'Can Any Mother Help Me?'
Have been meaning to say - I bought a rather good book in Stansted the other day, and it did me very well, despite being one that my eye had skimmed over and dismissed as being likely to be chicklit & not my sort of thing. (The hardback has to my mind a more appropriate cover, dunno why they've changed it really.)
It's packaged as social history, and has a lot of good and interesting stuff about the ordinary lives of ordinary women, in their own words - worth reading for that in any case. But the thing that really caught me about it is that it is an early precursor of an APA or of a blog - those things we are all involved in at the moment as LJ users, and which some of us have been involved with to one degree or another as BAPAns or BunAPAns.
The similarities were staggering and kept me giggling / gaping. The woman who started the club had written to Nursery World asking for support from other mothers as she was in a lonely situation far from her family and any other support circle - the result was a correspondence magazine very similar to something like an APA (rules were that everyone sent in an article to the central mailer / editor, schedule being fortnightly, yikes!, and she would compile the mailing with a cover, send it out to to the members who would then send them on in sequence, returning to the editor at the end of the sequence).
The women involved numbered around 30 or 40 maximum (though apparently there were other correspondence magazines circulating too); used pseudonyms such as Ubique, Ad Astra, A Priori; kept the magazine secret so that even husbands and children never really read the entries; and, amazingly, kept it going for 50 years or so, until the numbers had reduced to such an extent that it was not considered worth keeping going,
The subjects covered were varied though mostly family-focused - childbirth, marital difficulties & divorce, sexual, death, debilities, and own death as the members started getting older and older and dying off. So, the struggles of everyday life, mostly - with the (stated) restriction that every member should be a mother. Very interesting and well-written (though I myself would of course be banned under that restriction, as would be many of my friends).
I recommend this book to others and am happy to lend it out to those who can reach my copy.
It's packaged as social history, and has a lot of good and interesting stuff about the ordinary lives of ordinary women, in their own words - worth reading for that in any case. But the thing that really caught me about it is that it is an early precursor of an APA or of a blog - those things we are all involved in at the moment as LJ users, and which some of us have been involved with to one degree or another as BAPAns or BunAPAns.
The similarities were staggering and kept me giggling / gaping. The woman who started the club had written to Nursery World asking for support from other mothers as she was in a lonely situation far from her family and any other support circle - the result was a correspondence magazine very similar to something like an APA (rules were that everyone sent in an article to the central mailer / editor, schedule being fortnightly, yikes!, and she would compile the mailing with a cover, send it out to to the members who would then send them on in sequence, returning to the editor at the end of the sequence).
The women involved numbered around 30 or 40 maximum (though apparently there were other correspondence magazines circulating too); used pseudonyms such as Ubique, Ad Astra, A Priori; kept the magazine secret so that even husbands and children never really read the entries; and, amazingly, kept it going for 50 years or so, until the numbers had reduced to such an extent that it was not considered worth keeping going,
The subjects covered were varied though mostly family-focused - childbirth, marital difficulties & divorce, sexual, death, debilities, and own death as the members started getting older and older and dying off. So, the struggles of everyday life, mostly - with the (stated) restriction that every member should be a mother. Very interesting and well-written (though I myself would of course be banned under that restriction, as would be many of my friends).
I recommend this book to others and am happy to lend it out to those who can reach my copy.