase of the
superior breed, and decrease and gradual elimination of the
inferior breed … His policy, then, is early and fruitful marriage for
the best specimens of our race, and widespread celibacy in the
case of those less highly favoured, whilst everywhere the
sentiment should prevail, that eugenics, or the improvement of
the human stock, is the primary consideration in marriage, and the
guiding principle in sex relations.63
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Carey, Utopian Visions of Evolution and Race

Clapperton considered this scheme to be defective in only one aspect—namely

how it demanded celibacy from ‘’inferior’ specimens. She argued instead for the
‘careful use of artificial checks’—meaning contraception. As she elaborated:
Mr. Galton is our most advanced teacher in the field of eugenics …
[but on certain points] his system of social reform differs from
that of scientific meliorism … The systems are alike in teaching
that it is in man's power, therefore it is clearly his duty, to improve
the physical, intellectual, and moral structure of his race, by
intelligent forethought and careful action, in exercising the
function of propagating his kind … Population must not be kept
up by consumptives, or by persons whose pedigree is tainted by
insanity, or any other disease known to be hereditary. Such
persons, Mr. Gallon thinks, should live in celibacy; whilst I
consider celibacy as in itself a vital evil, destroying individual
happiness, and tending to social disorder.64
For Clapperton, love was a spiritual experience which even the ‘inferior’ should
be allowed to enjoy. In 1878 Clapperton’s intimate friend G. A. Gaskell had
written to Darwin himself arguing this point.65 Nevertheless, this was a minor
difference, and many sections of the text strongly echoed Galton:
In the savage epoch of our history, the force of natural selection
produced survival of the fittest. From that epoch we have long
since passed into a humanitarian semi-civilized epoch, in which
sympathetic selection produces a miserable state of indiscriminate
survival; and now we wait the solution of the above problem, to
pass onwards to a rational, wholly civilized epoch, when intelligent
selection will systematically secure the birth of the morally,
intellectually, and physically fit.66
As the title of her book indicates, Clapperton was wildly, even
romantically, optimistic for the future: ‘The era of science will be the Utopian
golden age; the beautiful Psyche (the mind) now wandering aimlessly through the
world will, in the evolution of happiness, be sought out and cherished’.67 In her
Preface, she optimistically proclaimed that ‘The possibility of evolving superior
social conditions is, to my mind, a scientific certainty, dependent upon psychic
effort’.68 To her, biological and social evolution were linked phenomena. Utopia
could only be achieved through ‘a process of evolution’, and not merely of social
relations, since ‘the realization of this state requires a perfected Humanity, hence
the path of progress is in the gradual improvement of individuals—the creation
of a superior race whose spontaneous impulses will construct and support an
improved and improving social system’.69
Clapperton herself also wrote later wrote a semi-feminist/proto-eugenic
utopian novel, Margaret Dunmore, or A Socialist Home (1888), which unsurprisingly
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shares much in common with A Week in the Future. This work was also intended
to be fictionalisation of Scientific Meliorism.70 Set just two years in the future, it
reflected Clapperton’s optimism that utopia was within reach. It focussed on the
benefits which would flow from the ‘creation of a modern domestic system,
favourable to the bringing into the world humanity of a new type’. This was the
‘first and most necessary step’ for ‘true progress’.71 In this new world, ‘the power
of bring fresh human life into existence is bound to be controlled in
unfavourable conditions by unhurtful scientific methods … in an epoch of conscious
evolution. For unhealthy persons to become parents is a crime again Humanity’.72
Its feminist politics are less overt, however, as the gender division of labour
remains largely unchanged, although it is challenged and women share communal
authority and decision-making.73
Finally, Clapperton’s future vision was not directed towards humanity at
large, but was racially specific. As she argued in her chapter on ‘Heredity’ in
Scientific Meliorism:
Now we stand upon the threshold of a new epoch, and conscious
evolution is awakening us to the fatal consequences of our own
unconscious action … Population has too rapidly increased. The
intelligent and thoughtful have refrained from parentage, and the
general result comes out in deterioration of national health, an
appreciable loss of vigour and vitality in the white races of mankind.74

