ABSTRACT
Women continued to enter the labour force in ever increasing numbers throughout the twentieth century, but many fears have been voiced about changing gender roles and a perceived deterioration of family life. Women’s paid employment may be an accepted fact of modern life, but it is still regarded by many as an undesirable one. In the first half of the twentieth century, government policy reflected the widely held view that the female population constituted a reserve labour force, only to be drawn on in times of dire necessity. During the First World War, the vast numbers of women who were encouraged to enter the labour force had to fight bitterly to achieve the same wage as their male counterparts, a privilege which was granted to women workers during the Second World War, in which, for the first time, state-run nurseries were also provided. But, like the previous generation of women war workers, they were expected to relinquish both their jobs and their state childcare facilities during peacetime. The immediate postwar period saw a forceful reassertion of traditional roles; women were enticed back into the home as sociologists and psychologists warned of the dangers of maternal deprivation caused by the working mother’s absence. Fears concerning the welfare of so-called ‘latchkey kids’ (those who had no mother to greet them from school) reinforced the notion that children could not be properly cared for without a home-based mother, heightening public hostility towards such women (to reinforce this, there were in 1995 several high-profile attacks in the tabloids on mothers who left their children ‘home alone’). But in spite of these attitudes, women’s participation in paid employment rose dramatically in the late 1950s and has continued to increase in every decade since. Shifts in patterns of employment, particularly the expansion of secretarial, administrative, and clerical occupations in the 1960s and 1970s, and the rapid growth of the service sector in the 1980s, opened up new areas of female employment. Today, nearly two-thirds of women aged between fifteen and sixty-four in Britain are in work, compared with between a third and a half in most other European countries (only in Sweden and Denmark the proportions are higher).
