[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Women and Work
I had the very good fortune, when about ten or eleven, of discovering feminism or at least discovering the term "feminism". I had always known that inequality between the sexes existed and that this made me angry but finally I had found a word to describe myself and my feelings. I discovered this through talking to my mother. She was unusual from my friends' mothers, in being an educated working class woman, and so was able to teach me things that were totally alien to my friends' mothers.
She was a young woman with a thirst for knowledge in the seventies. She left school without many qualifications and had to go to work and so, after a few menial jobs, she started training to be a nurse. My mother should have had an academic life but given her background and the times she was denied one. She didn't enjoy nursing but it was a profession and it allowed her to escape her parents and the slate mining town she grew up in. When exposed to the bright city lights of London (where she nursed) she discovered Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch. The book changed her life in the sense that her feelings were vindicated and she became a long-life fan of Greer (she actually borders on the obsessed, bless her). So through her reading she was able to teach me.
Unfortunately my mother ended up back in the slate mining town that she had tried to escape. She had me, married an idiot, subsequently divorced him and landed herself in a poverty trap. When my father left she couldn't continue working because she had to raise me and ended up on income support and living in fear of bills and lack of money to buy food. This situation was not uncommon in the town I grew up in......