Concluding Connections: Feminist Writing and Activism

As Lynman Sargent has observed, ‘Colonies produce utopias. The reason is
obvious. Colonies represent new beginnings for the colonists although they have
frequently represented endings for the colonized’. Australia proved fertile
grounds for visions of future development—a better Britain, a more healthy and
virile race. As Sargent also notes, there are two generalisation which can be made
regarding Australian utopian literature, ‘first, the single most common theme is
race and, second, it is overwhelmingly racist’. In this vein, Sargent identifies
explicitly anti-Chinese works, and others describing the threat of invasion from
Asia, and works targeting Aboriginal peoples. But also ‘utopias concerned with
eugenics that tend to stress the desirability of a white Australia’.75 Feminist
utopian fiction was no exception. The two works considered here certainly
represent a feminist future of women’s equality, or in Dugdale’s case supremacy,
as a desirable, even inevitable, result of social and biological evolution. But they
equally reflect the evolutionary thinking of their time.
Of course these novels should not be read as straightforward expressions
of the authors beliefs, nor can it be assumed that these ideas necessarily
translated into activism. There is evidence in the case of Dugdale that she
expressed the views contained in A Few Hours in her activism. And in 1883 she
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Carey, Utopian Visions of Evolution and Race

produced a pamphlet entitled Science and Religion (her only other known
publication). This supported Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and was a response
to an attack by the Rev. A.W. Cresswell (of St John’s Church, Camberwell) on a
lecture Judge Higginbotham had given on the subject.76
It is equally evident that Catherine Spence (unlike Jane Clapperton) did
not view heredity as wholly deterministic. In A Week in the Future, Emily Bethel,
reflecting on the benefits that have resulted from ensuring that children no
longer grew up in poverty, observes:
That work … was begun in my day … [and] I took an active part in
it in my corner of the world, and was surprised at the success of
training against heredity. But heredity left some failures with us, and
must have left more in such a country as England.77
As Spence’s promotion of the system of ‘boarding out’ for ‘neglected’ or orphan
children illustrated, she had great faith in the power of environment, but did
acknowledge that it had some limits. She also abhorred the great cost of
institutional care. She elaborated on these views in her 1887 pamphlet Heredity
and Environment. In relation to the inheritance of ‘character’ in particular, she
stated that this depended ‘greatly on the Environment which of the hereditary
traits will take persistent hold’.78 The remainder of the pamphlet went on to
review and refute some of the main scientific literature linking bad character,
‘pauperism’ and criminality to heredity, particularly the influential 1877 family
study by US sociologist Richard Dugdale, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism,
Disease and Heredity.
Spence was not alone in her interest in this topic. In 1899 the Western
Australian feminist and doctor, Roberta Jull, published another pamphlet also
entitled Heredity and Environment, which was the transcript of an address she had
given to the influential Perth women’s group, the Karrakatta Club. Her
assessment sided far more with the influence of heredity. She observed that:
The most obvious instance of heredity is that of Race. Children of
white parents are white, of black, black. Different races and tribes
have distinct racial and tribal characteristics. The Anglo-Saxon type
differs from the Latin. Again, the sub-divisions of these differ from
each other.
She then turned to the main topic which the club had asked her to speak on,
namely ‘the marriage of the unfit’. This was ‘[of] great importance … How many
children do we see born into the world to be sources of misery to themselves
and others; children whose very existence is a burning shame to their parents’.79
While this article has obviously only examined a small sample of
Australian feminist hereditarian thinking, these examples could fruitfully be
connected with others. For example, Bessie Harrison Lee’s influential publication
Marriage and Heredity, and with Catherine Martin’s fiction, which are discussed by
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 Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Nos. 17 & 18, 2012

Jennifer Caligari and Sharon Crozier-De Rosa in this issue of Lilith, along with
the activism, speeches and publications of Dugdale’s close associate Brettena
Smyth, who described herself in one 1894 publication as a ‘pioneer Australian
lecturess … in matters pertaining to health and disease, and the improvement of
the race’.80 Moreover, as I have discussed elsewhere, from the early twentieth
century a great deal of white Australian feminist activism was inspired by racial
and eugenic concerns.81 The earlier origins and cultural expressions of these
‘utopian visions’ are thus perhaps worthy of further investigation.

