Katherine Mansfield’s "Life of Ma Parker": Women’s Plight Katherine Mansfield’s "Life of Ma Parker" presents the plight of Ma Parker as a working-class woman at the turn of the century, in terms of her position in the sphere of the family and in the sphere of society. "Life of Ma Parker" is a story of a widowed charwoman. Like Miss Brill, Ma Parker is a very lonely woman, but their equally painful story is told quite differently, mainly because Mansfield supplies no background to account why Miss Brill’s Sunday passes as it does. As the title of the story denotes, we receive the story of Ma Parker’s