This book of stories of women of West Cornwall is the tenth title published by Penwith Local History Group since it started in 1990.

Some chapters are overviews: the treatment of women in wills in Zennor in 1600-1750; the experiences of slandered women who resorted to the Church Courts in 1700-1850; women’s employment in Penzance town centre in 1830-1906; and the everyday story of women and washing. Other chapters have a narrower focus: women who joined Ludgvan’s Female Friendly Society; the inevitability of life for women in farming and fishing families in nineteenth century Penwith; the Suffragist ‘pilgrimage’ from Land’s End to London in 1913; the women who cared for some Jewish children evacuated from London’s East End to Mousehole in 1940; the miner’s wife who had once modelled for the Newlyn Artists but was left destitute in Newlyn to bring up four young children when her husband died in South Africa; another miner’s wife who was widowed in Idaho but was able to return to St Hilary with her children; or more recently the bitter controversy over Penzances’s rival carnival queens in 1933.