The book Man Made Language (1980) is based on Spender's PhD research. She started lecturing at James Cook University in 1974, before going to live in London and publishing the book Man Made Language in 1980. In the latter half of the 1960s she taught English literature at Dapto High School.

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

She attended the Burwood Girls High School in Sydney and she was a Miss Kodak girl. The eldest of three children, she has a younger sister Lynne, and a much younger brother Graeme. Spender was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, a niece of the politician Percy Spender and crime writer Jean Spender. In the 1996 Australia Day honours, Spender was awarded 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'. 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 was the series editor of Penguin's Australian Women's Library from 1987.

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'. Dale Spender (born 22 September 1943) is an Australian feminist scholar, teacher, writer and consultant.

Man Made Language by Dale Spender