Gender and sexuality

This book is the first to go inside women’s work and family lives in a year of working flexibly. The private labours of going part-time, job sharing, and home working are brought to life with vivid personal stories, concluding that there is an opportunity to make employment and family life work better together.

Outsourcing of domestic work in the UK has been steadily rising since the 1970s, but little research has considered White British women. This book argues that outsourced domestic cleaning can either be done as mental and manual skilled work or as manual and ‘natural’ emotional/affective labour, depending on the work conditions.