ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with occupations which were never found, with work histories which never took place. The analysis explores the origin, substance, and function of the imagined alternative careers which men and women carried with them as they conducted their actual careers in the British economy from the years before 1914 until the early decades after the Second World War. The men and women in the 'Family Life and Work' survey had lived through a series of major secular upheavals, including two world wars and the Great Depression, but as they reviewed their work histories, the most dramatic period was usually located in their early teens. The First World War was particularly unsettling for those women who were suddenly translated from traditional 'female' occupations into munition factories and other work hitherto reserved for their menfolk. Within a given occupation, the issue of promotion threw a retrospective shadow over a limited education.