Endnotes
1 Lymann Tower Sargent, ‘Australia as Dystopia and Eutopia’, Arena Journal, no. 31 (2008): 118. See

also Lymann Tower Sargent, ‘Australian Utopian Literature: An Annotated, Chronological

Bibliography 1667-1999’, Utopian Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1999), pp. 138-173.
2 Mrs H. A. Dugdale, A Few Hours in a Far-off Age (Melbourne: M'Carron, Bird, 1883), 3. The book
was dedicated to Justice George Higginbotham, who was also a journalist, newspaper editor and
sometime politician, known for his liberal, reformist views and support for women’s suffrage:
Gwyneth Dow, 'Higinbotham, George (1826–1892)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National
Centre of Biography, Australian National University,
http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/higinbotham-george-3766/text5939.
3 Dugdale, A Few Hours in a Far-off Age, 40.
4 Catherine Helen Spence, A Week in the Future, with an introduction & notes by Lesley Durrell
Ljungdahl (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1987). Spence was unable to find a publisher for an earlier
utopian novel, which was eventually published 1984: Nan Bowman Albinski, ‘Handfasted : An
Australian Feminist’s American Utopia’, Journal of Popular Culture 23, no. 2 (1989): 15-31.
5 Helen Spence, A Week in the Future, 35.
6 Ibid., 39.
7 Ibid., 89.
8 Ibid., 35.
9 Ibid., 79.
10 Ibid., 107.
11 See for example Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1997); Ann Heilmann, New Woman Fiction: Women Writing First-Wave
Feminism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Angelique Richarson and Chris Willis, The New
Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-siècle Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
12 See for example Nan Bowman Albinski, Women’s Utopias in British and American Fiction (London:
Routledge, 1988); Libby Falk Jones and Sarah Webster Goodwin, eds, Feminism, Utopia and Narrative
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten, eds,
Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994).
13 Susan Lever, Real Relations: The Feminist Politics of Form in Australian Fiction (Sydney: Halstead
Press, 2000), 18. This book is primarily concerned with examining the relationship between literary
art and feminist politics, and does not cover the work of either Dugdale or Spence, although both
are briefly mentioned. For a personal foray into Australian women’s literary history, including
substantial excerpts from their writing se Dale Spender Writing a New World: Two Centuries of
Australian Women Writers (London & New York: Pandora, 1988). See also Debra Adelaide, ed., A
Bright and Fiery Troop: Australian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Melbourne: Penguin Books

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Carey, Utopian Visions of Evolution and Race

Australia, 1988), especially Helen Thompson’s chapter on Catherine Spence, and Kay Ferres,
ed., The Time to Write: Australian Women's Writing 1890-1930, (Melbourne: Penguin, 1993).
14 Susan Sheridan, Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing 1880s-1930s
(Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995), viii.
15 Susan Magarey, Passions of the First Wave Feminists (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001), 2. For other

Australian work on the ‘new woman’ and late nineteenth-century feminist activism see for example
Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley, and Susan Sheridan, eds, Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the
1890s (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993); Frank Bongiorno, 2001, ‘“Every Woman a Mother”: Radical
Intellectuals, Sex Reform and the “Woman Question: in Australia, 1890-1918’, Hecate 27, No. 1
(2001): 44-64; Carole Ferrier, ‘The Travels, Trials and Travails of the New Woman in Australasia’,
Australian Studies 17, no. 2 (2004): 95-112; Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian
Feminism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999).
16 Lucy Sussex, ‘Feminism’, in The MUP Encyclopaedia of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Paul

Collins (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 74. Both works are also briefly mentioned
in Russell Blackford, Van Ikin and Sean McMullen, Strange Constellations: A History of Australian
Science Fiction (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 30.
17 Lesley Durrell Ljungdahl, ‘Prologue’, in Spence, A Week in the Future, 7-27.
18 Audrey Oldfield, Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle? (Melbourne: Cambridge
University Press, 1992),134-5. Spence has, of course, received considerable scholarly. But while her
publication of A Week in Few Future frequently receives passing mention within treatments of her
life, and its feminist ideals are particularly noted, it has not been a central focus of any other study.
19 The text only receives passing mention in Magarey’s Passions, although she discusses Dugdale as a
significant feminist activist.
20 Susan Magarey, ‘Dreams and Desires: Four 1970s Feminist Visions of Utopia’, Australian Feminist

Studies 22, no. 53 (2007): 325-6.

