Ash Amin University of Cambridge Bhikhu Parekh WORKING LIVES€¦ · book explores the changing nature of women’s employment in post-war Britain. Seen through the eyes of those

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‘In this rich book, Linda McDowell writes an important history of the changing nature of work in Britain over the last 60 years through the experience and eyes of immigrant women. There are not many books that bring together the trials, hopes and achievements of various generations of working women from East Europe, the Caribbean and East Africa, and fewer still that rethink British labour market history on the basis of the evidence gathered. A very fine piece of scholarship.’ Ash Amin, University of Cambridge

‘An insightful and well-researched study of post second world war women’s migration into Britain, exploring the interplay between their changing self-understanding, patterns of work and gender identity. The unusual and original angle of analysis yields many a novel conclusion and makes the book indispensable.’ Bhikhu Parekh, University of Westminster and House of Lords

Based on unique and compelling insights into the working lives of migrant women in the UK, this book explores the changing nature of women’s employment in post-war Britain. Seen through the eyes of those arriving and seeking work since 1945, the author’s analysis of working patterns is based on many hours of interviews with female textile workers, hospital domestics, nurses, automotive workers, photo print packers, bankers, doctors, cleaners, nannies and agricultural workers.

The volume uses these first-hand accounts to track social changes in the UK up to 2007, combining theory and analysis of empirical data to provide a cogent analysis of the characteristics of the labour market in contemporary Britain. Linda McDowell sets the vivid details of women’s lives in the context of far-reaching changes in the country’s employment landscape and immigrant regulatory framework since World War II. Deploying fresh information gleaned from oral history accumulated over two decades of research, the book is a fascinating survey of the origins of Britain’s ethnically diverse population that fuses sociological and geographical analysis to demonstrate how migrant women are viewed by society as suitable workers for particular types of jobs.

Linda McDowell is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. She is a Fellow of St John’s College, where she is the Director of the Research Centre, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Widely published and well-known as a feminist ethnographer of labour and employment, her books include Capital Culture: Gender at Work in the City (Blackwell, 1997), Gender, Identity and Place (1999), Redundant Masculinities? Employment Change and White Working-Class Youth (Blackwell, 2003), Hard Labour (2005) and Working Bodies: Interactive Service Employment and Workplace Identities (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

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Working Lives

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RGS-IBG Book SeriesPublished

Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007Linda McDowell

Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working Women and the Cultural EconomyMaureen Molloy and Wendy Larner

Dunes: Dynamics, Morphology and Geological HistoryAndrew Warren

Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen MasseyEdited by David Featherstone and Joe Painter

The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton BosniaAlex Jeffrey

Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal AssemblageColin McFarlane

Globalizing Responsibility: The Political Rationalities of Ethical ConsumptionClive Barnett, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke and Alice Malpass

Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist CitiesAlison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská and Dariusz ŚwiątekSwept Up Lives? Re-envisioning the Homeless CityPaul Cloke, Jon May and Sarah Johnsen

Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, AffectsPeter Adey

Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines David Ley

State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British AtmosphereMark Whitehead

Complex Locations: Women’s Geographical Work in the UK, 1850–1970Avril Maddrell

Value Chain Struggles: Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of South IndiaJeff Neilson and Bill Pritchard

Queer Visibilities: Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape TownAndrew Tucker

Arsenic Pollution: A Global SynthesisPeter Ravenscroft, Hugh Brammer and Keith Richards

Resistance, Space and Political Identities: The Making of Counter-Global NetworksDavid Featherstone

Mental Health and Social Space: Towards Inclusionary Geographies?Hester Parr

Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in VulnerabilityGeorgina H. Endfield

Geochemical Sediments and LandscapesEdited by David J. Nash and Sue J. McLaren

Driving Spaces: A Cultural-Historical Geography of England’s M1 MotorwayPeter Merriman

Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban PolicyMustafa Dikeç

Geomorphology of Upland Peat: Erosion, Form and Landscape ChangeMartin Evans and Jeff Warburton

Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban GovernmentalitiesStephen Legg

People/States/TerritoriesRhys Jones

Publics and the CityKurt Iveson

After the Three Italies: Wealth, Inequality and Industrial ChangeMick Dunford and Lidia Greco

