Women and Work in Modern Britain

This text provides an introduction to the topic of women and work in modern Britain. Rosemary Crompton gives an account of the recent changes in the structure of women's employment, incorporating a comprehensive review of the theoretical concepts and arguments developed to explain them. Discussing the pattern of women's paid employment from the standpoint of both constraint and individual choice, the author begins by examining the variety of explanations offered to understand the situation of women in work in 20th-century Britain. In subsequent chapters she discusses the nature and extent of women's employment in Britain today. These include: cross-national comparisons of the differential structuring of women's employment; women as employees; and the impact on the lives of both women and men of the changing employment/family interface and its implications for the wider structure of inequality and social polarization in Britain.