Jenna Bailey on Can Any Mother Help Me?
February 20, 2009
“It was not just about being friendly,” says Jenna Bailey, “actually they encouraged the opposite. They really challenged each other on religion, education and literature – everything. It was no holds barred. It was not tea and knitting and niceness – it was a chance to challenge and be challenged.”
The intellectual vigour of the Co-operative Correspondence Club’s letters evidently left a durable mark on Bailey. Their route to fruition, however, was no less striking. In 1935 a young mother of four from a small Irish village, whose husband had abandoned her, wrote to the magazine Nursery World expressing her frustration at the limitations of her life and asking if any of its readers could “suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude ‘thinking’ and cost nothing”. After receiving numerous responses, she founded a letter-writing community of 24 women that lasted until 1990. Bailey’s 2007 study of its correspondence takes its title, Can Any Mother Help Me?, from the original letter. Hence Foursight Theatre’s dramatisation of her account, which visits the West Yorkshire Playhouse between 3 and 7 March, likewise adopts it. The production benefited from her input at one rehearsal each week.
Although Can Any Mother Help Me? is a commercial book, Canadian-born Bailey first researched the CCC’s correspondence for her MA thesis in Life History Research at Sussex University. “I think it’s a brilliant historical source,” she says. “I’ve learned a great deal from it. I was very surprised at how candid they are. Talking about sex is one example. Given the time period I wouldn’t have imagined that level of conversation. I was very surprised by the marriage laws – I didn’t realise until the project that women weren’t allowed to work once they were married; that shocked me. Everyone has come back to me after reading the book saying that they learned a great deal about what life was like for women in that time.”
For Bailey, the CCC’s longevity illustrates its value to its members. It only folded after most of them had died or were near-prohibitively frail. “I think that, initially, the women were desperate for conversation and intellectual stimulation,” she explains. “They were incredibly bright but housebound. Because of the practicalities of their lives, they weren’t able to get out and socialise, debate and engage with people – to learn about them and have windows into their lives. Also, during the war, the friendships really solidified, because the women didn’t have anyone else. This was the only constant in their lives – the one thing that kept them going. It lasted because, by that point, they were one another’s closest friends and their friendships, as with all good friendships, stood the test of time. Also, it shifted amazingly in what it gave the women over the years. It became a strong source of support again in the later years, because the women became housebound again, as they had to care for their husbands, and were having household problems. It fulfilled a lot of needs throughout the various stages in their lives.”
Though ostensibly a little surprising, the CCC’s intimacy appears to have been a corollary of its insularity. “Once they had recruited sufficiently for their needs it was created for life,” Bailey says, “and they upheld the value that no-one else was ever allowed to read it. Also, because the women were so far apart geographically, they could be very open about their husbands and neighbours and suchlike.”
However, although the group chose its members fastidiously, this was often “not in the sense that the women all had to be same, but in the sense that they had to be quite different”, Bailey tells me. “There were women in Dorset, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, London and Essex. There was a tendency toward the South, but they lived all over the place – Lancashire, for example. They were everything across the board – every political party, every religious background. Some were pacifists, some were army wives. For the time period, it was exceptionally diverse: in 1938 they recruited Elektra, basically because she was Jewish and they wanted a Jewish perspective.”
It is hence possibly as much because of the spread of perspectives that the CCC encompassed as the domestic frankness of its discussions that women remain able to identify firmly with its correspondence. It is, though, the latter reason that Bailey amplifies: “I think that what’s amazing about these letters is that, in a way, they are timeless in the sense that they highlight women’s needs, desires and feelings – they’re quite universal. I’ve been surprised by the number of women who have said to me that they connect with the women in the book. There’s a contrast between the amount that you can learn about a certain time period and what women’s lives were like and feelings in those moments that could be those of any woman.”
-Jenna Bailey was talking to Simon Walker
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