Balancing our space and time: the impact of women’s organistion on the British city, 1920–1980

Abstract

Three times in the last sixty years, women in Britain have been told to ‘go home’. The first time was at the close of the 1914–18 War, throughout which women’s public work had been both restricted and carefully presented as temporary (Beechey, 1977; Oakley, 1976; White, 1970). The second was at the close of the 1939–45 War, when women were told that their role in post-war reconstruction was to work full time in the homes, bearing and raising children and caring for their husbands, assisted by a range of new welfare state services and consumer goods (Douie, 1945; Myrdal and Klein, 1968; Riley, 1979; White, 1970). Thirdly, in the early 1980s in the context of a deepening recession and cutbacks of these same services, women were again being told to leave paid jobs to the men, their place was at home (Counter Information Services, CIS, 1976 and 1981; Labour Party, 1981).