Ruby: An Ordinary Woman

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From 1909 to 1969, Ruby Side Thompson, an English housewife and mother of seven sons, kept journals that recorded domestic details and expressed her rich inner life. The excerpts published here extend through 1938. Skillfully edited and annotated by Worster, a historian, and Glaser, a psychologist and Ruby's granddaughter, these diaries document constraints on wives in the early 20th century. The Thompsons lived in England and the U.S. Husband Ted was a perfectionist who kept Ruby financially dependent, belittled her abilities, ignored her sexual needs and forced his religion on her?he was a convert to Roman Catholicism. Overwhelmed by childbearing and rearing, the demands of housework and her husband's emotional cruelty, Ruby found relief by reading widely and writing fiction. After Ted ridiculed her literary efforts, she secretly poured her creativity into her journals. Her candid, witty, intelligent voice will speak to contemporary women and interest historians.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ruby Thompson was born in England in 1884 and moved to the U.S. in the early 1900s with her new husband. It was about that time that she began keeping a diary in which she carefully chronicled her everyday life, thoughts, hopes, and future plans. Ruby is a compilation of entries from her journal, from which emerges a picture of an ordinary, thoughtful, passionate woman. Ruby's words vividly illustrate women's life in the early 1900s. She doesn't paint a pretty picture; the frustration of constant pregancy, no access to birth control, being completely dependent on her husband financially and otherwise, and the stifling of her own spiritual and literary yearnings are some of the things she rails against in her diary. Culled from more than 40 volumes of journals that span several decades, Ruby is a fresh, unadulterated look at the life of early-twentieth-century women. Extensively annotated (one of the editors is Ruby's granddaughter). Kathleen Hughes