ABSTRACT
The married woman who leaves her home each day and goes off to work has become a familiar, if controversial, figure in western society. In England and Wales in 1959 approximately one worker in six was a married woman, and Ministry of Labour figures give a total of 3,683,000 married women in employment, just over half of all female employees. Economic expansion and full employment have increased the demand for women as members of the labour force. Assuming the supply of single women to be constant, this would imply the increased employment of married women as the last important reserve under conditions of labour shortage. Labour shortage in the war years, continuing into the 1950’s, had forced a drastic revision, not only of the firm’s recruiting policy, but also of its overall organization of womanpower. In Bermondsey the post-war, nation-wide shortage of workers was aggravated by the wartime drop in the borough’s population to about half of the pre-war figure.
