ABSTRACT
The women in this study have in common their participation in the paid workforce and their major caring responsibilities. The examination of this shared set of circumstances has revealed much that is common to all of them. It has also shown quite starkly how individual are the accounts and the lives that lie behind them. It is important in research of this kind, where common threads are drawn out of the whole fabric, out of the mass of data collected, that we do not lose either what is unique or, at least, different in those individual lives nor obscure the “wholeness” of those lives, the entirety of the individual experience of these different women. Each of the accounts we collected could have formed the basis for a book in its own right. We have not included life histories for each of the women, even in brief. We have, however, decided to present the reader with thumb nail sketches of six of the forty participants. These we hope will give a flavour of the variety of experiences and backgrounds and a feeling for the whole lives from which the fragments of ideas, descriptions and commentaries that comprise the bulk of the book, have been taken. In each sketch we have stuck closely to the real circumstances and only changed names and details that might identify the woman concerned.
