Reproductive Labour in Austere Times

Abstract

This chapter considers the often-repeated allegation that austerity targets women disproportionately and represents an erosion of key gains that have remade the lives of many women in recent years. In the process, there is an attempt to consider the modes of gendering through public policy under the much-mourned recent period of welfare capitalism and to gain an understanding of the enormity of the changes that we are now living through. Cultures of reproduction and associated expectations of gendering play their part in this reconfiguration, but the deployment of gender mythologies is oddly erratic.