Dear Miss Spence: An Open Letter to Catherine Helen Spence (1825–1910)

ABSTRACT

Inspired by Aileen Moreton-Robinson's Talkin’ Up to the White Woman, in this reflection on the beginnings of foster care in Australia I talk back to a dead white woman, Catherine Helen Spence, and argue that she should no longer be honoured for her role in the nascent system because of the classism at the heart of it.

KEYWORDS:

• Foster care
• boarding out
• Catherine Helen Spence
• lived experience

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Tony Tonkin and Nathan Kauschke for reading early drafts, and to Jemma Tonkin-Michell for listening as I explored some of the ideas out loud.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dee Michell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender Studies & Social Analysis at the University of Adelaide. From 2013 she has been working with Dr Nell Musgrove, Australian Catholic University, on the ARC funded Long History of Foster Care. She also has a long standing interest in equity at university, and in women in marginalised religious groups.

Notes

1. I have taken this and the following quotation from Margaret Barbalet's 1983 book as, curiously, the original cannot be located in the State Records Office, Adelaide. The closest the researcher was able to come to locating the source was to find a series of reports by the lying-in homes inspectress for the period 1900–1910.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant number 20112148] for the Long History of Foster Care project has enabled the research for this paper, for which I am grateful.