For Catherine Helen Spence, effective voting was the most important cause of her life, and she worked for it for the last 50 years of her life. For her the notion of 'effective voting' upholding democracy was more important than 'votes for women'. The state electorate of Spence is named for Catherine in recognition of her work for parliamentary democracy.
Injustice rectifies nothing.
She was not talking about votes for women. In that powerful, but peculiar, assertion she expressed her life's major conviction and mission. Reform of electoral injustice had been, she wrote later, 'the foremost object of my life'. A year later she had delivered 'about forty public addresses to audiences in various places and of various political standpoints', campaigning not only in Adelaide but also in the country, to the south-east and then to the north of the city. She did make a contribution to the method of distributing preferences, however.