Putting Workfare in PlacePeter Sunley, Ron Martin and Corinne Nativel

Domicile and DiasporaAlison Blunt

Geographies and MoralitiesEdited by Roger Lee and David M. Smith

Military GeographiesRachel Woodward

A New Deal for Transport?Edited by Iain Docherty and Jon Shaw

Geographies of British ModernityEdited by David Gilbert, David Matless and Brian Short

Lost Geographies of PowerJohn Allen

Globalizing South ChinaCarolyn L. Cartier

Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 YearsEdited by David L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee

Forthcoming

Smoking Geographies: Space, Place and TobaccoRoss Barnett, Graham Moon, Jamie Pearce, Lee Thompson and Liz Twigg

Material Politics: Disputes Along the PipelineAndrew Barry

Peopling Immigration Control: Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum SystemNick Gill

The Geopolitics of Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in an Integrating EuropeMerje Kuus

The Geopolitics of Expertise in the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk BroadsDavid Matless

Frontier Regions of Marketization: Agribusiness, Farmers and the Precarious Making of Global Connections in West AfricaStefan Ouma

Articulations of Capital: Global Production Networks and Regional TransformationsJohn Pickles, Adrian Smith and Robert Begg, with Milan Buček, Rudolf Pástor and Poli RoukovaOrigination: The Geographies of Brands and BrandingAndy Pike

Making Other Worlds: Agency and Interaction in Environmental ChangeJohn Wainwright

Everyday Moral Economies: Food, Politics and Scale in CubaMarisa Wilson

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Working Lives

Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007

Linda McDowell

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

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This edition first published 2013© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing.

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

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The right of Linda McDowell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McDowell, Linda, 1949– Working lives: gender, migration and employment in Britain, 1945–2007 / Linda McDowell. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4443-3919-2 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-4443-3918-5 (pbk.)1. Women foreign workers—Great Britain—History—20th century. 2. Immigrant women—Employment—Great Britain—History—20th century. 3. Immigrant women—Great Britain—Social conditions—20th century. 4. Great Britain—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects—History—20th century. 5. Great Britain—Emigration and immigration—Economic aspects—History—20th century. 6. Great Britain—Economic conditions—20th century. 7. Great Britain—Social conditions—1945 HD8398.A2M2955 2013 331.4—dc23

2012051591

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Young women from Calcutta in London, 1957. © Popperfoto / Getty ImagesCover design by Workhaus

Set in 10/12pt Plantin by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

1 2013

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For my mother, Olive Morgan Leigh, born in September 1926, and my grandson, Toby Christopher McDowell, born in July 2009

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List of Figures and Tables viiiSeries Editors’ Preface xPreface: Leaving Home and Looking for Work xi

Part One Migration and Mobilities 1

1 Leaving Home: Migration and Working Lives 32 Gendering Labour Geographies and Histories 193 The Transformation of Britain 51

Part Two Out to Work: Embodied Genealogies 69

4 Post-war Reconstruction, 1945–1951 715 Coming Home: The Heart of Empire, 1948–1968 956 Years of Struggle, 1968–1979 1287 Privilege and Inequality, 1979–1997 1578 Back to the Future: Diversity and Precarious

Labour, 1997–2007 1849 Full Circle, 1945–2007 213

References 232Appendix: Post-war Legislation 253Index 263

Contents

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Figures

4.1 Young women EVWs from the Baltic, queuing for a medical inspection at a reception camp in Britain, in September 1947, before being allocated employment 81

5.1 A young woman from the Caribbean arriving in England by ship, May 1961 100

6.1 The leader of the Grunwick strike: Mrs Jayaben Desai, 1976 1517.1 One woman (at ten to the hour) among the male brokers

on the floor of The Atrium, Lloyd’s of London 1688.1 A migrant worker mopping the floor in a large hotel 198

Tables

3.1 UK population by nationality and birthplace, 2009–10 603.2 Foreign-born population in the UK in the second half

of the twentieth century 613.3 Foreign-born population living in the UK, largest

25 groups, 2001 614.1 Total arrivals in the UK under the Baltic Cygnet

and Westward Ho! schemes 785.1 The Caribbean population in Great Britain, 1951–84 986.1 Country of birth, Great Britain, 1971 1347.1 Change in the earnings distribution in Great Britain,

