Round About a Pound a Week

Maud Pember Reeves (1865-1953) was born Magdalene Stuart Robison in Mudgee, New South Wales, Australia. She was a suffragist, socialist, feminist, writer and member of the Fabian Society who spent most of her life in New Zealand (her family had moved to Christchurch in 1868) and Britain. She married William Pember Reeves, a journalist and politician, in Christchurch in 1885. In 1896 the Reeves and their three children moved to London after William's appointment as representative of the NZ government within the British Empire. The couple befriended a number of left-wing intellectuals including George Bernard Shaw, H G Wells, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and in 1904 Maud joined the Fabian Society which promoted social reform, being elected to its executive committee two years later. In 1908 she founded the Fabian Women's Group with Charlotte Wilson and, initiated by Maud in 1909, the FWG's Motherhood Special Fund Committee began a study of the domestic lives of families with new babies living on a subsistence wage of about a pound a week. The conclusions from the project were first published in 1912 as a Fabian Tract and later became Maud's Round About a Pound a Week (1913).