Life As We Have Known It - The Voices of Working-Class Women (Paperback)

With an introductory letter by Virginia Woolf, first-hand records of working class women's experiences in early 20th-century England, from jobs to families to political awakenings

""I was born in Bethnal Green . . . a tiny scrap of humanity. I was my mother's seventh, and seven more were born after me . . . When I was ten years old I began to earn my own living.""

Told in the distinctive and memorable voices of working-class women, this collection is a remarkable firsthand account of working lives at the turn of the last century. First published in association with the Women's Co-operative Guild in 1931, it is a unique evocation of a lost age, and a humbling testament to what Virginia Woolf called "that inborn energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench." Here is domestic service; toiling in factories and in the fields, and of husbands--often old and ill before their time, some drinkers or gamblers. Despite telling of the hardship of a poverty-stricken marriage, the horrors of childbirth, and of lives spent in search of jobs, these are spirited and inspiring voices.