1979–95, full-time employees 1597.2 Principal employers of women in the UK, 1997 1637.3 Non-British-born population of working age, UK, 1979

and 2000, by birthplace, % 166

List of Figures and Tables

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list of figures and tables ix

8.1 The numbers of foreign nationals allocated a national insurance number in 2006/7 187

9.1 Ethnic composition of the population in 2001, UK 2249.2 Economic activity of the working-age population by

ethnic group, UK, 2004 226

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The RGS-IBG Book Series only publishes work of the highest international standing. Its emphasis is on distinctive new developments in human and  physical geography, although it is also open to contributions from cognate disciplines whose interests overlap with those of geographers. The series places strong emphasis on theoretically informed and empirically strong texts. Reflecting the vibrant and diverse theoretical and empirical agendas that characterize the contemporary discipline, contributions are expected to inform, challenge and stimulate the reader. Overall, the RGS-IBG Book Series seeks to promote scholarly publications that leave an intellectual mark and change the way readers think about particular issues, methods or theories.

For details on how to submit a proposal please visit:www.rgsbookseries.com

Neil CoeNational University of Singapore

Joanna BullardLoughborough University, UK

RGS-IBG Book Series Editors

Series Editors’ Preface

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This book is about the migration of women in search of work and a better standard of living. It is also a book primarily about the UK. My purpose is to explore the changing character of the British economy and society over the long post-war years between 1945 and the economic crisis in 2008 through the eyes of women born elsewhere. It is a book for students, for my own and my children’s generation, and for the general reader who wants to know more about Britain in the past, and about the lives of their mothers and grandmothers over the sixty years that were perhaps one of the most optimis-tic periods in Britain’s history. It was certainly a time in which women’s lives changed almost immeasurably, as well as when the population became more diverse in its origins. There are many books about Britain in the post-war era, some straddling the entire period, others focusing on particular decades, but very few place women’s lives and voices, especially working-class women born elsewhere, at the centre of the text. This is their place here.

I want to illustrate the assumptions that are dominant at different times over more than half a century about who belongs in Britain and who does not, about how employment and motherhood are connected, about who gets what sorts of jobs and why, and the standards of living that these jobs permit. I also want to document the place of migrant women in Britain’s labour history, illustrating their contributions to economic growth and change and to providing for the needs of the population, often through working in caring roles. Some of the women whose lives I explore came to the UK by choice, others did not. Some might have been able to go home and chose not to, others were unable to return to their homeland. All these women made significant contributions to the UK through waged work and for some of them through their involvement in struggles and strikes to improve their own and others’ working conditions. Through their eyes, the huge changes that occurred in post-war Britain – in social attitudes, in politics, in sexual mores, in gender relations and in women’s rights, as well

Preface: Leaving Home and Looking for Work

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xii preface: leaving home and looking for work

as in the structure of employment – are revealed, showing the ways in which migrant women were differentially included and excluded from these changes. The focus on women also helps to challenge assumptions – now less common than at the start of the post-war era – that work and employment is a male domain; that women, if they work at all, do so for ‘pin money’. Participation in waged work for these women was an economic necessity, through which they made a crucial contribution to household budgets and children’s lives. Further, as feminist scholars have insisted, waged work is but one part of women’s work. Domestic labour in the home is also work and needs analysis. Many of the women in this book not only undertook domestic work in their own homes but were paid a wage for doing the same tasks in someone else’s home.

My key aim is to explore the changing connections between immigration, employment and gender relations since 1945. Moving between places and going out to work typically challenge and reshape conventional assump-tions about gender divisions of labour and the different responsibilities of men, women and children, in the home as well as in the workplace. The coincidence of the rise of women as workers in their own right and the focus on women’s lives in feminist scholarship has transformed the analysis of labour history and migration theory, giving women a new place at the centre of analysis. It is this coincidence that stimulated this book, which looks at  women’s employment and migration histories and memories of their working lives in the post-war era.

