Aging & Wisdom Quote by Catherine Helen Spence

Spence’s praise lands like more than nostalgic gratitude; it’s a quiet political claim smuggled into a memoirish sentence. “I count myself well educated” reads almost like a preemptive rebuttal to a 19th-century reflex: that a woman’s intellect is either accidental or ornamental. She insists on her education as a fact worth stating plainly, then immediately locates its source not in institutions or curricula but in a person - “the admirable woman at the head of the school.” Authority here is explicitly female, and that matters in a culture that treated women as fit to teach small children but not to be credited as architects of serious minds.

The almost comically precise timeline - “from the age of four and a half till I was thirteen and a half” - does double duty. It lends documentary credibility, and it underlines how formative those years were: education is portrayed as a long apprenticeship, not a finishing-school gloss. Spence is also staking a claim about what “education” should mean: not mere literacy, but an early, sustained cultivation of judgment.

Calling the headmistress “a born teacher in advance of her own times” flatters the individual while quietly indicting the era. If excellence had to be “in advance,” the time itself was lagging - especially on the question of girls’ intellectual potential. Spence, an author and public thinker in colonial Australia, is sketching her own origin story, but she’s also crediting an intergenerational relay: women making other women possible, even when the broader system refused to.