"Can Any Mother Help Me?" has anyone read this?

[choosyfloosy]

Read a chunk of it in a bookshop the other day (was meant to be Christmas shopping). Fantastic - a 1920s/30s version of MN - exactly the same, except with a lot more embroidery and a lot more delayed gratification. Letter to the Nursing World Magazine by isolated mother asking for others to be in touch with - led to creation of Correspondence Club which was private (not its proper name, sorry) - letters and articles were put together into a magazine - I think initially only one copy - and it was posted round to subscribers, and they all wrote little comments at the end of the articles, like threads. They had pseudonyms too. I might get it from the library.

the excerpts from the womens articles are really interesting but i found that the links were really dry, kind of "i wrote this for my thesis" prose.....worth reading...

there was quite a bit written about some of the women involved in the press when it was released (summer?)

I've just finished this ... it was okay but not as interesting as I thought it would be having read excerpts and various reviews before getting hold of the book itself. I didn't get a sense of really knowing each individual woman featured as you usually do with personal writing (or at least that which is deemed good enough to publish) such as letters & diaries. Nor did I find myself warming to any of them.

Given the period the magazine was in circulation - 40 years I think, quite obviously an awful lot of stuff would have had to have been left out. There was mention of some of it disappearing into the ether, and also of members (or their families) who wished their contributions to remain private .... so those restrictions probably meant it didn't really "flow" as well as it might have done.

A disappointment overall for me.

i got it from library (camden). agree with catsmother, perhaps whoever has the material wasn't happy to let a lot of stuff out, it did feel censored and disjointed.

also i think it was written for a dissertation rather than for its own sake so showcasing the author rather than the women (i left school at 16 so may be well wrong there).