“HOUSE-BOUND housewives, are you frustrated in your efforts to find an intellectual escape from the kitchen sink and chores?”

This, word for word, is the opening paragraph of a story in the Adver on Friday, December 8, 1967.

The story was about Swindon women who had joined a national group called The Housewives’ Register, described as a meeting point for “ex-career women”.

If such a paragraph appeared in the paper these days, housewives would probably find an intellectual escape by arming themselves with heavy objects and storming our offices in search of whoever wrote it, but the world was a very different place 45 years ago.

Women were generally expected to be submissive and men were expected to be breadwinners and rugged. They wore aftershave with names such as Spruce, an advert for which appeared later that December as one of the earliest full colour pages printed by this newspaper. Smelling like a Christmas tree seems to have been a sign of masculinity in the year that gave us Sgt Pepper and the marriage of Elvis and Priscilla.

It was still perfectly legal for an employer to pay women less than men for doing the same job, and to specify ‘men’, ‘women’, ‘boys’ or ‘girls’ in recruitment ads. When a woman married, she generally left work to tend the marital home and have children.

Our article’s next paragraph said women’s magazines wrongly assumed readers were interested only in babies, special offers and looking pretty, but this was as close to feminism as we got in those days.

The register had been founded in 1960 by a Cheshire woman called Maureen Nicol, and was known as The Housebound Wives’ Register until 1966.

The Swindon branch was founded by Yvonne Miles, of Quarry Road, who had been a laboratory technician before her marriage. Members met regularly to discuss all manner of issues, from current affars to the latest scientific advances.

Mrs Miles said: “If you are tied at home with housework and children, you get mentally lazy. Meeting other women to discuss subjects allows you to think.”

Fellow member Marion Kirkhope, a former physiotherapist living in Highworth Road, Stratton, revealed she was a member of a church young wives’ group. “But,” she added, “they concentrated on the life of the church and family, and I felt I also wanted something more thought-provoking.”

Other topics the group had either discussed or planned to discuss included ‘humanism as opposed to Christianity’ and Silent Spring, the groundbreaking book by scientist Rachel Carson which prompted a global rethink of pesticide use.

In case any potential member feared these discussions would be too high-brow for them, Mrs Miles had some words of reassurance: “It does not take a terrifically high intelligence, just a lively interested mind.”

The Housewives’ Register went from strength to strength and moved with the times. The first overseas groups formed in Australia and Canada the following year. Charitable status came in 1980, and by 1990 the organisation had changed its name to the National Women’s Register.

In 1995 founder Maureen Nicol was made an OBE, and in 2010 the NWR celebrated its Golden Jubilee. Its website is www.nwr.org.uk If you are one of the women pictured here, we’d be delighted to hear from you at bhudson@swindonadvertiser.co.uk We’d also be delighted to hear from anybody who remembers Spruce aftershave, or who still has a bottle lurking in a forgotten corner of a bathroom cabinet.