issues of life. The Nursery has
produced one tract, No. 132, "A Guide to Books for Socialists,"
described in the "Wells Report" as intended "to supplement or even
replace that arid and indiscriminating catalogue, What to Read."

Last in date, but by no means least in importance of the Groups of this
period, was the Women's Group, founded by Mrs. C.M. Wilson, who after
nearly twenty years of nominal membership had resumed her active
interest in the Society. The vigorous part taken by the women of the
Society under the leadership of Mrs. Reeves in obtaining the only
alteration yet made in the Basis has been already described. The Group
was not formed till a year later, and at that time the Women's Suffrage
movement, and especially the party led by Mrs. Pankhurst, had attracted
universal attention. The early Suffrage movement was mainly Socialist
in origin: most of the first leaders of the Women's Social and Political
Union were or had been members either of the Fabian Society or of the
I.L.P. and it may almost be said that all the women of the Society
joined one or more of the Suffrage Societies which for the next seven
years played so large a part in national politics. But besides the
question of the vote, which is not peculiar to Socialism, there is a
very large group of subjects of special interest to Socialist women,
either practical problems of immediate politics relating to the wages
and conditions of women's labour and the treatment of women by Education
Acts, National Insurance Acts, and Factory Acts; or remoter and more
theoretical problems, especially those connected with the question
whether the wife in the ideal state is to be an independent wage-earner
or the mistress and manager of an isolated home, dependent on her
husband as breadwinner. Efficiently organised by Mrs. C.M. Wilson, until
ill-health required her resignation of the secretaryship in 1914; by
Mrs. Bernard Shaw, Mrs. Pember Reeves, Miss Murby, Miss Emma Brooke, and
many others, including in later years Dr. Letitia Fairfield, the Group
has had many of the characteristics of an independent society. It has
its own office, latterly at 25 Tothill Street, rented from the parent
Society, with its own paid assistant secretary, and it has issued for
private circulation its own publications. In 1913 it prepared a volume
of essays on "Women Workers in Seven Professions," which was edited by
Professor Edith Morley and published by George Routledge and Sons. I