Co-operative Correspondence Club

The Cooperative Correspondence Club (CCC) was a group of approximately twenty-four women, living all over the United Kingdom, who wrote to each other in the form of a private correspondence magazine from 1936 to 1990.

The CCC began in 1935 after one woman, writing under the pen name Ubique, wrote the following cry for help into the motherhood magazine the Nursery World. “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 get so down and depressed after the children are in bed and I am alone in the house . . . Can any reader suggest an occupation that will intrigue me and exclude "thinking" and cost nothing! A hard problem I admit."

Mothers from all over the country replied to Ubique’s letter, expressing that they too were struggling with similar feelings of boredom and loneliness. The women suggested that, as a way to combat this, they write to one another. So many women replied that they decided to write in the form of a correspondence magazine so that everyone could be included.

At the time that the women of the CCC came together, marriage bars were in place which meant that women in public service jobs were no longer legally allowed to work once they were married. Alongside this was enormous societal pressure for women to be in the home and to spend their time working hard to be “ideal” housewives and mothers. Strict housekeeping and childrearing regimes were the norm. Typical days were filled by maintaining the household and religiously following the rules outlined by the childrearing expert of the time, Truby King, whose practices are seen as quite severe in modern times.

This was also a difficult time for middle class women in the UK because they were the first generation who chose to move away from their family homes to start their married life. Although this was their preference, it meant that the women did not have their mothers or grandmothers near them (as previous generations had) so they had limited support with raising their families. All of these circumstances resulted in many well educated, bright women, like those in the CCC, who were relegated to the home feeling generally dissatisfied and lacking intellectual stimulation and adult companionship.

When they got together in 1935, every member of the CCC agreed to write an article, fortnightly, using a nom de plume, and mail it to the editor, who would compile all of the contributions and hand-stitch them together in a decorative linen cover. There was only one copy of each edition of the magazine. The editor 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 to respond to the articles by commenting directly on the pages. That member would forward it on to the next woman, and so on, until every person had received the magazine.

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