 Rose Hacker aka ‘Elektra’ celebrating her 100th birthday with ‘Angharad’, ‘Accidia’ and author Jenna Bailey |
The secret magazine for wives and mothers
In 1935 – long before the internet – a remarkable virtual community was created by desperate young mothers writes Bernard Miller
Can Any Mother Help me? Faber and Faber. £16.99. order this book
OF one thing most of our readers can be sure. Whatever the topic, Rose Hacker, our centenarian columnist, has not just an opinion but also a mine of personal experience relevant today.
When Rose wrote recently about the need for more alternative ways of “recreating democracy”, “groups of people working together”, “grass roots action” and “bottom-up development” based on “virtual friendships and communities”, she was describing something she knew well.
As early as 1935, long before email or the internet, Rose helped launch an international, grass-roots, mutual support virtual community.
A young mother in a lonely Irish village had been abandoned by her husband with four children and very little money. In those days bringing up children involved hard physical work. Technical equipment now assumed essential and taken for granted didn’t then exist. Could today’s young mothers imagine life without plastic, disposables, tissues, washing machines, microwaves, electric kettles, dishwashers, baby alarms, food-processors, steam irons, vacuum cleaners and other modern aids of all kinds?
There was no television. This woman couldn’t even afford a radio.
For those who could pay, it was easier to employ a person to help than get the technology. Even more daunting than the hard labour were the isolation and lack of stimulation. Getting a job was nigh on impossible.
Starved of all educated, human contact, this benighted young mother wrote to The Nursery World magazine with a heartfelt plea: “Can any mother help me?”
She struck a chord.
From the response, she recruited 24 young mothers to create a virtual community of desperate housewives.
Forget Google searches, MySpace and online chat groups. Rose’s community provided much needed support for isolated women using technology no more sophisticated than a simple pen and paper. It exploited brainpower rather than silicon chips. For Broadband read Royal Mail. But it transformed lives throughout these islands.
Like today’s chatroomers, mail-groupers and bloggers, each member had her own virtual identity. Rose was known as Elektra, the founding moderator as Ubique.
Members wrote fortnightly on any topic that mattered to them. Ubique bound their letters and sent them round the group in a rota.
Each kept the papers for 24 hours, added their own comments and questions, then sent them on. True friendships developed and continued, supporting the mothers for decades.
CCC – the Co-operative Correspondence Club, was a mutual support, practical community, advice centre and more. Through its columns mothers could advertise and buy second-hand prams, cots, clothing, toys, books – in fact anything a mother might need.
And topics went way beyond the household grind. As you might expect from something involving Rose, it tackled issues such as sex, sexism, female orgasm, anti-semitism, racism, education, special needs, inequality and justice head-on
Wartime censorship meant the CCC correspondence arriving from Ireland with large swathes of text blacked out, so the Irish editor was replaced by Rose’s close friend Ina Farley.
Like many of her era, she had to give up teaching when she married since most professional jobs were for single women only. A BA honours graduate and a wonderful teacher, she had written grammar books for the use of Indian students.
CCC lasted until 1990. Ina, too ill to continue as editor, moved into a care home saying she was going to burn the seven decades’ worth of CCC letters.
Rose was horrified. When Ina said: “Well you take them!” Rose did just that and donated them to the archives of Sussex University. But, being Rose, before she did this she contracted a skilled librarian to catalogue and cross-index them and she wrote a draft social history of the women involved.
Once the material became available at Sussex University, several young women used it to write MA and doctoral theses.
Because the letters filed in the archive were no longer bound, Jenna undertook forensic research to piece the sequences together.
Remarkably, she also tracked down family members of the original mothers plus the four survivors and includes comments and additional material from them.
Jenna has drawn from a range of articles by different women on various themes to give a flavour of their lives, times and relationships, concerns, challenges and ways of helping each other.
With stories told in the women’s own words, the effect is of a series of interwoven, interactive, individual narratives.
If you are addicted to Rose’s column, this book will allow you a glimpse of what Rose was writing nearly 80 years ago. However it is much more than just Rose.
The women’s remarkable writing offers a gripping, touching and often humorous take on social, cultural, historical and moral 20th century events, major and minor – all from personal perspectives.
The publishers rightly suggest it for book clubs but it will be equally enjoyable for the individual reader.
If the book gives rise to just one community group – real or virtual – then it will have fulfilled Rose’s wishes and will serve as a tribute to the work of Jenna Bailey and the lives of all those cooperative mothers.
|
