Introduction

These well-known quotations serve to convey two themes that are central to this book: first, that rapid social change is endemic in modern societies, but nevertheless, that sexual differences, as expressed in gender relations, are characterised by both change and continuity. We do not lack attempts that seek to develop totalising accounts of global social change (for example, Castells' (1997) three-volume Information Age), but, in this book, we focus on a particular ‘slice’ of this totality, that is, the inter-relationships between men, women, families and employment. However, this ‘slice’ will be (and will always have been) crucially affected by wider normative, political and economic contexts and the manner of their development. In order to understand the present, we have first to understand the past.

The growth of capitalist industrialism from the end of the eighteenth century was accompanied by technical innovation, the development of the factory system, and the expansion of independent wage labour, which required individuals to be freed from traditional restraints on their mobility and employment opportunities.