Everyday Matters: Selected letters of Dora Taylor, Bessie Head and Lilian Ngoyi is one of the best books I have read in a long time. It is the amazing story of three unique, humble but extraordinary women. They came from different race groups but had in common the troubled times in which they lived and their dedication to the pursuit of their dreams. Their stories are captured in the letters they wrote to their loved ones.Dora Taylor was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1899, an illegitimate child of working-class parents. Her mother died when she was six years old and her father, James Jack, and her stepmother neglected and ill-treated her. As a child, she was moved to her paternal grandparents, who were so poor they had to go to a soup kitchen to be fed. But Taylor remembered this time as a happy period because she loved her grandmother.As a teenager she read poetry and literature. She married James Garden Taylor, who brought her to South Africa in 1926, where she encountered the injustices of racial discrimination.It was during this time that she expressed her feelings about her past and condemned the injustices of the present in letters written to her grandparents and friends abroad.Bessie Head had a similar upbringing. Born in 1937 in Pietermaritzburg, Head never knew her parents and lived in an orphanage as a child. Her mother was white and her father was black - an illegal combination in the apartheid era. Head was moved to an Anglican establishment in Durban and spent six years of her life there. The principal at her school told her that her mother had gone insane and described her origins as "a horror".In 1956, Head took a teaching post in Durban, where her appreciation of literature grew stronger. She moved to Johannesburg to work for a newspaper called Home Post. There she wrote a column that was popular among the youth.The book reveals a sad ending to a life lived with distinction. Head died in 1986 of hepatitis. Her friends complained that she did not take care of her health because she had a serous drinking problem.Lilian Ngoyi, born Lilian Madediba Matabane in 1911, had a more prominent career in politics, although she was not as prolific a writer as Taylor or Head.She was born in Pretoria, the only girl in a family of five sons. Her father was a mine-worker and her mother a teacher.Her husband trained as a teacher but did not work as one because teachers were poorly paid. From the information available, it seems he died young, leaving Lilian to take care of their child, Edith.She moved to Orlando where she lived in a one-room shack and then to a small house in Mzimhlophe, which she described as the "matchbox house". She joined the Garment Workers' Union, for which she organised marches, and was arrested in 1952 for trying to send a telegram to the then prime minister DF Malan.She became the first woman to be elected to a national position in the ANC.Ngoyi travelled to Britain, Germany, China and Russia and wrote in her letters of how the free world provided a stark contrast to what was happening in South Africa.But Ngoyi is remembered mostly in the history of South African politics for organising - with Helen Joseph, Rahima Moosa and Sophia Williams de Bruyn - the 1956 march to the Union Buildings to protest against the carrying of passes by women .Ngoyi died in Soweto on March 13 1980, at the age of 69. Her friend Joseph described her departure as a "great shock".The letters contained in this book take the reader to a time in South Africa when women did not have many rights in society.As these three women travelled through different countries, the pain they felt due to broken relationships, lost friends and oppressive laws is poured out through their pens. The book is a great gift to buy for a woman this August.'Everyday Matters: Selected letters of Dora Taylor, Bessie Head and Lilian Ngoyi'. Edited by MJ Daymon. Published by Jacana, R280..