ABSTRACT
Of the 22 women interviewed who were still working for the BBC 13 were single (including the 4 General Trainees), 5 were married, 2 were widows, and 2 were divorced. Of these 9 married, widowed or divorced women, 8 had children. Of the women with children, 4 had taken the minimum amount of time off to have their babies and had come back to work, 1 had lived abroad a lot but had been able to combine bringing up a baby with a variety of part-time and fulltime work, two had worked freelance or part-time for the BBC, and the other had come back to the BBC when her children were out of the baby stage. All the women with children thought that if a woman wanted to stay in the running for the good jobs she had to take as little time off to have her children as possible. Their own reasons for returning to work were rarely clear-cut, however. They either felt they had to work for economic reasons or they believed that their function in the family was one of bringing stability-either financial or emotional. None of the women interviewed said that she had returned to work because of sheer love of the job or ambition, although these might have been secondary factors. None of the women with children who had worked through showed any real regrets about it, although they felt that they had missed certain things through not having brought up their children all the time. However, they thought that there might be certain advantages to the children:
'I think that when the children were very little, they would rather have had me at home, but when they got to about 9 or 10, they were proud of me. I think I possibly make a better mother to older children. My own mother was a very motherly mother. But when I was about 11 and started asking lots of questions to which they didn't know the answers, my parents felt threatened. Now when my son knows more than I do I'm glad. I have an assured position. My assurance of my own status has made them rather arrogant perhaps-they don't accept things on trust.'