The book has had a long gestation. Its origins lie in part in the history of migration for employment in my own family. My paternal great-grandparents were German Jews from Alsace-Lorraine who came to Manchester in the 1870s, both of whom found work in the then-expanding cotton textile industry. Their son, born in Manchester, married a woman from Scotland whose family had moved to England before the First World War. His early death meant that Margaret Dick Magee (her maiden name) had to seek waged work to support two young sons both during and just after the Second World War. On my mother’s side, there were Scots too who had also moved south to find work. And the men on this side of the family also died early. My maternal grandmother had to look for waged work on the death of her husband, picking up a range of casual jobs, ‘women’s work’ in housekeeping and casual charring jobs. My husband’s father too was a migrant: in his case from Northern Ireland, part of that generation of young men who joined the British armed forces at the end of the Second World War. Like many of his age and generation he lived in England until retire-ment, when he then went ‘home’. Our daughter, through marriage, has now provided another link in the history of Britain’s migrant population, as her husband’s father came to the UK, also to join the armed forces, but twenty years later than my own father-in-law. He came to the UK from Dominica and now in his fifties is also thinking of returning ‘home’.

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preface: leaving home and looking for work xiii

Stories about these men and women’s transnational moves and new lives in Britain had always been in the background of my family’s history, but it was not until the late 1990s, when they merged with the work I had just begun on migrant women’s lives in the UK after the end of the Second World War, that I began to ponder the connections between the working histories of the migrant women in my own family and those of thousands of unknown others. I wanted to put women at the centre of a history of post-war migration as they too often feature only in the margins of the growing number of books exploring the relatively recent past. For a variety of reasons, however, it has taken me more years than I expected to complete the research for this book. Over these years I have accumulated a large number of debts – to colleagues, students, friends and family too numerous to all be mentioned individually. I must thank, however, the people who have undertaken, with and without me, some of the interviews on which the book is based. They are, alphabetically, Sundari Anitha, Anna Badyina, Adina Batnitzky, Gill Court, Sarah Dyer, Jane Dyson and Adam Ramadan. Sarah Daisy found some of the statistics I needed, checked the references and did some editing, as well as insisting that I did not forget to include women in professional occupations.

Writing the book coincided with a new set of family responsibilities which, as for many women, raised questions about how to negotiate different demands – from family, workplace colleagues, current and former graduate students. Like many women of my age – a baby boomer – rising longevity has produced what is sometimes termed a sandwich generation, with responsi-bilities for parents well into one’s own retirement age when children may not yet be launched on a career or may need help with their own children. Being  part of a four-generational family brings great pleasures but often corresponding demands on time and money. This book took second place between 2010 and 2011 to sharing a household with my son, daughter-in-law and their son, Toby, whose presence brought me enormous joy but also distracted me from academic efforts. Nevertheless, this book is dedicated to my grandson, as well as to his great-grandmother. His life may also be one of migration – he and his parents moved in 2011 to Scotland from Oxford – but I expect it will be marked in different ways by gender divisions than my own life has been or those of the women whose histories are at the heart of this book. For some of them, migration entailed leaving their own family behind – a necessity that I find deeply moving. This book is also for all of them.

The research reported here has been funded variously over the years by the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, St John’s College, Oxford, and the University of Oxford. I am extremely grateful to these bodies for their support and to all the colleagues, students and friends who have listened to me talk about different parts of the study at different times over many years now. Parts of some chapters include rewritten extracts from a number of

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xiv preface: leaving home and looking for work

journal articles published in Progress in Human Geography (2008), British Journal of Industrial Relations (2008), Social and Cultural Geography (2012) and Gender, Place and Culture (2012) and edited extracts from my books Capital Culture (Blackwell, 1997), Hard Labour (UCL Press, 2005) and Working Bodies (Blackwell, 2009). I thank the publishers, journal editors and co-authors of a number of the papers (Sundari Anitha, Adina Batnitzky, Sarah Dyer and Ruth Pearson) for their agreement to the inclusion of these extracts. While short extracts from a number of oral testimonies have been included in these publications, many of the testimonies have not and appear for the first time in this book.

This is the second book for which Jacqueline Scott, at Wiley-Blackwell, has been the commissioning editor. I should like to thank her, as well as Kevin Ward, who was the editor of the IBG series when I began to write, and Neil Coe, who had replaced him as I handed the book over. Brigitte Lee Messenger was a wonderful copy editor who pointed out and deleted all my stylistic tics. Finally, an anonymous reviewer provided valuable feedback: whoever you are, thank you.

