The social reproduction of the female labour force, the process whereby girls and women come to take their place in the sexual division of labour, as domestic workers and as waged workers within certain sectors of the economy, is clearly a complex one. Women not only work in the home, servicing their husbands and children, but also now make up a large proportion of the labour force; working predominantly in what has been identified as the female sector of the occupational structure in a small number of manufacturing industries, in the service industries, in clencal work, and in the female professions of teaching, nursing and social work; and occupying, furthermore, the less skilled, lower paid, often part-time work even within these (Hakim, 1978). And attempts to understand these patterns of female employment in the context of women's dual role within capitalist society ( in the home and as members of a reserve army of labour, a source of cheap, unorganized workers which can be called upon to augment the work force in times of economic upturn and discarded in times of recession) have emphasized the importance of considering a wide range of constraints on the routes women can take; constraints deriving not only from the structure and functioning of the dual labour market itself (Barron and Norris, 1976) but also from women's own aspirations, the way in which they grow up prepared to accept their place in the sexual division of labour. And it is consideration of this latter fact, and the way it relates to the structuring of the labour process, which is central to the following discussion; a discussion which focusses on girls' initial entry into the labour force, into that female and predominantly 'dead end work, identified above, in which the majority of women are employed and inwhich they predominate; and on the extent to which their socialization 'succeeds', to a greater or less degree, in preparing them for this. There has long been evidence (see, for example, Sharpe, 1976 and Byrne, 1978) that girls largely aspire to, and expect to enter, those areas of employment designated as 'women's work'. And attention has been directed to the part played by different agencies of socialization in reproducing and affirming the existing divison of labour in this way. In particular, the 'poverty of aspiration' (Byrne 1978 ) of the majority of girls has been accounted for in terms of the broad identification of femininity with domesticity; and the way in which a domestic ideology, the message that women's primary role is that of wife and mother, has been and is, transmitted not only by family, peer