What's so Special about Women's Employment? A Review of some Recent Studies of Women's Paid Work

Abstract

It is now about ten years since the publication of some of the first classical texts of contemporary feminism and an immense amount of new feminist work has been accomplished in a whole number of spheres. In this article I want to look at some of the recently published studies of women's employment, and within the limited scope of what is primarily a review article, to make some assessment of how far we have progressed in developing a feminist theoretical understanding of women's place in the world of paid work. Writings on women's employment have taken a variety of forms over this period. Some experiential accounts of paid work have been published, although, given the experiential emphasis of much feminist thinking, especially in the early years of the women's liberation movement, these have been rather few in number. Statistical analyses of women's employment, many of them underaken under the auspices of the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Oepartment of Employment, have become more widely available. Although these are by no means adequate, as a number of critics concerned with women's employment have pointed out, they are indispensable for understanding the overall patterns of women's employment: changes in women's participation rate in the world of paid work; the distribution of women across industries and occupations; and evidence about rates of pay, hours of work and so on. The bulk of 'mainstream' feminist writings on women's employment falls into three categories: political and educational books and pamphlets, theoretical writings and empirical case studies. Of the wide variety of broadly 'educational' material available, much of it is devised for women trade unionists: material on employment legislation, on women's place in the workforce and on women in trade unions. The more academic writings about women's paid work have veered between theoretical analyses and empirical case studies. In the early years of feminist analysis many femirlists (myself included) engaged in largely theoretical work. We felt that it was necessary to clarit what concepts and theories were appropriate for a feminist understanding. We tried to use and transform the concepts which Marxists and radical economists were developing to analyse work in general, for example, the labour process, concepts of value, deskilling, the industrial reserve army of labour and the dual labour market. We also developed our own specifically feminist concepts, for example, patriarchy, production and reproduction, domestic labour and wage labour. It is still concepts derived fiom Marx and IFom radical economic analysis which form the basis of theoretical analyses of women's employment, although some writers have