Linda McDowellOxford

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Migration and MobilitiesPart One

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Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007, First Edition. Linda McDowell.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Introduction: Geographical Journeys

One of the key rites of passage for growing numbers of young women is leaving home. Once associated for the majority with marriage and the move from a parental to a conjugal home, many young women now live indepen-dently for varying periods of time. In the industrial West, this has been related to the rising numbers of women in universities and with the growth in women’s labour market participation, enabling women increasingly to become financially independent and establish their own home. While once women’s lives were associated with the private spaces of the home and the local scale of the domestic, women in Britain are now part of the public sphere of waged work, where they participate in almost equal numbers to men. About 11 million men and women are now in waged work at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and the social construction of femininity is no longer as closely linked with domesticity as it once was.

These changes have in the main been a post-Second World War phenomenon. While something like a third of all women worked for wages for some part of their lives in the century before that war, the numbers began to rise after it, accelerating from the 1970s. Between the end of the Second World War and the new millennium, then, there has been a transfor-mation of employment, class, culture and relationships between gender and employment that have radically changed many people’s lives. Men, as well

Leaving Home: Migration and Working Lives

Chapter One

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4 working lives

as women, found that the older certainties about their place in the labour market were challenged by the rise of new forms of work, new patterns of labour market participation and growing diversity in the social characteris-tics of employees. Perhaps the most significant change in the last three dec-ades or so in the UK, however, has been the extended participation of women, especially mothers, in the workforce.

For many women, however, leaving home to take part in the labour market has not been a growing privilege, associated with educational par-ticipation, but an economic necessity. In different ways, sometimes on a casual basis or for cash in hand, working-class women have always contri-buted to their households and single women, without the support of a wider household, have also of necessity had to look for employment. For all but the few who work at ‘home’, in their own domestic arena, earning a living, going out to work, necessarily involves a journey, as Alice Kessler-Harris (1982) signalled in the title of her now classic history of US women’s working lives: Out to Work. Long before the establishment of capitalist social relations and the type of regulation that now characterises the formal labour markets of many societies, providing the daily essentials for everyday life often involved both long journeys and absences from the home. Travelling considerable distances was common among nomadic hunters and gatherers before the establishment of agriculture. From herders engaged in tran-shumance, moving between pastures on a seasonal or annual basis, to the peripatetic tramps, hobos and casual workers of national depressions, leav-ing home has been a correlate of making a living. For some, the migrations associated with employment have been more permanent or larger scale, across significant distances. In the transition to industrial capitalism and urbanisation in the West, hundreds of thousands of people moved from the countryside to the city; others moved across national boundaries to start a new life far from their country of birth. It is this group of people for whom leaving home also entails leaving their homeland that is the subject here.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of migrants from Ireland, Germany, Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe moved across the Atlantic to the USA and Canada, escaping from hunger, hardship, oppression and political unrest in search of a better standard of living, leav-ing behind increasingly impoverished compatriots as the more able, the more skilled and the more adventurous swelled the ranks of the leavers. These movements were predominantly voluntary, albeit often motivated by necessity, encouraged by a variety of economic, political and social circum-stances, to ‘new’ lands where the settlers re-established societies in the image of the ‘old’ country, with different degrees of success, but often disenfranchising the original inhabitants. Earlier migrations, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, were different. The wholesale transpor-tation of slaves between Africa, Europe and the Americas was a tragic example of involuntary movement to provide labourers for the plantations

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leaving home: migration and working lives 5

and homes of the slave owners in the Americas, transforming both the sending and the receiving economies, and leaving a legacy of inequality and injustice that is still not settled. And more recently, in the immediate post-war period, white Britons left the UK to establish new lives in Australia and New Zealand as well as in North America, and several millions of displaced people after the end of the Second World War were transformed from refugees into economic migrants as western countries recruited workers to rebuild their shattered economies.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the rate of movement has increased as millions of people move in search of work or as displaced peo-ples and refugees. Currently in East and South-East Asia millions of people are moving within and across national boundaries as economic develop-ment, the mobility of capital and the growing integration of the global econ-omy draw increasing numbers of people into different forms of employment relations. These more recent movements might be regarded as a sort of reverse colonisation (Bennett 1964), as millions of workers move from the economically exploited margins of the global economy to the centres of production, in the main as ‘volunteers’ or as casual cheap labourers, but sometimes under duress, as manufacturing workers, maids and nannies, gardeners and cleaners, construction workers and sex workers, bartenders and into numerous other forms of work, servicing the demands of more affluent populations.

