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Dr Dale Spender AM<\/strong> Dr Dale Spender AMWriter, teacher, feminist1943-2023 At heart a teacher and a writer and always a feminist, Dale Spender lived a life driven by passion for women\u2019s equality and for education.\u00a0She published and edited over 30 books and many more articles, book chapters and blog entries on feminism, women\u2019s history and literature, education and new technologies. She brought numerous women along with her, attested to by the number of publications written or co-edited with other established and new writers. Dale Spender was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, on 22 September 1943, the first daughter of Ivy Davis and Harry… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":588,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondchance.org.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondchance.org.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondchance.org.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondchance.org.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondchance.org.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/secondchance.org.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":597,"href":"https:\/\/secondchance.org.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions\/597"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondchance.org.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secondchance.org.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondchance.org.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secondchance.org.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Writer, teacher, feminist<\/strong>
1943-2023<\/strong><\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n
At heart a teacher and a writer and always a feminist, Dale Spender lived a life driven by passion for women\u2019s equality and for education.\u00a0She published and edited over 30 books and many more articles, book chapters and blog entries on feminism, women\u2019s history and literature, education and new technologies. She brought numerous women along with her, attested to by the number of publications written or co-edited with other established and new writers.
Dale Spender was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, on 22 September 1943, the first daughter of Ivy Davis and Harry (Frank Henry) Spender. That she shared her birth date with early radical feminist and Suffragette, Christabel Pankhurst, was a source of joy and humour throughout her life.
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Dale showed signs of rebellion from her early years which were spent on a small property outside of Windsor, NSW.\u00a0<\/strong>When Dale was 15, the family moved to Strathfield in Sydney where she graduated from Burwood Girls High School with the unusual Leaving Certificate results of first class honours in English and History (for which she thanked her female teachers) and borderline passes in only two other subjects. She was accepted as a special entrant to Sydney University where she completed a Bachelor of Arts and teaching qualifications. Her first teaching appointment was to a boys\u2019 school in Sydney where female staff were still expected to make morning tea \u2013 and were excluded from school decision making, often undertaken by male teachers at the local RSL Club.\u00a0
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She later completed an MA in English Literature and a was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by QUT.\u00a0\u00a0She travelled to the UK to undertake her PhD at the University of London after her proposal to study \u2018mateship in the Australian novel\u2019 was rejected as a thesis topic by the University of Sydney English Department.\u00a0
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An early focus for her activism and writing was girls\u2019 education. Importantly she drew attention to the glaring omission in the body of knowledge deemed valuable by the education system \u2013 a recognition and accounting for the experience and achievements of women. She became a firm believer in the advantages offered to girls who attended single sex schools and in 1982 published\u00a0Invisible Women: The Schooling Scandal<\/em>, a study of the disadvantage and prejudice in women\u2019s education.\u00a0
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In 1980, Dale published\u00a0Man Made Language<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 originally her PhD thesis. The work established her as a feminist academic and remains influential in contemporary analysis of sexism in language and in the social and political reality it creates. Her research unearthed a factor that even women questioned: in mixed sex conversations it was not women who talked too much. It was men who dominated and who interrupted when others, especially women, were speaking. She was delighted when the word \u2018mansplaining\u2019 gained currency. She noted that until the terms \u2018sexism\u2019 and \u2018sexual harassment\u2019 were coined, women who objected to men\u2019s behaviour were mocked as lacking a sense of humour.
