Catherine Helen Spence (1825-1910), writer and reformer, came to South Australia aged 14 and began her career with a number of pioneering novels, including Clara Morison (1854). From the 1870s onward, she urged various electoral reforms in SA's daily newspapers, particularly women's suffrage and the Hare system of proportional representation. An indefatigable campaigner for peace, charity, education and women's rights, she made a gruelling lecture tour of the US, Britain and Switzerland at the age of 67, returning to Australia to continue her campaigns for 'effective voting' and to stand as Australia's first female political candidate, in the Federal Convention elections in 1897. She never married, believing that women were made for more than 'making the world pleasant for men', but she raised three sets of orphaned children.