These different migrations involve and affect men and women in different ways at different times. It seems that the forced migrations that character-ised the early modern period included women as well as men, and white women among them (Colley 2002, 2007), whereas the enslavement of Africans in the Americas in the seventeenth century was predominantly, although not solely, a movement of men, as was the later transport of inden-tured servants and convicts from, for example, India to East Africa, China to the USA and Canada, and Britain to Australia. An analysis of migration reveals the assumptions about the suitability of men or women for different markets, as well as the racialised ideologies that permitted the exploitation of people constructed as inferior Others. In previous eras, when the earlier movers were men, the vanguard of the migratory movement, they sent for other family members once some labour market security had been found and savings accumulated. In the last century or so, however, women have made up an increasing proportion of transnational migrants, moving not only as part of a wide household group but also as independent individuals, sometimes in advance of other family members, at other times as single, unattached women, and in growing numbers leaving their families behind them as they become the primary breadwinners from a distance.

In the modern world, where restless global capital searches for locations where labour is cheap and exploitable, rural to urban migrations as well as transnational movements are increasingly dominated by women. These

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6 working lives

migrants move into export processing industries – garments, electronics, food processing – in Thailand, Taiwan, coastal China, the Mexican border, into sweated industries in the cities of the advanced industrial West (Sassen 2001) and into the caring work of nannies, nurses and domestic servants, to replace the domestic labour of middle-class women or to provide care for ageing populations (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). These migrations have a huge effect on gender and familial relations in both ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ societies, affecting the demographic structure of different populations, the opportunities (or not) to create independent households and cultural assumptions about appropriate forms of work and behaviour for men and women, in some cases permitting greater freedom for women, in others deepening women’s exploitation as they find themselves trapped in unequal forms of relationships, both in the workplace and in the society at large.

Transnational migration has now become a global phenomenon. It has been estimated that at the start of the twenty-first century, about 200 million people in the world were migrants, the largest absolute number in history (Smith et al. 2006: 9) and about 3 per cent of the world’s popula-tion. Facilitated by developments in transport and communication tech-nologies, people are now able to cross vast distances relatively easily and inexpensively, although the nature, pace and scale of migration are also connected to changes in national economies, to patterns of transnational capital flows, to wars, famine and pestilence, to revolutions and regime change, which may force the previously immobile to think about migration. The direction of travel is in the main from the South to the North, from less economically developed countries to the richer countries of the world, as it has been across the last two centuries. China, India and the Philippines have been the three main sending countries in the last half-century or so: an estimated 35 million Chinese, 20 million Indians and 7 million Filipinos lived elsewhere in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Europe and North America are the key destination regions, as they have been for centuries: 70 million migrants (9.5 per cent of the population) live in different parts of Europe and 50 million in the USA (14 per cent of the total population; IOM 2008, 2010).

Many of these 200 million migrants have become a key part of the labour force in both developed and developing countries, both vulnerable as new-comers and valuable as an essential part of the workforce in service and manufacturing industries. Although the scale of international migration is now larger than ever, paradoxically its regulation is easier than in earlier centuries. The controls on trans-border movements are now both greater and more easily enforceable. In the age of bioinformatics, when physical and even genetic information is encoded in travel documents, and new technologies of electronic surveillance, transnational movements are easier to track and to control, at least in the most technologically sophisticated

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leaving home: migration and working lives 7

nations. Significantly, these same technologies permit migrants themselves to retain contacts with their ‘homeland’ as well as to build connections between diasporic communities in different places elsewhere. The internet, cheap phone rates, calling cards, low-budget flights, all mean that what was once – for migrants from, say, Russia to New York, from Poland to Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – a permanent move-ment, involving the severance of ties to friends and family left behind, has now become less permanent.

Although historical continuities are clear, it seems that a new stage in migration has begun, what theorists have termed transnationalism (Castles and Miller 2009; Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Vertovec 2001) involving living between two (or more) places. Migration may in earlier eras have been more permanent, although it was never entirely so. Some migrants have always returned ‘home’ and maintained connections through marriage, for exam-ple, as well as occasional visits. However, it seems that geographical move-ment is now both more common and more complex as, over the life cycle, growing numbers of people may move between several countries rather than from one to another in a single movement.

