ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the construction of part-time work and the part-time worker reflected the more general concerns at the time about 'women' and the question of whether or not they could, or should, be considered as 'workers’. Women played a significant role in creating the rise in part-time work in industry simply by reacting so wholeheartedly to the opportunity part-time jobs offered. In the process of trying to occupy the industrial workplace differently, more powerful and assertive interest groups than the women part-timers designated them industrial ’outsiders'. The observations made by sociologists during the 1960s about the appeal of part-time work were confirmed by the words of working-class women looking back at the working lives they experienced around the same time. The nature of the work available to working-class women helps to provide an explanation as to why women like Gladys Petty had a yearning to be at home.
