Our first meeting of the New Year was at Kathy’s house on January 13th, and we discussed Can Any Mother Help Me?, an account of the Cooperative Correspondence Club. The CCC was set up in 1935 on foot of a flood of responses a woman styling herself Ubique received to a cry for help she sent to the letters page of Nursery World. In her letter she indicated that she was in a rut in an unsatisfactory marriage with children being her main responsibility; she did not have access to a wireless or to a library or any intellectual stimulation it seems. The responses she received indicated that she wasn’t alone and so the club was set up, whereby every member, of which there would be about two dozen to keep it manageable would write an article every month, which would be sent to an editor who bound them all together in embroidered linen covers and sent them out to the members who read and sent on the magazines to each other in turn before they got sent back to the editor. Unfortunately complete copies of the magazine don’t exist as she (it was a woman called Ad Astra for most of the life of the magazine) sent a lot of the articles back to their writers.
The club came to the attention of Jenna Bailey when she was doing some research at the Mass Observation Archive and came across some to the material which had been donated to the archive by a member of the group. This led her on to researching members of the group with the permission of their families, which not all families gave, and to the book we discussed, which told the stories of the individuals, the group and reprinted at length many of the original articles. As the magazine had circulated among its members until the late 1990s, it really was like a diary of adult female life in Britain from just before the Second World War until very recently, with the correspondents talking at times very candidly about their own grown-up children and grandchildren as well.
The initial impulse to set up a club like this was one of the things that fascinated our readers; life was so different for married women with children in those days (let alone unmarried women with children), the marriage ban on work was a concept that was new to some of us, the very idea that on marriage you’d have to give up your job in the bank or wherever is suffocating. The women who signed up to join this club were all suffocating one way or another. The social pressure was on them to be good little housewives and mothers and not to have much time left over to be anything else. As Julie rightly pointed out on the blog and at the meeting, in one sense they weren’t much of a cross section of society, there was only one member of the group who could be called working class (Cotton Goods) and she was a source of endless interest to the others as to how the working class lived.
The others mostly had very solid middle class backgrounds with third level education being the norm, and most gallingly (is that a word?) had domestic help in running their homes. This is not to take away though from the impossibly high standards that all people had to live up to in those days…housekeeping was like an art, homemaking was something you were being taught about at school, a wife’s duty was to be a clever little manager, stolidly supporting her husband’s stellar rise in the workplace, while not bothering him with the annoying details of life at home. He could be blissfully unaware of the children’s measles while the mother with her domestic crew would be subsumed in them. I’ve no doubt that the workload of these women wasn’t as punishing as that of the average factory worker or domestic help or miner’s wife, or else they wouldn’t have had time to feel the need for a magazine or to read and contribute to it, but it does seem the their lives could be awfully dull. Some of them seemed short of money, but I’m sure that’s relative; I don’t think any of them were threatened with repossessions!
The contributions published in Bailey’s book were mainly personal, and intensely personal at times, which I thought was interesting, since the intention had been to discuss things outside of the sphere of housework and children, but as we discussed this as a group it was suggested that these were selective contributions designed to give a biographical picture of the women who wrote them. Certainly Bailey mentions in her introduction that political discussions tended to get a bit heated, and the only Jewish member had to point out on many occasions the casual anti-Semitism that pervaded early contributions.
We mostly enjoyed the book, I felt it was a window on the recent past, from a much-ignored perspective, for instance it was interesting to read first hand accounts of the blitz and evacuations not from the points of view of soldiers or spies, but from ordinary people going about their lives.
Some lengthy contributions however, had mixed reactions; there’s no doubt that Isis’ account, over several issues of a curious affair-non-affair she had with a doctor was self indulgent, some people found it really page-turning, while some found it annoying. For my own part, I thought it was sad as it gradually became apparent that the whole thing seemed to have happened in her head; she had a particularly disinterested husband and a baby son who was gradually diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome and during this time formed an attachment to the only male who showed any interest in how she or her children were; her GP. She ended up becoming a Catholic after being advised to meet a particularly charismatic monk (I thought she’d form an attachment to him too) and her son spent his life in an institution.
On a lighter note, and one I forgot to bring up on the day, Yonire’s essays from the wild side (apparently she was given to exaggeration) were pure entertainment, her account of breaking into a church (in Edinburgh I think) while drunk in the middle of the night with a male friend so he could play the organ was very funny, especially the bit where he tries to kiss her and won’t take no for an answer and she practically brains him with a shoe…could have been from a different era.
As the correspondents got older and faced illness and death, of children, spouses and themselves, the entries became very poignant, and it was brought to a close as it was felt it could not continue without key members. Some of the characters had been extraordinary; pursuing various careers successfully after their children had been raised, many of them in marriage guidance and counselling!
Again, I feel I could write for pages and pages and not do justice to the book or our discussion, I’ll just leave it at that and say it provided plenty of conversation fodder, and all in the cosy environs of Kathy’s living room…many thanks Kathy for offering to house us for this meeting. It’s back to normal for the next one, i.e. The first Tuesday in February at the Coningsby Children’s Centre (our very own CCC, ho ho ho) to discuss the Memory Keeper’s Daughter.
Many thanks to Gill too for sorting out tickets to the performance of Can Any Mother Help Me? on February 14th at the Courtyard…looking forward to a babe in arms evening out!!!
