Women and unemployment in deindustrialising Britain, 1975 -1990

There were two stand-out trends of the labour market of the 1970s and 1980s. Firstly, from the mid-1970s, unemployment began to rise precipitously, largely as a result of deindustrialisation. Secondly, the participation of women in the labour market – particularly married women with young children – continued its inexorable rise.  Despite the overall increasing participation of women in workforce, like men, they too were vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the labour market; indeed, the increasing numbers of women in the labour market also meant that there were increasing numbers of women who were vulnerable to unemployment. More conservative or traditional understandings of women’s domestic role precluded them from being understood as truly ‘unemployed’; this vision of womanhood saw women’s domestic role as generally constituting their ‘true work’; men were  breadwinners, with women’s work being for pin money, and women’s job losses therefore not entailing the same psychological or economic effects as it did for men. But by the early 1980s, for the first time, the unemployed woman became a subject of concern for feminist policy makers, activists, and sociologists alike.  These actors were concerned to expose the plight of unemployed women, and to illuminate the centrality of work to women’s sense of self, and women’s earnings to the family economy.

Dr Natalie Thomlinson is an Associate Professor at the University of Reading.