21 Magarey, Passions, 79-80.
22 Eleanor Dark’s much later work, Prelude to Christopher (1934) is the only text by an Australian
woman writer that has been extensively examined for its strongly eugenic plot, and even this has
not been linked to earlier works: Susan Carson, ‘Finding Hy-Brazil: Eugenics and Modernism in
the Pacific. Hecate 35, nos 1/2 (2009): 124-133; Nicole Moore, ‘The Rational Natural: Conflicts of
the Modern in Eleanor Dark’, Hecate 27, no. 1 (2001): 19-31. See also Barbara Brooks and Judith
Clark, Eleanor Dark: A Writer’s Life (Sydney: Macmillan 1998).
23 See for example Albinski, Women’s Utopias in British and American Fiction. This is a broad survey of
works from the 1830s to 1897. Thus, while few themes are discussed in detail, Albinski does note
the preoccupation with evolutionary progress in women’s utopian fictions of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, and the strong emergence of eugenic themes from the 1880s.
However, she elides the implications of this in terms of racial themes. See also Jean Pfaelzer, ‘A
State of Her Own: or, What Did Women Want?’, in her The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984). This notes the Social Darwinian basis of
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), the most well known early feminist utopian fiction,
which is often erroneously cited as the first work in this genre. Beth Sutton-Ramspeck makes
explicitly clear the centrality of eugenics to Herland and to Gilman’s earlier utopian novel, Moving the
Mountain (1911). In both works, society is completely restructured on strictly eugenic principles:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland and Related Writings, edited and with an introduction by Beth
Sutton-Ramspeck (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2012).
24 Ledger, 71; Heilmann, 85.
25 Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the
New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xvii. For other works which specifically
explore eugenics in new woman fiction see for example, Cecily Devereaux, Growing a Race: Nellie L.

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 Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Nos. 17 & 18, 2012

McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005);
Teresa Mangum, Married, Middlebrow and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998), chapter six; Carolyn Burdett, ‘The Hidden Romance of Sexual
Science: Eugenics, the Nation and the Making of Modern Feminism’, in Sexology in Culture: Labelling
Bodies and Desires, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 44–59; Carolyn
Burdett, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2001). There is a voluminous literature on the history of eugenics, some of which
discusses its relationship with early western feminism. For a recent, comprehensive, overview see
Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010). The broader relationship between feminism and eugenics,
particularly in the early twentieth century, has also received some notice. For Australia, and
discussions of some of the international context, see my own previous work: Jane Carey, ‘The
Racial Imperatives of Sex: Birth Control and Eugenics in Britain, the United States and Australia in
the Interwar Years’, Women's History Review 21, no. 5 (2012): 733-75 Jane Carey, ‘“Wanted—A Real
White Australia”: The Women’s Movement, Whiteness and the Settler-colonial Project’, in Studies
in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity, Culture, ed. Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (New York:
Palgrave, 2011), 122-139; Jane Carey, “Women’s Objective—A Perfect Race”: Whiteness, Eugenics
and the Articulation of Race’, in Re-Orienting Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the History of an
Identity, ed. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 183-
198; and see also Ann Curthoys, 'Eugenics, Feminism and Birth Control: The Case of Marion
Piddington', Hecate 15, no. 1 (1989): 73–89.
26 Susan Sheridan, Along the Faultlines: Sex, Race and Nation in Australian Women’s Writing 1880s-1930s
(Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 113. Other important work has explored race and colonialism in
Australian women’s writing. See for example, Ann Standish, Australia Through Women’s Eyes
(Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008); Patricia Grimshaw and Ann Standish, ‘The
Fabrication of White Homemaking: Louisa Meredith in Colonial Tasmania’, in Re-Orienting
Whiteness, ed. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), 135-48.
27 Biographical details on Daugdale are taken from Janice N. Brownfoot, 'Dugdale, Henrietta

Augusta (1826–1918)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography,

Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dugdale-henrietta-augusta-
3452/text5269; and Susan Priestley, Henrietta Augusta Dugdale: An Activist 1827-1918 (Melbourne:
Melbourne Books, 2011). Priestley’s disappointing biography devotes considerable space to
Dugdale’s family history, particularly tracing her lineage back in Britain, and to her early life, but
pays strangely less attention to her period of public prominence and feminist activism in the 1880s.
Her publication of A Few Hours is discussed, but little detail is given about the actual content of the
novel, or her motivations for writing it.
28 Argus 13 April 1869, 7. Dugdale’s authorship of this letter is slightly uncertain, but the sentiments
it contains certainly reflect her personal circumstances at the time.
29 Dugdale, A Few Hours, 10.
30 Ibid., 6. Emphasis in original.
31 Ibid., 43-4.
32 Ibid., 40.
33 Ibid., 52-3, 57.
34 Gippsland Times, 19 March 1886, 3.
35 Hobart Mercury, 18 January 1886, 3.
36 Argus, 19 May 1884, 9.
37 Argus, 24 June 1884, 7.

