Stupid or smart, there wasn't much choice about what was going to happen to me ... Growing up was like falling into a hole.... I m...ight not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class. At a time when I had not yet grasped th...e significance of the fact that in my house English was a second language, or that I wore dresses while my brother wore pants, I knew--and I knew it was important to know--that Papa worked hard all day long.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the average human being asks is something he can call a home; a family that is fed and warm; and now and then a little happine...ss; once in a long while an extravagance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aspirations of most people--security, pleasure, leisure, meaningful work, creative and intellectual pursuits--are to be suppor...ted. These desires and dreams are not shameful. In supporting them, we are showing solidarity with working people, for whom these are luxuries and not givens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To most middle-class feminists, as to most middle-class non-feminists, working-class women remain mysterious creatures to be "reac...hed out to" in some abstract way. No connection. No solidarity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... we did not call ourselves ladies. We did not forget that we were working-girls, wearing coarse aprons suitable to our work, an...d that there was some danger of our becoming drudges.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a number of years I ... believed that political bondage was the cause of many of the ills endured by those of my own sex; unti...l I discovered that the man without a job was about as badly off as the woman without a ballot. In fact, a little worse, for we can live without voting but we cannot live without eating. The real antagonism is not that which exists or is supposed to exist between the sexes; but between the capitalist class and the proletariat. Women are victims of class distinctions more than of sex distinctions ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... in the working class, the process of building a family, of making a living for it, of nurturing and maintaining the individual...s in it "costs worlds of pain."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
English audiences of working people are like an instrument that responds to the player. Thought ripples up and down them, and if i...n some heart the speaker strikes a dissonance there is a swift answer. Always the voice speaks from gallery or pit, the terrible voice which detaches itself in every English crowd, full of caustic wit, full of irony or, maybe, approval.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »