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In 1935 a reader’s letter to the magazine Nursery World began with the words: “Can any mother help me?” It was a cri de coeur from a young woman, bored and isolated at home with small children, desperate for distraction from her “brooding” thoughts. Readers responded — some with sympathetic understanding, others with bracing advice — and the young woman wrote again, regretting that she couldn’t afford to reply to each of them personally and suggesting that they form a correspondence magazine: each contributor would write pieces on any subject, mail them to the young woman who would stitch them together inside a cover and post to the first name on a prearranged list; that person would read and/or write any comments in the margins and send on to the next name and so on until the magazine had been fully circulated.

The Cooperative Correspondence Club took off like a rocket: recruited through adverts and personal recommendation, its members were mostly middle-class housewives — educated, opinionated, excluded from careers by convention and legislation (teachers and other professionals were barred from working once married), often intellectually frustrated and harassed by the demands of household management and child-rearing. Using pseudonyms drawn from classical literature — Ubique, Elektra, Ad Astra — and writing for each other’s eyes only, they shared experiences — the birth of a handicapped child, infidelity, thwarted ambition — and discussed everything from child psychology and family planning to pacifism and politics. The club survived through the Second World War and flourished for 55 years until the failing health and mortality of its ageing membership brought it to a natural end.

At 88, Joan Melling is the youngest of the club’s four surviving former members. As an isolated young mother with an unusable degree from Cambridge, five children and a distant husband wedded to his work, she chose Accidia as her nom de plume after reading about nuns suffering from a form of depression called accidie — special friendships were discouraged in the convent, which made them very lonely. Like many of the correspondents, Accidia’s accounts of daily life have resonance half a century later: “The early morning is a peak period of buttoning trousers, fastening sandals, brushing hair, chivvying and chasing, shouting answers to innumerable questions — ‘Mummy, where’s my...?’ ‘Mummy, A’s doing so and so and I can’t dress properly’, ‘Mummy, B’s locked the door and I can’t get in to clean my teeth’. Lucky, lucky Daddy who dresses placidly and half asleep, unconscious of the turmoil and unmolested by the throng!”

Expert View

We are not the first generation of women to feel excluded and marginalised and bored.

Sarah Vine

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BACKGROUND

• A woman's work is never done – but it could be better paid

• Blind feminism has hurt our children

• Look, just grow up and kick out the kids

• Doing our best in broken families

• Jeremy Clarkson: Home alone can be the perfect state for a child

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Yet, she says now, she thrived on it: “I think part of the thing of having all these babies was to provide the companionship that was missing in my marriage. After all, I knew how not to have them. ”

On an inhospitable February afternoon, we are sitting in a pool of lamplight in the Dorset cottage where she has lived alone for 14 years since her husband died. “My family are scattered now — in Canada, Australia, Germany — a very bad investment on the whole. But my son Benedict is congenial company, we have had several holidays together and now he has a Catalan boyfriend, they both come to visit me.” Still she is as lonely and intermittently depressed — “I prefer the word melancholy” — as she was throughout her marriage, describing her life in the club magazine as “a vale of (unshed) tears”. The correspondence club filled a gap in her life: “One terribly missed adult conversation and the club provided companionship at one remove. I made a particular friend whose husband was a conscientious objector, like mine: we had both been shunned by our neighbours during the war.” When her children grew up, she worked for the Marriage Guidance Council, later Relate, retiring only four years ago. Does she think that young women have a better time these days? “Well I’m not in favour of marrying young,” she says. “A lot of marriages are a farce — an enormous amount of money spent on a lavish wedding and on the getting of things, then they get bored.” In her great granddaughter’s class, she says, there are only three children out of 30 whose parents are still together.

But, unlike in her day, women with her level of education can now have satisfying careers as well as children: is that not progress? She frowns: “But men still don’t do their share in the house and all these women are crazily trying to do everything. I don’t think it’s working terribly well, but I’m not sure what the answer is — except men pulling their weight.” Before leaving this tall, solitary, rather shy woman, I ask if she has any photos of her family: “Oh yes, they are upstairs somewhere; I don’t normally look at them — a good Buddhist stays in the present, looking neither forward nor back.”

Despite the restrictions placed on them by marriage and motherhood, many CCC members contributed to their communities through voluntary work, but Elaine Morgan, another of the four survivors, now living in Wales, was an exception: she earned money by writing plays for television, spurred on by her desire for a third child her husband said they couldn’t afford. She convinced him that if she earned £1,000 then they could go into production again.

