Social Work and Issues
Although Spence rejected both of the two proposals of marriage she received during her life, and never married, she had a keen interest in family life and marriage - as applied to other people. Both her life's work and her writing were devoted to raising the awareness of, and improving the lot of, women and children. She successively raised three families of orphaned children - the first being those of her sister Mrs Ward.
She was one of the prime movers, with C. Emily Clark (sister of John Howard Clark), of the "Boarding-out Society". This organization had as its aim the placing of destitute children, who would otherwise be sent to "Industrial School", into approved families. At first treated with scorn by the South Australian Government, the scheme was encouraged when the institutions devoted to the handling of troublesome boys became overcrowded. These two were also appointed to the State Children's Council, which controlled the Magill Reformatory.
Read more about this topic: Catherine Helen Spence
Famous quotes containing the words social, work and/or issues:
“What is done for science must also be done for art: accepting undesirable side effects for the sake of the main goal, and moreover diminishing their importance by making this main goal more magnificent. For one should reform forward, not backward: social illnesses, revolutions, are evolutions inhibited by a conserving stupidity.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)