2026/01/01 by Natalie Thomlinson
Arts and Humanities · Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Centrality #Deindustrialization #Earnings #Employment and Welfare Studies #Feminism #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes #Period (music) #Political and Economic history of UK and US #Position (finance) #Unemployment
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/jbr.2026.10271
published in Journal of British Studies 65 (Cambridge University Press)
openalex publication_date 2026/01/01 · openalex created_date 2026/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Abstract The mass unemployment attendant upon deindustrialization has generally been implicitly understood as a male phenomenon, both at the time and later. But by the early 1980s, the unemployed woman had become a subject of concern for feminist activists and academics, who were concerned to make visible the plight of unemployed women, and to illuminate the centrality of work to women’s sense of self and women’s earnings to the family economy. Even more fundamentally, they questioned why women without paid work were not always understood as unemployed, instead seen as being absorbed back into domesticity. This article therefore examines the concerted contemporaneous feminist response to this moment by examining the archives of organizations belonging to the Women’s Employment Projects Group, a nationwide network of feminist activists who campaigned between the late 1970s and late 1980s to improve women’s position in the labor force. Offering us a portal into understanding how issues surrounding women’s unemployment were conceptualized by feminists during a period of unprecedented shifts in women’s working lives, this article argues that these groups have much to offer scholars of deindustrialization, both in terms of the attention they drew to the sheer scale of female joblessness, and their radical reconceptualization of women’s unemployment.