ABSTRACT
The conclusion is a short chapter that brings together the initial research problem – women’s contradictory roles and their amelioration – into relief against the theoretical trajectory of the book. The conclusion revisits the early theoretical work in classical contract theory and the feminist critique, and the transformations within the family associated with modernisation and the (initially latent) duality in western women’s lives which this produced, notwithstanding class and regional differences. The conclusion re-sets the research problem in its theoretical and historical context, revisits the contemporary manifestation of this problem (role contradiction and the double burden), before outlining the central findings of the interview data and the role of periodic maternal absence in ameliorating contradiction. This last finding is situated in terms of the larger argument that contemporary western women are free as ‘individuals’ and constrained as mothers with the bold statement that the freedom of mothers will transform the social order and constitutes a central unfinished goal of feminism in the twenty-first century.
