ABSTRACT
Forty-seven of the single working women were interviewed more than once. For 35 we have three interviews given in 1992, 1994 and 1995–96, and in a further twelve cases we have two interviews given in 1994 and 1995–96. 1 For these women we thus have longitudinal data, albeit not for a long time but a period in which important changes in employment and personal relationships can occur. Sherie serves as an example, being first interviewed in October 1994 when she was working as a catering assistant and living with her mother. When interviewed in March 1996 Sherie had spent the summer of 1995 as a self-employed ‘coach hostess’ (see later) before regaining a job as a Post Office counter clerk for which she had initially trained. She was also cohabiting with her boyfriend. It is with such developments over time that this chapter and the next are concerned, changes which are recorded in our successive interviews rather than simply through the recollection of the interviewee about the past. Changes can occur in the woman’s situation (her job, where she lives, her relationship with a boyfriend) or in her ideas and aspirations as to what she sees herself doing both in the present and future. Our concern in this chapter is very much with the links between these two, the relationship between changes in structural situation and the ideas which generate an actor’s own agency in the situation. More substantively we are also concerned with the relationship between ‘work’ and ‘family’, between changes in women’s employment situation and aspirations and changes in their ‘personal’ relationships, especially with boyfriends, and expectations for future family formation.
