Life As We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women

In this reprint from 1977, which was first published in association with the Women's Co-operative Guild in 1931, Davies (1861-1944), who was the general secretary of the Guild for 32 years, a period during which the Guild became a campaigning organization for issues affecting women's lives and living conditions, collects six memoirs from working-class women in the UK. The women tell of domestic service, working in factories and fields, husbands who were drinkers and gamblers, poverty-stricken marriages, the fears of childbirth, and lives spent in search of jobs. The introduction was written by Virginia Woolf, and appendices contain excerpts from letters by women in the Guild. Distributed by Trafalgar Square. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
'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, Life as We Have Known It is a remarkable first-hand account of working lives at the turn of the last century. First published in association with the Women's Co-operative Guild in 1931,Life as We Have Known 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.