ABSTRACT
We intend to tell spatial stories about the construction of gender differences. We write about lives in contemporary Worcester, Massachusetts and structure the plot around women’s and men’s labor market experiences. Our interest in paid employment does, however, take us well beyond the workplace, into neighborhoods and homes. Our argument is that social and economic geographies are the media through which the segregation of large numbers of women into poorly paid jobs is produced and reproduced. This book is also a travel story, written about gender, place, and space, through time. We began this research in 1986, and although we attempt to draw together the segments that have been published over the last six years and reinterpret them as a whole, we would misrepresent the process involved, as well as the real movement that has occurred within feminist geography, if we were to suppress theoretical shifts and conceptual reorientations. Over time, we have chosen to address different theoretical literatures, which take varying questions as being important, and have different objectives and varying styles of representation. We see this theoretical restlessness as having positive consequences. Each theoretical tradition offers a different perspective on women’s and men’s lives and can be used to highlight the underlying assumptions and silences of the others. Each addresses a different audience; by speaking in multiple conceptual languages, we hope to reach different communities of readers, not just sympathetic feminist geographers, but also political economists, more orthodox economists and sociologists, and wider geographical and feminist audiences.
