ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an account of the lives of the single working women between leaving school and our first interviews with them. For most of the women there are multiple interviews and the detailed analysis of change over the research period appears in Chapters 8 and 9. Here we have a broader canvas. The women left school between 1984 and 1991 with the majority (38) leaving between 1987 and 1990. The 1980s had seen important changes in the way in which young people made the transition from ‘youth’ to ‘adulthood’. Irwin (1995) has pointed out that some of these changes go back further but by the early 1980s their scope and depth were clear. The availability of jobs for young workers at 16 had shrunk dramatically, support for them by state benefit had been removed, a massive programme of Youth Training had been introduced by central government alongside increasing numbers remaining in the education system. In terms of family there were increases in lone motherhood by young women, cohabitation and children being born outside marriage, alongside young people remaining in their parental homes for longer.
