Dale Spender

Dale Spender (22 September 1943 – 21 November 2023) was an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, writer and consultant.

Dale Spender was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, on 22 September 1943.

She was a niece of the politician Percy Spender and crime writer Jean Spender.

She was the eldest of three children.

She attended the Burwood Girls High School in Sydney and she was a Kodak girl.

In the late 1960s, as an MA graduate from Sydney University, she taught English and history at Meadowbank Boys High School, in Sydney's north-western suburbs.

She also taught English literature at Dapto High School.

She started lecturing at James Cook University in 1974, before going to live in London, where she studied for a PhD at the University of London and published her research as the book Man Made Language in 1980.

In London, she joined the Fawcett Society, the organisation named after women's suffrage pioneer Millicent Garrett Fawcett.

In her 1980 book Man Made Language (published by Routledge and Kegan Paul), Spender argues that in patriarchal societies men control language and that it works in their favour.

"Language helps form the limits of our reality. It is our means of ordering, classifying and manipulating the world" (1980:3).

Where men perceive themselves as the dominant gender, disobedient women who fail to conform to their given inferior role are labelled as abnormal, promiscuous, neurotic or frigid.

Spender draws parallels with how derogatory terms are used to maintain racism (1980:6).

Man Made Language illustrates how linguistic determinism interconnects with economic determinism to oppress women in society and provides a wide breadth of analysis to do this.

The book explores the assumed deficiencies of women, silencing, intimidation and the politics of naming.

In 1983, Dale Spender was co-founder of and editorial advisor to Pandora Press, the first of the feminist imprints devoted solely to non-fiction, committed, according to The New York Times, to showing that "women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation".

Among Spender's subsequent publications was her 1986 book for Pandora Press, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen, which showed that the reputation of many deserving early women writers "had been sidelined by sexism".

She was the series editor of Penguin's Australian Women's Library from 1987.

Spender's work is "a major contribution to the recovery of women writers and theorists and to the documentation of the continuity of feminist activism and thought".

She published Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers in 1988, the year when she returned to Australia, living in Brisbane, Queensland.

In 1991, Spender published a literary spoof, The Diary of Elizabeth Pepys (1991, Grafton Books, London).

In the 1996 Australia Day honours, Spender was appointed Member of the Order of Australia "for service to the community as a writer and researcher in the field of equality of opportunity and equal status for women".

For nine years she was a director of Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) in Australia and for two years (2002–2004) she was the chair.

She was also involved with the Second Chance Programme, which tackles homelessness among women in Australia.

Spender had been in a relationship with Professor Ted Brown for more than three decades.

They had no children.

She consistently dressed in purple clothes, a choice she initially made for its symbolic reference to the suffragettes.

Dale Spender lived in Brisbane, Australia, where she died on 21 November 2023, at the age of 80.

Announcing her death, Spender's family said that it was "a source of joy and humour in her life" that she shared a birthday with early radical feminist Christabel Pankhurst.

Purportedly written by Elisabeth Pepys, the wife of Samuel Pepys, the book is a feminist critique of women's lives in 17th-century London.

Spender was a co-originator of the database WIKED (Women's International Knowledge Encyclopedia and Data) and founding editor of Pergamon's Athene Series and of Pandora Press, commissioning editor of the Penguin Australian Women's Library, and associate editor of the Great Women Series (United Kingdom).

Spender was particularly concerned with intellectual property and the effects of new technologies: in her terms, the prospects for "new wealth" and "new learning".