Despite this recent shift in the nature of migration, until the twenty-first century, economic migrants typically moved on a permanent basis, to settle in a new country. Indeed, countries such as Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand are ‘settler societies’, their lands colonised and their econo-mies developed by large numbers of in-migrants, who less positively have often mistreated and restricted the land and opportunities available to the indigenous populations (Pateman and Mills 2007). The United Kingdom’s more recent history has been a different one. Despite a long history of movement and in-migration associated in the main with colonialism, until the second half of the twentieth century, the population was largely ethni-cally homogeneous, mainly white-skinned and born in the country. At the end of the Second World War, less than 5 per cent of the population of the UK had been born abroad. In the decades since then, however, economic migration has begun to transform the population. Schemes to recruit for-eign labour after the war and to permit demobbed soldiers and airmen from Poland to stay, as well as responses to the Hungarian repression in 1956 and to independence movements in the South Asian subcontinent and in Africa between the late 1940s and the 1970s, have altered the composition of the UK population. More recently, recruitment of skilled workers to meet the growing demands in new service industries, the need for less skilled workers to care for an ageing population, and the growing permeability of borders within Europe, as membership of the European Union (EU) was extended in 2004 and 2007,1 have transformed many British towns and cities. The number of foreign-born people in the UK has more than doubled but was still only about 8 per cent of the total UK population in 2001. This com-pares with 11 per cent of the US population in 2000. The percentage may

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seem small, given the significance of debates about migration in the national consciousness. In part this is explained by the confusion between the foreign-born population and British-born children of migrants whose presence increases the diversity of the population. The growing movement of people from elsewhere into the UK over the last sixty years, many of whom have stayed in the country for the rest of their lives, and their descend-ants has produced a new diversity in national origins, cultures and customs, skin colour and languages which simultaneously has enriched and chal-lenged the indigenous population.

In the UK, as elsewhere, in more recent decades, as new patterns of economic migration seem to be emerging, migrants have become more transitory and more diverse not only in terms of their origins, but also in their motives, intentions and statuses within destination countries (Vertovec 2007). In the immediate post-war era in Britain, the majority of economic migrants came to stay. They left their home villages, towns and cities – in the Caribbean, the Punjab, or East Africa – to move to the UK on a permanent basis. Despite journeys home for holidays, for key family events such as births, marriages or deaths, most of the migrants in the earlier post-war decades lived for their entire post-migration lives in the UK, with the excep-tion of small numbers who returned to their country of origin on retire-ment. In the last three decades, however, the numbers of people leaving the UK have risen from less than 70,000 each year to almost 200,000 by 2006, although not all these leavers were previous in-migrants and some are British-born people moving for work or on retirement. Nevertheless, more people arrived in the UK over these years than left, as in-migration accele-rated especially from the early 1990s onwards.

It seems clear, however, that in-migrants are less likely to stay perma-nently than in previous decades. Only a quarter of the migrants who entered the UK in 1998 were still here ten years later (Finch et al. 2009). In part this is explained by the rising numbers of young, single migrants from within the European Union who came to the UK after EU expansion in 2004 per-mitted them to work in the expanded Union. Initially Britain was one of only three old member states that opened their borders to labour migrants, although other countries have now done so, and as a consequence larger than expected numbers of young migrants moved to the UK in the early years after accession. However, wider access to labour markets and the effects of economic recession in Western Europe after 2007 (Rogers 2009) have had an impact on recent numbers of both entrants and leavers, increas-ing the movement between countries within, and beyond, the EU.

Moving across geographical space to seek work elsewhere is, then, one of the key defining characteristics of the twenty-first century, so far. Globally it was estimated by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that in 2005/6, one in ten workers was employed outside the country of their birth – an estimated million people. These figures are, of course, merely best

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estimates as both migration and employment records are notoriously unreliable, especially the former. Many movements across national boundaries simply are not recorded as borders are porous or as migrants take evasive action to avoid being captured in official statistics. Many coun-tries, where in-migration records are reasonably reliable, may not collect the figures of leavers with much enthusiasm. Some of the in-migrants may overstay their welcome and others may not have entered legally, and so both groups may be engaged in waged work outside the formal mechanisms of the labour market.

