While previous chapters have focused on how austerity is made present through the lived experiences of women, this chapter pays particular attention to how women's future imaginaries are felt in the present. It explores how austerity affects these imaginaries and asks which types of futures have women begun to imagine in the context of austerity? Women's future imaginings are multiple and, as this chapter shows, are affected particularly by class positioning. This is because, Rebecca Coleman (2014a, 2014b) notes, inequality and power are produced and reinforced through women's different kinds of imagined and real futures.

Economic, political, technological and social changes, which began in the 1970s and intensified in the following decades, delivered new and different expectations for the future. Many authors (Sennett, 1998; Bauman, 2005; Ehrenreich, 2005) have explored how such changes have resulted in a situation where people no longer work with the possibility of long-term planning, and without consideration for the directed construction of a future.