Bailey - Can Any Mother Help Me?

Ubiques letter in Over the Teacups in July, 1935.

Ballingate, Ireland, 1935:

Can any mother help me? I live a very lonely life as I have no near neighbours. I cannot afford to buy a wireless. I adore reading, but with no library am very limited with books. I dislike needlework, though I have a lot to do! I get so down and depressed after the children are in bed and I am alone in the house. I sew, read and write stories galore, but in spite of good resolutions, and the engaging company of cat and dog, I do brood, and dig the dead. I have had a rotten time, and been cruelly hurt, both physically and mentally, but I know it is bad to brood and breed hard thoughts and resentments. Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude thinking and cost nothing! A hard problem, I admit.

This cry for help, written by a lonely mother using the nom de plume Ubique (Latin for everywhere), appeared in the July 1935 issue of the widely read British motherhood magazine The Nursery World. The letter, published in the Over the Teacups column of the magazine, elicited a chain of responses from sympathetic mothers from many different walks of life living all over the United Kingdom. Fellow readers of The Nursery World, also writing under pseudonyms, were happy to offer Ubique suggestions to help her through her troubles. The majority of the responses echoed that of Sympathiser:

I am indeed sorry for Ubique in her trouble I wonder if Ubique would care to correspond with readers. I should be very pleased to exchange letters with her, and this would give her fresh thoughts and would, I should think, cheer her up. Perhaps she will tell me if she cares for this idea.

Mother of Three, who wrote that letters are a wonderful help when one is lonely, even suggested that more fortunate new friends can enclose a stamped envelope, so that stamps need not be a strain.

Ubique received letters from several women throughout the next couple of months and, in September of that year, she responded to The Nursery World: I feel I must thank all the kind people who have both written to me personally and via THE NURSERY WORLD. Id love to write to them all personally, and correspond with lots of them, but even the stamps are 2d. Instead, Ubique suggested that they form a correspondence magazine. This meant that each woman, writing under a nom de plume, would contribute an article on any subject and mail it to Ubique, who would assemble all of the articles and hand stitch them together in a decorative cover. She would mail the completed magazine to the first woman on a pre-arranged list, who had a set amount of time to read it and respond to the articles by commenting directly on the pages. That member would forward it on to the next woman, and so on, until the magazine had been fully circulated. There was only one copy of each magazine, and they would produce it fortnightly . The women decided to call themselves the Cooperative Correspondence Club (CCC) and proposed that the magazine be written exclusively for, and read exclusively by, the members of the club.

Like Ubique, most of the prospective members of the CCC were lonely and bored, and they welcomed the opportunity for connection and change that a correspondence magazine offered. One of the first women to answer Ubiques letter in 1935 was Janna, aged twenty-six . She regretted her decision to marry young, stating that there was so much else I wanted out of life, and in those days marriage often = housewifery, which I loathed. I didnt even, then, want children, and really had poor little [Julian] more because of boredom than anything else. As Janna wrote, for women in the 1930s marriage typically meant being relegated to the home. During the inter-war years there was a great deal of emphasis on the family unit and on the traditional roles for men and women. The members of the CCC therefore belonged to a generation of women whose choices were limited as they were expected mainly to become housewives and mothers.