The condition of women has undergone impressive changes since the late 1960s. A series of interconnected changes have made possible a new way of being a woman: the new consumer culture, television, the technological transformation of domestic activities, mass schooling, the new youth culture, the political and cultural environment around 1968, and the feminist struggle that brought abortion, contraception and divorce to the forefront of public debate.

Such processes have produced multiple consequences, from a tendency to more equal sharing of domestic commitments to a decline in the fertility rate. If we were to select the most innovative feature, however, we would argue that the increasing centrality of work in women's biographical paths has been of paramount importance. Women born in the 1940s, and who were in their 20s in 1968, were the first to experience the break with the idea of the woman as housewife, which was the central role model for their mothers. They were the first to consider work as a keystone in their lives. Initially, they followed the principle of ‘communicating vessels’ – salaried work is increased, decreased or eliminated in various phases of the lifecycle according to family needs, and continuity of work is determined by family necessities (Saraceno, 1986). They then followed the ‘double-presence’ model, where family and work become parallel paths, and working became a right/duty connected with being an adult woman, independently of the needs of the family (Balbo, 1978).

This model was progressively internalised by later generations of women, although at different rates – firstly in more economically developed milieus by educated women of higher social status before it gained more general cultural acceptance. During the 1980s, even those women who chose not to marry and/or work did so by challenging – and thereby diverging from – a ‘typical’ path. This path implied reconciling marriage, motherhood and work, often with difficulty.

At present, the situation seems to be changing once again. Increasing family instability, more precarious working conditions and, more generally, the current process of modernisation, seem to be threatening the solidity of those models around which gender identities have been constructed.

It is well known that one of the founding features of reflexive modernity is an increasing demand for control by individuals who are no longer guided by tradition and fixed scripts.