Mothers and the Labour Market

Abstract

This chapter reflects on the shifting public discourses in Britain concerning mothers and the labour market from the end of the Second World War and shows how the framing of research questions reflects these changing public discourses. At the end of the Second World War, women were ejected from many of the jobs in which they had worked in wartime to create work for returning servicemen. This ejection marked a watershed in women's lives and a backward step in female emancipation. The author began research on mothers in the labour market in the late 1970s. At that time, home was still promoted as the ‘best place’ to rear young children and mothers the best people to do so. This narrative shifted in the late 1980s, reflecting not only the rapid growth in the employment of mothers with young children but the increased emphasis placed by government on market forces and the notion of ‘individual choice’. Reflecting these changes, the social research agenda also shifted. In the 1960s and 1970s, motherhood was a small field of inquiry occupied mainly by those concerned with family life or child development. Gradually, much of the territory of ‘family studies’ was taken over by feminist sociologists whose work threw the spotlight on to patriarchy and women's oppression.