“My readers may not find it a very thrilling story, but I hope it will reveal to them the early dreams, secret hopes and half-realized ambitions of one very ordinary woman...Looking back on my own life, I feel my greatest enemy has been the cooking stove — a sort of tyrant who has kept me in subjection.”

'The Hard Way Up' is a unique and absorbing social document — a first-hand account of the life and struggles of a working-class woman who became a leader of the Suffragette and Labour movements in the north of England.

Whereas most suffragettes came from the middle-class, this autobiography gives a different side of the picture.

Hannah Mitchell was born in 1871 in the remote Peak district of Derbyshire. With only a fortnight’s formal schooling, she escaped from a tyrannical mother to the hard life of domestic service and the miseries of a clothing sweatshop. Marriage, motherhood followed, and through the years the sheer force of her character helped her to extraordinary achievements as a suffragette, Labour Party campaigner, speaker, writer and public figure in the city of Manchester.

The story of her life, told with great simplicity and modesty, was found among her papers on her death. It is a record of extraordinary achievement, as well as standing as a fascinating account of social history which documents the lost rural traditions of agricultural England, and of the turbulent social and political changes of the early twentieth century.

‘A rare and fascinating picture of grassroots political involvement before the First World War and the personal experiences of a woman rebelling against sex and class injustice’ — Sheila Rowbotham, social historian.

Hannah Mitchell (1871-1956) was a suffragette and Labour Party activist.

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