ABSTRACT
Both variations of the rational household model of migration tend to predict that married women will do worse in labour market terms from household migration. This is taken so much for granted-by women and men, and by geographers and sociologists-that it has hardly been analysed in Britain since the 1970s.1 Two recent studies both provided evidence that such a position is taken as the natural state of affairs even in 1980s Britain. Faced with a hypothetical question about a move to a new location to improve their partner’s job, a majority of women (63 per cent) thought that a woman should ‘encourage the partner to take the job and look for any job she could do there’. Only 12 per cent thought she should ‘ask the partner not to accept before she could be sure of finding as good a job there as she has now’ (Rose and Fielder 1988:10). Likewise, in their retrospective study of actual moves to Aberdeen in the 1980s, Bonney and Love (1991) found that a majority of the women forced to give up their jobs with the move to Aberdeen were quite happy with the outcome. Questioning the ubiquity of experiences such as these provides the opening to the first attempt to resolve our paradox.
