In the winter of 1946, a young mother (with a husband overseas, a young child, and “no home help”) wrote an angry letter to her newspaper, blaming everyone—from the press to the government to a number of local service agencies—for her plight. In her view, all were flawed systems curtailing her rights, including (and especially) those regarding family planning.

Either we young mothers must have home help(s) at a sensible wage, she writes, or else the government must accept the fact that we will simply have to forgo all hopes of a family exceeding, at the very outside, three children.

(With wartime birth rates plummeting, she clearly felt justified.)

Exasperated, she continues.

There is a limit, after all, to what the human frame can tackle.

(The human frame is everything, no?)

When tasks diurnal tire the human frame / The
spirits faint, and dim the vital flame.

(Phillis Wheatley.)

Vilified, crucified, in the human frame /
A million candles burning for the help that
never came. (Leonard Cohen.)

The help, of course, did come (and kept coming) even as members of the privileged class kept complaining. The writer of this letter nevertheless focused squarely on her own body—and its implied (possibly endangered) fertility—not the real-time bodies of those carting the coal and washing the floors and minding the children. Because those people, who tackled so much, held their own forgone hopes, too.