Vale Dr Dale Spender AM

Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne share their reflections on the remarkable life of Dale Spender
22 September 1943 – 21 November 2023

Renate Klein writes

I met Dale Spender for the first time at a Women’s Studies Conference in the USA in 1979. As I was trying to get my courage up to ask her if it would be a good idea to do my PhD at London University (I had received an offer), she approached me and said, “Where did you get this raincoat?” (And no it was not purple, it was a brilliant red!) I was totally flabbergasted, but ten minutes later I had the name of a friend who might help me find accommodation (she did), Dale’s phone number and assurances she’d help me find my way around once I was in London. 

Dale did much more than that! She introduced me to heaps of feminists, showed me how to become an editor and included me in her life and work. She became my close friend and mentor over the next 6 years during which we both lived in London. When my PhD supervisor began to dislike my politics and used the excuse to say my English wasn’t up to scratch, Dale corrected my writing and added quite a bit of her own words which I then submitted. We were almost rolling on the floor together with fits of laughter when the pages came back with the same criticism: unsatisfactory command of the English language. This happened more than once! Only the switch to a different supervisor made it possible for me to complete my doctorate: still with Dale’s support but minus her own words.

I was privileged to see Women of Ideas – and What Men Have Done to Them grow as piles of pages in Dale’s neat handwriting and I remember the many times when I arrived in her flat in Chelsea and she told me excitedly about yet another new woman writer she unearthed in the British Library and then proceeded to read me the latest instalment she’d penned the night before.

Dale herself was a brilliant Woman of Ideas – she always had more than one book on the go and to be part of her life was exhilarating. We didn’t just do a lot of hard work – we also had lots of fun, went to bookshops, literary events, visited the Fawcett Library and had plenty of good food with equally good drinks: red wine was Dale’s favourite in London; later she switched to Prosecco.

Dale was extremely entertaining and fun to be with. She was a dynamo of a woman. Her stories kept us spellbound. She was very generous with friends and strangers sharing her wisdom or contacts or helpful advice – just as she had done with me: a complete stranger. When she was seeking contributions for her new collection Feminist Theorists, she encouraged me to write a chapter on Hedwig Dohm, a brilliant radical feminist from Germany. I knuckled down, did the research and wrote it.

But she did not suffer fools gladly, particularly not when they were men. Once when we visited my Swiss girlfriend in beautiful snowy St Moritz, her then partner behaved in an obnoxious and patronising way to Dale. After trying to reason with him for a while without success, all of a sudden she said: “Oh Paul, I’ve just never seen a man with such beautiful hands as you have …” He totally fell for it and couldn’t stop grinning at her in admiration. I remember having to leave the room very quickly so I could explode into laughter. It was so typical Dale: one way or another, she always got her way.  Except with eating huge amounts of chocolate: we both gobbled up one kilo bars of Swiss chocolate that I’ve only ever seen in Switzerland. I could keep eating longer than Dale, but she was a close second.

But Dale also had her limits. When an unexperienced editor at The Women’s Press had returned a book manuscript with stupid changes and big cuts that distorted Dale’s meaning she was distraught: not just angry but despondent that someone could do this to her thoughts. Writing for her was a sacred act; one did not violate words.

After she moved back to Australia in 1986, she applied for a number of jobs at universities. She was highly qualified for these positions but to our dismay, she was never successful. It looked like men were afraid of her and women saw her as rivals: a sad example of being a Prophet at home or a Tall Poppy that was cut down. But she still delighted students at the Women’s Studies Institutes at Deakin University (run by Robyn Rowland) and later during Winter Institutes in Townsville (run by Betty McLellan and Coralie McLean) where she taught courses on education and women’s writing. When she gave lectures, she rarely had a typed -out text, she used cards with a couple of keywords or a particular line on it.

Dale’s encouragement to women was second to none. She told us to trust ourselves, claim our spaces (as men did) and start writing or producing art. She was a strong supporter of single sex education as shown in Invisible Women: The Schooling Scandal. In the wake of her death, countless women came forward who credited her with such support or simply said that Dale or her books – specifically Man Made Language – had turned them into feminists.

After being rebuffed by academia, Dale turned to emerging on-line technologies like the Internet and wrote her landmark book, Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace. Yet again, she was a trailblazer and dared put into words what others were still too scared to voice. She also became the editor of the Penguin Australian Women’s Library which brought with it the happy coincidence that Penguin had appointed my soon to be partner Susan Hawthorne to be the in-house editor for this big project that produced at least a dozen books by previously unknown Australian writers. So our lives stayed intertwined. But we were no longer that close as Dale lived in Brisbane whereas Susan and I were domiciled in Melbourne where I had started teaching Women’s Studies at Deakin University.

