Ruby: An Ordinary Woman

Thompson, Ruby Alice Side; Glaser, Bonnie Thompson (editor); Worster, Ann Martin (editor)

ISBN 10: 0571198589 / ISBN 13: 9780571198580

Published by Faber & Faber, 1995

About this Item

No Stock Photos! We photograph every item. 274 pages; light edge wear to jacket and boards, spine slightly out of square; Ruby is the fascinating journal of passionate, opinionated feminist Ruby Thompson (1884-1970), as presented by her granddaughter and Ann Martin Worster. Focusing on issues that are just as pressing today as they were when she lived, Ruby spotlights Ruby Thompson's criticism of the Roman Catholic Church, and advocacy of birth control, abortion, and independence for women.

Seller Inventory # 025095

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Ruby: An Ordinary Woman
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0571198589
• ISBN 13: 9780571198580
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Weight: 22 ounces
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biography

About this title

Synopsis

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Reviews

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