ABSTRACT
If women’s employment prospects are argued to be adversely affected by economic recession and cutbacks in social welfare provision then Britain could be said to provide a test case. Britain has probably suffered from the most severe recession amongst advanced countries since 1979: manufacturing output fell by 14 per cent between 1979 and 1981 and unemployment rose from around 1.4 million to over 2.5 million over the same period. Unemployment has since risen to 3-4 million1 and the underlying trend has continued upwards. These economic problems result partly from structural problems with the British economy but have been intensified since 1979 by the Conservative government’s policy of strict control of public expenditure to meet monetarist targets. These financial objectives have been bolstered by ideological objectives to return more of the burden of income support and physical care to the family, and by implication, to encourage women to concentrate on domestic labour. If under these conditions women maintain or even advance their labour market position then the argument that women act primarily as a flexible reserve of labour, to be repelled from the labour market in downturns, would appear to have little substance.