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38 Biographical details on Spence are taken from Susan Magarey, Unbridling the Tongues of Women: A
Biography of Catherine Helen Spence, 2nd rev. edition (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2010);
Susan Eade, 'Spence, Catherine Helen (1825–1910)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National
Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/spence-
catherine-helen-4627/text7621.
39 Spence, A Week in the Future, 22.
40 Ibid., 24.
41 Ibid., 24.
42 Ibid., 113.
43 Ibid., 89.
44 Ibid., 39.
45 Ibid., 82.
46 Ibid., 96.
47 Ibid., 114-5.
48 Ibid., 44.
49 Ibid., 59.
50 Ibid., 115.
51 Ibid., 57.
52 Ibid., 111. My emphasis. See also the similar discussion of racial mixture on p. 115.
53 South Australian Advertiser, 9 February 1889, 7.
54 Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May 1889, 9.
55 Brisbane Courier, 22 June 1889, 7.
56 Queenslander, 13 April 1889, 690. Many reviews gave only fleeting mention to Spence’s

contributions. See for example Sydney Morning Herald, 4 June 1889 and 29 June 1889.
57 Magarey does briefly note this: Passions, 78, 80.
58 For biographical details on Clapperton see S. M. den Otter, ‘Clapperton, Jane Hume (1832–
1914)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
59 For a detailed and insightful discussion of the Club ‘s activities and ideas see Lucy Bland,
Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914 (London: Penguin Books, 1995),
3-47.
60 Carey, ‘The Racial Imperatives of Sex’, 736-7.
61 Catherine Helen Spence (writing under the appellation ‘A Colonist of 1839’), ‘Scientific
meliorism and the evolution of happiness’, parts 1 & 2, Observer 11 June 1887 and 18 June 1887.
62 Duangrudi Suksang, ‘Equal Partnership: Jane Hume Clapperton's Evolutionist-Socialist Utopia’,

Utopian Studies 3, No. 1 (1992), 95.

63 Jane Hume Clapperton, Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench & Co., 1885), 332.
64 Ibid., 335.
65 Ibid., 337.
66 Ibid., 336.
67 Ibid., 408.
68 Ibid., xi.
69 Ibid., 426.
70 On this point see Wendy Parkins, ‘Domesticating Socialism and the Senses in Jane Hume
Clapperton’s Margaret Dunmore: Or, A Socialist Home’, Victoriographies 1, no. 2 (2011): 261–286.
71 Jane Hume Clapperton, Margaret Dunmore, or A Socialist Home (London: Swan Sonnerschein,
Lowrey & Co., 1888), 22. For discussions of this book see also Suksang, and Ledger, 50-53. See
also Jane Hume Clapperton, A Vision of the Future: Based on the Application of Ethical Principles
(London: S. Sonnerschein, 1904).

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72 Clapperton, Margaret Dunmore, 126-7. Emphasis in original.

73 Clapperton certainly did support enfranchisement, social equality and equality in marriage for
women: Scientific Meliorism, 435.
74 Clapperton, Scientific Meliorism, 326. My emphasis.
75 Sargent, ‘Australia as Dystopia and Eutopia’, 112, 115.
76 H. A Dugdale, Science and Religion (Melbourne: Stephens Printer, 1883).
77 Spence, A Week in the Future, 82.
78 Catherine Helen Spence, Heredity and Environment (Adelaide: Webb & Son Printers, 1897). This
was a published version of a paper she had delivered to the Criminological Society of South
Australia and printed at their request.
79 Roberta Jull, Heredity and Environment, Paper read at the Karrakatta Women’s Club by a Medical
Practitioner. Printed by Request of the Club. (Perth: Upham & Edwards, City Printing: 1899), 3, 5.
80 Brettena Smyth, The Social Evil: Its Causes and Cure (Melbourne: Rae Brothers, 1884), title page.
81 See note 25 above.

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