ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the burden carried by the category 'women'. During the 1960s various groups interested in the welfare of women workers acknowledged their concern about the discrimination faced by women as workers. Women leaders implicitly acknowledged the predicament that assumptions about the private sphere created for women workers and their training needs when they drew up the Industrial Charter for Women in 1963. The Department set up the Industrial Training Boards which were responsible for ensuring an adequate supply of properly trained women and men at all levels of industry. With the insistence that industrial training be treated as an apparently gender-neutral issue the special training needs of women as workers became lost in an environment dominated by men and masculine concerns. The leaders within the women’s trade union movement fully comprehended the changes that were occurring in the lives of many working- class women because of the increasing employment of married women in the post-war industrial workplace.
