The populism flourishing in South Australia in the early 1890s when Catherine Spence first took to the colony's platforms was but a brief and distant echo of the populism that she encountered in the United States in 1893. In this period there were close and extensive links between populism and the multifarious activities and organisations of the Women's Movement that mushroomed throughout the capitalist industrial, and industrialising, world in the late 19th century. Spence encountered a number of prominent representatives of the North American Women's Movement during that year.

In San Francisco she met ‘that celebrated journalist, poetess and economic writer, Charlotte Perkins Stetson’. In 1893, the feminist thinker we now know as Charlotte Perkins Gilman was not so much celebrated as struggling against unwanted notoriety, because she had left her husband. Jeanne Young, writing the last section of Spence's autobiography for her, accorded to Gilman a recognition which she acquired somewhat later, but Gilman was already active in feminist circles. To her, Spence owed ‘one of the best women's meetings I ever addressed’. In Chicago, Spence was in the heartland of the North American women's labour movement. In 1893, a time of severe economic depression in Chicago and elsewhere, members of the Working Women's Union, the Ladies’ Federal Union and the Illinois Women's Alliance all helped in organising and supporting a strike of 3,000 garment workers. Much of that activity emanated from Hull House which Jane Addams and Ellen Starr had founded in 1889 on the model of Toynbee Hall in the east end of London.