Life As We Have Known It Av Margaret Llewelyn Davies

<P><B>''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.''<br></B><br>Told in the distinctive and memorable voices of working class women, <I>Life as We Have Known It</I> 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, <I>Life as We Have Known it</I> 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.</P>