Maureen Nicol, who has died aged 94, was the founding father of what turned the groundbreaking Nationwide Ladies’s Register.
She was a younger stay-at-home mom with two kids aged below 5 when she and her husband, Brian, moved to a big Cheshire housing property, supplied by Brian’s employer, the Atomic Vitality Authority.
There was sparse public transport, and Maureen had little cash and few associates when, in February 1960, she learn an article within the Guardian by Betty Jerman, entitled Squeezed in Like Sardines in Suburbia, commissioned by Mary Stott, the then girls’s editor.
“The article was describing precisely how I felt,” Maureen defined later. For the primary time in her life she wrote a letter to the paper, starting a protracted relationship with the Guardian, Jerman and Stott.
Maureen steered that these in “voluntary exile”, “housebound wives with liberal pursuits and a need to stay people” who had been lacking the stimulation of labor and human grownup contact – “kindred spirits within the deserts of the suburbs” – would possibly arrange a nationwide register to satisfy native, like-minded girls.
Inside every week, Maureen had acquired greater than 400 letters. Many expressed aid that they weren’t alone, that others had been additionally experiencing loneliness and acute psychological deprivation, lacking their jobs as academics, nurses, medical doctors, air hostesses, engineers and secretaries, amongst different professions. All of them additionally assumed that it was Maureen who can be organising the register.
“I’m not a publicist and I’m not an organiser,” Maureen defined. Nonetheless, she borrowed a typewriter, and later an historical duplicator loaned by the native Labour celebration. A month after her first letter to the Guardian, the paper revealed a second letter, through which Maureen requested girls to put in writing to her, at her residence in Eastham, Cheshire, in the event that they had been within the Register.
She was inundated with replies, and was quickly pressured to cost an annual subscription payment of a shilling a yr, to cowl postal prices.
She additionally rapidly recruited a number of volunteers who would tackle the organisation of various components of the nation, and the Housebound Wives’ Register was born. From 1966 it was the Nationwide Housewives’ Register, and from 1987 the Nationwide Ladies’s Register. In its first yr, in 1960, it attracted over 1,600 members, who would meet domestically in every others’ properties for dialogue. Now there are 5,000 members in additional than 300 teams.
A number of years earlier than the feminist Betty Friedan mused about why American college-educated girls had been bored as dutiful wives and moms struggling “the issue that has no title”, in The Female Mystique (1963), Maureen had found the existence of a military of wives who had conformed to the Nineteen Fifties expectation they might surrender work as soon as they turned moms, however who had been additionally strongly immune to surrendering their brains to domesticity.
“We liked our youngsters, after all, however there was an entire world on the market,” Maureen instructed one interviewer.
A lot to her shock, the media curiosity was intense, reporters all the time on her door step in an period with fewer telephones and no web, and the response was not all the time constructive. One reporter requested her if the existence of the Register “would result in the break up of the house”.
The NWR’s tenets have remained unchanged because the starting. Teams are open to all. No home chat, no culinary competitiveness in one another’s properties; solely espresso, tea and biscuits served, no campaigning, loads of group actions, dialogue, friendship and debate.
“These days, individuals have views however they don’t hear to one another,” Maureen, who described herself as “left of centre”, mentioned in an interview, aged 90, for the NWR’s sixtieth anniversary. “Leftwing, rightwing … you hear and respect the opposite particular person’s viewpoint.”
At its peak, within the 80s, NWR had 24,000 members unfold over 4 continents. Though girls had been now not anticipated to surrender work on marriage, then as now, the strain of jobs, household life and little free time, and divorce, retirement or a change of location implies that many nonetheless search the friendship and stimulation that an NWR group can present.
Born in London, Maureen was the daughter of Alice (nee Simpson) and Arthur Johnson, who collectively ran a nook store. She spent most of her adolescence in Dartford, Kent. She was evacuated to the north of England through the second world battle and rescued by her mom after complaining that the childless couple with whom she was billeted labored her onerous and fed her little.
Dartford colleges had been closed, so Maureen missed two years of training. In later life, she took quite a few programs, together with an A-level in English literature in her 50s. She additionally labored as a volunteer for the Residents Recommendation Bureau for nearly a decade, gaining a certificates in household regulation.
Leaving faculty at 16, Maureen went to technical faculty to amass secretarial {qualifications}. She finally labored for a number of years on the London theatrical costumiers Nathans, a job she liked. She additionally turned a lifelong theatregoer. In 1952, in a pink wedding ceremony costume, she married Brian Nicol. Over time, as he took on more and more senior positions in training, the household moved a number of instances each within the UK, and to Uganda and Hong Kong. In most locations, Maureen would be part of the native group of the Nationwide Ladies’s Register.
She had handed on the function of nationwide organiser in 1962, and develop into – together with Stott and Jerman – a trustee of the organisation.
In 1995, Maureen was appointed OBE for her companies to girls. Her diary of the day of the investiture data that she was not impressed by the Queen, who was in “a plain silk costume with out ornamentation and regarded strained. She knew nothing in regards to the NWR.”
Maureen was self-effacing and disliked public talking. When elevating her hand on the NWR’s AGM, she would give her title and group location like another member. Her son, Simon, mentioned that his mom was all the time “tremendous eager” that he and his sister, Sally, achieved properly in training: “We do surprise what she might need performed if she had had better alternatives.” As it’s, Maureen was, within the phrases of Jerman, “a rare girl who recognised a common want and acted upon it”.
She is survived by Brian, Simon and Sally, and two grandchildren.
