Continuities, Change and Transformations

Abstract

There have been recent, and dramatic, changes in the position of women and gender relations. In Europe, within living memory, discrimination in employment by sex has been perfectly legal, and married women have been formally subordinate to their husbands. For example, in England, rape within marriage was only criminalised in 1991, French men could formally forbid their wives to take up paid employment until 1965, and Portuguese women were by law subject to their husband’s authority until the 1970s. However, the unravelling of the ‘male breadwinner model’ towards more egalitarian models of work-family articulation across Europe is a complex and very slow process. There is no doubt that the growth in the labour force participation of women, especially mothers, and the variety of national policy responses to support dual earner families have been associated with some changes in attitudes, expectations, behaviours and experiences, in the home and in the workplace, in different European contexts. However, the contributors to this book show that both structural and relational factors remain important in shaping work and family experiences, albeit in highly complex and differentiated ways. Changes and transformations are occurring at various societal levels, in different ways and at different rates both between countries and also within countries and within institutions, influenced by a plurality of factors.