might bring; it was one of the precursors of Edward Bellamy's 1889 Looking Backward. Her final work, called A Last Word, was lost while still in manuscript form. Social work and issues Although Spence rejected marriage for herself, she had a keen interest in family life and marriage, and other people, and 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 friend Lucy Duval. She was one of the prime movers, with Emily Clark, of the "Boarding-out Society". This organization had as its aim removing children from the Destitute Asylum into approved families and eventually to remove all children from institutions except the delinquent. 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. Spence and Clark were also appointed to the State Children's Council, which controlled the Magill Reformatory. Spence was the first (and to 1905 the only) female member of the Destitute Board. Spence also got involved in co-operative garment manufacture to employ and give skills to those with no incomes, as a founding shareholder in the South Australian Co-operative Clothing Company. Religion Around 1854, having become disillusioned with some doctrines of the Church of Scotland, she began attending meetings of the Adelaide Unitarian Christian Church. She preached her first sermons at the Wakefield Street church in 1878, (though she was not the first woman to preach there, Martha Turner, sister of Gyles Turner and pastor of the Melbourne church from 1873, having preached there in the early 1870s) and she filled in for the minister J. Crawford Woods during his occasional absences between 1884 and 1889. Politics - feminism, suffrage and "Effective Voting" Spence was an advocate of Thomas Hare's scheme of proportional representation (PR), the single transferable voting (STV) system. At one stage, she said she considered this reform more pressing than that of woman suffrage itself. Her 1861 book A Plea for Pure Democracy was an important stimulus to Australia's adoption of PR. Spence campaigned for both female political involvement and PR. She spoke at events across Australia and to large political rallies. When Spence became vice-president of the Women's Suffrage League, she toured and was recognised as a powerful speaker for feminism,