Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France and the United States

Extraordinary. Difficult to read, especially in light of how much women have achieved since then, and given the language that is used in regard to them. Or that they are allowed to use in describing their lives.

The brutality and harshness of the lives of working women are especially poignant, and the sadness that a little girl expresses when her brothers steal and abuse her cherished doll is also hard to read.

The book documents women of the entire era of the Victorian era from France, England, and the US. This was also the first time that I had read any accounts of a slave-woman's life in her own words.

A good read for a feminist, a historian, or just an interested reader.