Magazine Movements by Laurel Forster

Author:Laurel Forster [Forster, Laurel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9781441106018
Google: kh1mBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2015-02-26T04:33:16+00:00

6

A Magazine of Letters, CCC

The Cooperative Correspondence Club (CCC) (1935–1990) crafted a magazine unlike any other under discussion in the present volume. Their magazine was a single issue hand-collated assemblage of letters, produced once a fortnight for decades and then towards the end, every two months. It consisted of correspondence from the CCC members, written under pseudonyms and sent to the editor in advance of the production of the magazine. The editor organised the mostly handwritten letters within a cover, and then sent this ‘magazine’ on its way through the post to the first name on the roster. Each member had just twenty-four hours to read her way through everyone’s letters, and was then obliged to send the magazine to the next name on the list. This circulation of letters amongst a self-selecting group of correspondents continued, with only a few changes of participants, for over fifty years. Only women were allowed to join, and only women who were mothers; married status was not a requirement. The membership of the club comprised housewives and mothers at home as well as a number of working and professional women, a good number of whom were university educated. All, regardless of circumstances or formal education, were interested in extending their life experiences beyond the confines of 1930s British hearth and home.

This was far from the only correspondence club in Britain in the twentieth century, but it was one of the earliest. A large body of material related to the CCC has been collected and preserved under the auspices of the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex University,1 and it has come to recent attention through the detailed and important recovery work of Jenna Bailey.2 Bailey’s oral history research into the lives of the CCC members, sometimes through their families, through her collaboration with a surviving member, Rose Hacker, and her use of the letters, has enabled this private organisation to be brought to light and to life in numerous ways.3 Ten years before Bailey’s work on some of the CCC contributors, Rose Hacker (1906–2008), a long-time member of the group, foresaw the potential importance, in historical terms, of the CCC’s letters and undertook the enormous project of collation, information gathering, summarising and describing the club, resulting in her unpublished manuscript, ‘Sisters Under the Skin’, also held at the Mass Observation Archive.4 The club meant a great deal to Hacker, who had a lifelong interest in people and their social circumstances and relationships. She was a socialist, a member of the Labour Party and the Fabian Society, and an interview on Woman’s Hour (BBC R4) revealed a lifelong commitment to campaigning for social justice; and crossing social divisions was an important aspect of her life.5 She wrote books on sex education such as Telling the Teenagers (1957), and worked in marriage guidance counselling. Aged 100 she was invited to write a column for a North London newspaper, the Camden New Journal, which she did until she died.6 Hacker’s detailed contextualising account of a correspondence of

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