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In 1982 Dale\u2019s\u00a0Women of Ideas and what men have done to them,<\/em>\u00a0reclaimed the rightful position of women in ideas and literature over three centuries \u2013 tracking women\u2019s writing back beyond Daniel Defoe. Reclaiming women\u2019s intellectual heritage, she said, was a deeply feminist act: \u201cUnless we can reconstruct our past, draw on it and transmit it to the next generation, our oppression persists.\u201d (Women of Ideas, 1982).\u00a0
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Dale\u2019s London years until the late 1980s saw her immersed in a literary life and second wave feminism. In London she joined the Fawcett Society, a charity named after Millicent Fawcett, a suffragist and women’s rights campaigner. She adopted the purple, green and white of the suffragists and determined that in future she would wear only purple. She uncovered the Dora Meeson 1908 suffragists banner stowed away at the Fawcett Society and worked to have it returned to Australia where it is now on permanent display in Parliament House. The banner depicts and symbolises the women of Australia, who had the vote; it urges the British Parliament to \u2018Trust The Women\u2019 and give them the right to vote as the Commonwealth of Australia had done.
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She became part of a network of writers and thinkers and embarked on a period of research involving weeks and months at a time in the British Library (down in the stacks) where she discovered the published books of 18th<\/sup>\u00a0and 19th<\/sup>\u00a0century Australian women writers. She had never heard of them. She determined to bring them out of the stacks and onto the bookshelves of schools, libraries and homes.
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As editor of Penguin Australia\u2019s Women\u2019s Library and with the establishment of Pandora Press (the Routledge Press feminist imprint), she orchestrated the re-publication of many early women writers whose works had been forgotten. She also produced\u00a0The Diary of Elizabeth Pepys<\/em>\u00a0(1991), a literary spoof based on the famous 17th<\/sup>\u00a0century\u00a0Diary of Samuel Pepys<\/em>. Purportedly written by Elizabeth, Pepys\u2019s wife, the book is a feminist view of women’s lives in 17th century London. For many years she also edited a Women\u2019s Studies international journal with Cheris Kramarae at the University of Illinois.\u00a0
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She was in demand as an inspirational speaker in many countries and formed life-long friendships with women across the world. In England she interviewed and became friends with women from first wave feminism and in 1983 published her lively interviews with them under the title\u00a0There\u2019s always been a women\u2019s movement this century<\/em>. Rebecca West offered the oft-quoted \u201cI myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute\u201d. These were inspiring words for new, second wave feminists.\u00a0\u00a0In Australia, she forged connections with women such as Faith Bandler (an indigenous rights advocate) and Quentin Bryce (Sex Discrimination Commissioner and then Governor of Queensland and Australian Governor General).\u00a0
On returning to Australia, Dale was criticised by those working in the same intellectual fields as not being scholarly, as too prolific, as a populist and tall poppy. She applied for several academic positions in Australia but was not successful, perhaps on the grounds that are familiar to other intellectuals who made their name and fame outside of Australia. Or perhaps it was because she cheekily advised women that to change the world, they should be rude to men, three times a day. Undaunted, she determinedly forged a new career as a writer, consultant and speaker in areas as diverse as copyright, information technology, indigenous and girls\u2019 education. In 1995 she published\u00a0Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace,\u00a0<\/em>arguing that\u00a0<\/em>new technologies were being used to exclude women from culture and society just as a male controlled publishing industry had done in previous times. In Brisbane, where she has lived since the late 1980s, she was instrumental in establishing the Second Chance Program, with her friend Majorie Morton, an organisation that raises funds to assist homeless women.
She was close to her family. She had a strong bond with her parents, especially her mother, and with her brother Graeme and sister Lynne. She and Lynne together published\u00a0Scribbling Sisters<\/em>, a collection of letters that they wrote to each other from different continents. She was an eccentric \u2018purple aunt\u2019 to Graeme\u2019s and Lynne\u2019s children. She lived for over 45 years with Ted (Emeritus Professor ET) Brown AC, an academic and geotechnical engineer acknowledged as an eminent scholar and world expert in the field of rock mechanics. She once said that she would never have been published but for Ted\u2019s absolute insistence that she \u2018do her homework\u2019 before putting her words into print.
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Dale Spender was intelligent, witty, creative, generous, prolific and brilliantly controversial. She will be sadly and sorely missed by those who knew and loved her and who benefitted from her generosity and humour, her prescience and her lifelong commitment to feminism and women\u2019s equality.
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Kirsten Lees and Lynne Spender
November 2023<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"