ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some issues relating to women, work and the labour market. It looks at discrimination against women in the nineteenth century, as well as at various struggles resulting in legislative or women’s rights, including for both middle- and working-class women. The demand for women’s suffrage in Britain was fought for on and off during the whole of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, and divided the British labour movement. From the outset the modern Women’s Liberation Movement recognised the centrality of choice in matters of reproduction in the fight for equality for women. The refusal of postmodernism and post-feminism to think about the whole world and its relationships is totally inadequate when it comes to changing the lives of half the world’s population – namely women.
