In the Chat Room (1935)
In the Chat Room (1935)
In the Guardian’s books section of March 10th Veronica Horwell reviews a new study by Jenna Bailey of the Cooperative Correspondence Club, a contact organisation established in the 1930s for “educated women, trapped at home with their children (often many and not always wanted) because of the period’s rules which demanded that they leave professional jobs on marriage”.
Can Any Mother Help Me?, published by Faber, traces the club’s origins in a letter published in 1935 in the popular magazine Nursery World: “I live a very lonely life … I have had a rotten time … but know it is bad to brood and breed hard thoughts.”
The club’s few dozen members, all well-educated and mostly middle class, regularly posted a typed or handwritten article to the editor, who stitched them together into a private magazine which was then posted out to all contributors. The women wrote pseudonymously, though they did know each other’s identities. Choosing their CCC names, however, Horwell writes, “seems to have liberated members, just as logging on with a chatroom name or creating an online avatar might do now: it freed them to tell others what they could or would not utter within their families”.
What did they write about? Well, politics, religion and art, but also the recurring events of women’s lives – “births difficult and easy, sexual assault and aching longing, love reciprocated and withheld, proud and inept housekeeping, coming at last to divorce and widowhood”, all generally retailed with a briskness that reminds Horwell of Laura Jessons, the heroine of Brief Encounter ( ... nothing lasts really; neither happiness nor despair”). “Was that code of stoicism generational worldwide, or was it a specifically British geopsychology?” she asks.
The ordinary goddesses of the CCC kept in touch for 55 years and one of them, “Elektra”, has lived long enough (100 last year) to see Jenna Bailey retrieve her writings and those of her friends from the archives and place them before what will no doubt be a wide and admiring readership.
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