Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates women’s insistence on survival and resistance. It focuses on women’s creativity in the construction of countercultures. The book provides due credit to the taken-for-granted, life-enabling work of women in the background, whether that work be the weekly wash, or finding foster homes for refugee children or doing obscure but vital medical research. It focuses principally on many aspects of women’s working lives, exists not only to redress a gross imbalance in the imaging of our shared past, but also to ask what in our past we hold to be worth remembering. The book explores that women also live and work in the world and that our experience matters just as much as does that of men. It is an empirical, humanist–feminist text.