In August 1922 a young woman was writing a letter to her comrade and colleague in a New York garment shop. The sender was Rose Pesotta, writing from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she had just completed a summer school for women workers. Short as it is, the letter brings together a cluster of themes, ideas, and practices that were crucial in the way women garment workers shook and changed the world in the first half of the twentieth century in the US and Europe. Taking Pesotta's epistolary trace of her educational experience at Bryn Mawr as the starting point, in this paper the author wants to look into a rather grey area in the field of gender and education: women workers' intellectual lives and their dynamic intervention in the socio-historical and cultural formations of the twentieth century. The author argues that a genealogical approach to women workers' autobiographical narratives unveils significant gaps, silences, and omissions in the cultural histories of the twentieth century, but also problematises and unsettles the writing of labour histories. Moreover, these writings constitute archives of minor knowledges, counter-memories, and radical futurities, and open up new questions and perspectives in socio-historical studies of the memory of work that need to be further explored and theorised.