It is one of those cruel blows of fate that among other brilliant feminist intellectuals Dale fell prey to dementia. For me it is still hard to fathom how this supremely witty woman with a memory that seemed unattainable to mere mortals, came to forget the here and now. For many years, a group of us kept sending Dale beautiful cards which she pinned to a special board and, according to her sister Lynne, had great pleasure looking at.

As my dear friend Dale with whom I could laugh, steal horses and have a few drinks, left us quite a few years ago, I am hopeful that Dale is now in a much better place than the one she was confined to in the last five or so years. I will miss Dale till the day my time comes to go over the rainbow bridge and I sure hope we’ll meet up so we can resume our friendship. After all this time, I still have a red raincoat – I shall remember to put it on so she finds me. 

Susan Hawthorne writes

In the early 1980s, a friend told me about Dale’s book, Man Made Language. I read it, was bowled over by it and was surprised to discover she was Australian. I have a vague memory of standing in Readings Bookshop in Carlton and seeing her rush past. Someone said, “That’s Dale Spender.” It must have been around this time when she was being interviewed by the media in Australia and asked, ‘What do you think of manholes?” Without a pause, she answered, “There should be more of them.” In 1982, her book Women of Ideas—and What Men Have Done to Them was published and after that I noticed more of her books including her earlier ones since I was also working in a feminist library where I saw that, by 1984 she had published nine books.

In 1986, I applied for an editorial job at Penguin Books. I did not get the job, but a few months later they rang and asked to re-interview me. My interview happened in McCoppins Bar in the Melbourne inner suburb of Collingwood. This time around, I was successful. Soon after starting at Penguin Australia, I was told that Dale Spender had put in a proposal for a series tentatively called the Penguin Australian Women’s Library. So, they needed someone who knew something of women’s writing. I’d been reviewing for several years and had run a women’s writers’ festival. The Penguin Australian Women’s Library published lost Australian women writers as well as anthologies of essays and contemporary writing. I think I have Dale to thank for getting me into publishing unbeknownst to either of us. Luck. Timing. A week or two later I met Dale socially through Renate whom I’d known only a short time. We laughed at the serendipity.

In the following four years, I worked closely with Dale on the various books in the series, many of which are real treasures that had fallen into obscurity. Some of the writers – like Dymphna Cusack ­– were still known, others – like Mary Fortune, were not; and The Peaceful Army, an anthology of Australian mid-century writers in turn celebrating writers of previous generations was also republished. I noticed how she drew younger women, me included, into her orbit and opened doors so that they would build the experience needed for their careers.

In 1991, Renate and I set up Spinifex Press. Dale had agreed, as early as 1992, that we could publish her next book Nattering on the Net: Women, Power and Cyberspace and it appeared in our 1992 catalogue as a forthcoming title. Published in 1995, it was one of the first feminist books to deal with the impact of was fast becoming the digital revolution.  As one reviewer wrote:

‘… the book is incredibly readable and well indexed for dipping into. It is also a fabulous tool for a cybrarian trying to prove a point about copyright, plagiarism, and the future of print media. Dale Spender is a revolutionary in the way of Negroponte.’ —Catherine Ryan, State Library of Victoria Newsletter

Nattering on the Net touched many readers including librarians, booksellers and readers. In 1995, it was a Top Twenty Title in the Listener Women's Book Festival, NZ and was translated into German.

Dale is credited as the author of around 30 books, but she was responsible for many more through a number of book series she set up with different publishing houses. These include the Pandora Women’s Library, the Athene Series through Pergamon, the Penguin Australian Women’s Library, the feminist journal, Women’s Studies International Forum (in its first year, 1978, called Women’s Studies Quarterly). Forty-five years later, it still exists. With Cheris Kramerae, Dale initiated the four-volume Routledge International Women’s Encyclopedia. That is a lot of knowledge Dale has generated giving many women academics a place to publish and creating opportunities for many writers.

At that time, Dale was frequently asked to give keynote speeches and I remember one in Melbourne in which she spoke about truth. She said that ‘truth’ used to be something that was enduring, that people of generations had agreed was important. Now, she said, ‘Truth is whatever is most recent.’ She was Director and Chair at the Copyright Agency which ensures that authors and publishers receive payment for photocopied works. She would be horrified to see how AI is today having an impact on writers.

I last saw Dale in 2014 and have missed our conversations which would go in so many unexpected directions. I hope she is sharing her cosmic life-after with all her literary and feminist heroines.

Mission Beach, 3 December 2023