On the few holidays which fall to the lot of the cotton worker, or when the mills were stopped owing to bad trade, Annie Kenney and her sisters and some of their favourite work-mates would put together a simple luncheon and set off roaming for miles across the moors. The grass and the trees might be blackened with the smoke of the factories, the sight of whose tall chimneys the girls could never leave behind, but, blighted as it was, this was the only country that Annie had ever known, and it was all beautiful to her. When they had walked till they were tired, the girls would lie down on the grass, and then they would read to each other in turn, and Annie would talk to them about the flowers and the sky. Just as she was intensely alive to all that was beautiful, so too Annie Kenney realised keenly the ugly and sordid side of life. When speaking of her early days to a conference of women in Germany, in 1908, she said: I grew up in the midst of women and girls in the works, and I saw the hard lives of the women and children about me. I noticed the great difference made in the treatment of men and women in the factory, differences in conditions, differences in wages and differences in status. I realised this difference not in the factory alone but in the home. I saw men, women, boys and girls, all working hard during the day in the same hot, stifling factories. Then when work was over I noticed that it was the mothers who hurried home, who fetched the children that had been put out to nurse, prepared the tea for the husband, did the cleaning, baking, washing, sewing and nursing. I noticed that when the husband came home, his day's work was over; he took his tea and then went to join his friends in the club or in the public house, or on the cricket or foot-ball field, and I used to ask myself why this was so. Why was the mother the drudge of the family, and not the father's companion and equal?