Abstract
The study of women’s employment has been and continues to be of crucial importance in the feminist agenda for change. The analysis and explanation of processes which generate gender divisions and inequality in work has always been linked to feminist campaigns to end sex discrimination and inequality in the work place and, more generally, has occupied a central place in feminist theorisations of patriarchy or ‘gender regimes’ in modern societies (cf. Walby, 1990, 1997). Indeed, the steadily increasing participation of women in paid employment during the latter half of the twentieth century is arguably one of the most significant aspects of the transformation of gender relations (Walby, 1997). This chapter focuses on the distinctive ways feminists analyse women’s paid work, as well as indicating some recent trends in women’s employment.1
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Further reading
Rosemary Pringle, Secretaries’ Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work (London: Verso, 1989). This is an important study of women’s work which moved beyond the preoccupation with structures of women’s employment and male power, and pioneered the application of post-structuralist ideas to an analysis of women’s work. Rosemary Pringle looks in particular at the ways in which discourses of sexuality construct the jobs of bosses and secretaries.
Barbara Reskin and Irene Padavic, Women and Men at Work (London: Pine Forge Press, 1994). This is a very clearly written overview of the main aspects of women’s work in modern societies, providing an introduction to the key concepts developed to explore women’s employment as well as insights into the actual position of women in work in Western Europe and the USA.
Lisa Adkins, Gendered Work: Sexuality, Family and the Labour Market (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995). Lisa Adkins critically reviews feminist and sociological analyses of employment, and develops a new way of understanding the gendered structure of the labour market. Drawing on an empirical study of gendered work in the leisure and tourist industries, Lisa Adkins extends the concept of ‘labour’ to include ‘sexual labour’, arguing that women are constituted as ‘workers’ through the commodification of their sexuality.
Sylvia Walby, Gender Transformations (London: Routledge, 1997). Developing her analysis of the shift from ‘private’ to ‘public patriarchy’ (Theorising Patriarchy, 1990), Sylvia Walby provides an excellent summary and analysis of the major changes in gendered employment in Britain today, exploring new divisions amongst women in terms of age, class, ‘race’ and ethnicity, and analysing changes in women’s employment, as well gender relations more generally, in the context of the flexibilisation of work, the state, gender politics and citizenship.
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© 1997 Anne Witz
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Witz, A. (1997). Women and Work. In: Robinson, V., Richardson, D. (eds) Introducing Women’s Studies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25726-3_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25726-3_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-68470-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-25726-3
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