"Women, where are your jobs going?": Feminism and the problem of unemployment in Thatcher's Britain

Thomlinson, N. (2026) "Women, where are your jobs going?": Feminism and the problem of unemployment in Thatcher's Britain. Journal of British Studies, 65. e87. ISSN 1545-6986 doi: 10.1017/jbr.2026.10271

Abstract/Summary

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.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/131163
Identification Number/DOI	10.1017/jbr.2026.10271
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Humanities > History
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
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