The women never discussed sex or contraception openly in the pages of their magazine but, writing as Angharad, Elaine kept her fellow members up to date on her situation with wittily veiled explanations of her family planning practices: “You see, in our ménage, the control of this side of things has never been left to the distaff side. I have never even beheld a ‘wife’s best friend’ [a Dutch cap], let alone learnt how to manipulate one. I think this was at first because he thought I would be inefficient and later because he found I was recklessly philoprogenitive and quite capable of filling his house with noisy pledges of my affection while blandly protesting every time that I didn’t know the gun was loaded... However, he now has ten years’ expertise in keeping us both very happy with no risk. (Please don’t anyone scribble questions on this one, as I am already blushing hotly). No, I must just earn that thousand, then he won’t go back on his word.”

Angharad and her husband never conceived the longed-for third child, but they did adopt a baby and she continued to entertain and occasionally scandalise her readers, chronicling her attempts to give up smoking and keeping them abreast of the critical highs and lows of her professional life.

As well as writing plays and many episodes of the long-running TV series Dr Finlay’s Casebook, Elaine Morgan produced several books, notably The Descent of Woman, a riposte to the male-centred theories of Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape. She rejected the idea that the distinguishing features of women had evolved to serve and please men, arguing that if, as one theory went, humans lost their hair because they needed to sweat while chasing game, that did not explain why women should also lose their hair as, according to the so-called savannah hypothesis, they would be looking after the children. The book sold well but was pilloried by the anthropological establishment as “unscientific”. Now 85 and widowed, she writes a weekly column for the Western Mail.

Rose Hacker also contributes a regular column, which appears fortnightly in the Camden New Journal under the line: “She's 100, so she should know.” Rose chose Elektra as her nom de plume because, like Agamemnon’s daughter, she adored her father, working with him in his fashion business, modelling Parisian frocks for clients until her marriage in 1930. A member of an Orthodox Jewish family, she became an ardent socialist, a member of the Fabians and of the Progressive League run by Bertrand and Dora Russell. Like Joan Melling, she worked for the Marriage Guidance Council and wrote a book, Telling the Teenagers, explaining how to talk to young people about sex, love and relationships. Rose and her husband were founder members of the Camden Association for Mental Health and established sheltered homes for discharged mental health patients. At 67 she was elected to the Greater London Council and at 96 was made honorary lifetime president of the Highgate Labour Party. Widowed in 1982, she works on her column, practises t’ai chi and lives in a retirement home in North London.

Rose’s studio room is crowded with books and papers; a telegram from the Queen sits on the shelf behind her. Her sight is poor now and a reading screen magnifies text for her: “But it is a bother,” she says, nipping across the floor to demonstrate, “You can only read a bit at a time and you often lose your place; a friend, Bernard, comes once a week to help me with references for my column and types it up for me. He is the son of an old friend from CND and was Barbara Castle’s secretary: all my contemporaries are dead now but I am friends with their children.” She resumes her seat, tucking her legs under her like a girl: “Now, what would you like to know?”

When she married she told her husband that she didn’t want babies straight away and certainly didn’t want to be “a slave to the family” like his mother and her own. They would have a free marriage — “I’d read Bertrand Russell” — separate holidays and time to themselves. When she left her husband at home and toured Russia with a friend, her mother was appalled: “She said: ‘He won’t be there when you get back’, but he was.” She had a live-in maid and cook: “I’m almost ashamed to say this, but it was the middle-class norm. I was exceptionally privileged, I could do whatever I liked — and did.” Intellectually somewhat promiscuous, as a counsellor Rose became a Jungian, then a Freudian and flirted with the ideas of Wilhelm Reich: “When we started Marriage Guidance women would say, ‘I never refuse him – I don’t know what’s wrong’, then in the end they were complaining about not having orgasms. The Pill changed a lot: it made sex easier, but it didn’t make love any easier.”

She thinks men are confused these days — “Young women are binge drinking and then crying rape...poor men don’t know where they are” — and is not convinced that couples are happier: “This having careers and children, it isn’t freedom, it’s slavery. I can’t imagine how they do it — my son and daughter-in-law have a wonderful family but they both work so hard they're exhausted.” She doesn’t regret staying at home as a young mother: “It’s terribly hard not to be with babies, they learn something every day and those early years are so fascinating.”

She readily agrees that there have been improvements in her lifetime: “Obviously there isn’t such dreadful poverty — I remember the Bread, Milk and Coal Society, taking provisions to people who were starving — but these days people want more and more things; we don’t need these things. I think the idealism has gone: in the Thirties we were planning the Welfare State, we were here for a better life, but it’s not a better life. I don’t know how we will ever recover from the Iraq War — and now we’re putting all our money into Trident.”

Rose has heart arrhythmia and has collapsed “a few times”. She could have a pace-maker, she says: “But I don’t want one; I don’t want anyone to ‘strive officiously’ to keep me alive.” Meanwhile, with two other residents, she is in rehearsals for a choreographed dance to be performed at The Place in London, in memory of Isadora Duncan: “I’m having a marvellous time in my old age: I can’t believe I’m still here.”

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