At the start of the twenty-first century, there were almost equal numbers of men and women among the official figures for transnational migrants (IOM 2008), although according to United Nations statistics, there were more women than men among the recent migrants in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, Oceania and the former USSR (Koser 2007: 6–7). This transformation in the gender composition of transnational migrants is the subject here, associated with a parallel transformation in the structure of the labour market and the division of labour in the more afflu-ent countries of the world that attract growing numbers of women migrants. Migration often challenges and recuts older divisions based on gender, as well as on class and ethnicity (Andall 2003; Palmary et al. 2010). For many migrants, moving in search of work involves downward social mobility as qualifications and skills may not be recognised. Migrants from middle-class backgrounds may find their insertion into the class structure in the UK problematic as they are able to find only low(er)-status work. They may experience anxiety as previous ideas of status and authority are challenged by the hierarchical structure of the labour market and by racialised discrimination. Gendered notions of authority may also be challenged as women assert their growing independence based on new expectations about women’s and men’s rights and obligations in host societies, leading to new cleavages and divisions within migrant populations as well as between different migrant groups and between migrants and ‘local’ populations.

Transforming Lives

These questions about the transformation of identities as women move across national borders and enter the labour market are the focus of this book. At its heart are the lives of women migrants, born outside the UK but who moved there in the decades after the Second World War from a variety of countries to create a better life for themselves and their families. Some women came alone, others as single women but as part of a family or house-hold that moved together, and others came either to marry or as already married women. All of them worked for wages for large parts of their lives, in a range of different types of jobs in different parts of the UK, becoming

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a crucial part of the workforce in female-dominated sectors of the British economy. The main focus of the succeeding chapters is the waged work undertaken by these women migrants – the types of jobs they undertook as the British economy changed from one dominated by manufacturing indus-tries employing mainly men to a service-dominated economy in which almost equal numbers of men and women are in waged employment. In Part One I explore ways of theorising the connections between employ-ment, migration and identity, and in Part Two the focus is on the daily working lives of migrant women across six post-war decades.

Over these decades, not only the types of jobs changed but also the ways in which people were attached to the labour market became more varied. New forms of contracts, shift work, casual employment, short hours or long hours and overtime all became more common and, at the same time, the workforce itself became more diverse, as more women, more people born outside the UK, older workers, students and schoolchildren all worked for wages (McDowell 2009). Part of this growing diversity is reflected in the origins of the women migrants who became part of the British labour market in growing numbers after the end of the Second World War. In the second part of the book, I explore the nature of the UK labour market through the eyes of migrant women. I investigate the jobs that women undertake, and the reasons why class, colour, gender and ethnicity intersect in particular ways at different times in the UK, to produce a gender division of labour in which migrant women often, but by no means always, find themselves restricted to some of the lowest-status and poorest-paid jobs in the UK economy. The voices of women migrants across sixty post-war years echo through the pages, as they reflect on their lives in the UK in their own words. It is interesting to hear the similarities and continuities of their labour market experiences, despite the differences among women migrants and in the jobs they undertook over the years. Some of these women are now elderly – the oldest were over 75 when I talked to them. Others were much younger, still in their teens and twenties. What unites them is their history of migration and employment.

The focus on women reveals the ways in which gender operates as both a normative and regulatory device in the sphere of production and the world of waged labour. Notions of appropriate work for men and women affect both the nature and distribution of jobs and opportunities between the sexes, as well as men’s and women’s aspirations. Accepted versions of masculinity and manliness, ideas about appropriate femininity, and about respectability at different times and in particular places influence definitions of what sorts of work tasks are appropriate to expect or allow women and men to do in the labour market. Laws to regulate different types of waged work and the hours during which it is undertaken also act to reinforce gendered assumptions, to restrict women to particular tasks and sometimes to reinforce their responsibilities for family life and caring for others.

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These ideas of appropriateness run through the education system too, separating women from men even before their search for waged work, and have a lasting impact on wages and living standards through the ideology of the male breadwinner, which assumes that a man supports a household whereas a woman works for ‘extras’. These normative assumptions and gen-dered practices also influence class structures and political actions. For many years, for example, the trade union movement regarded women as in competition with men as cheap labour and failed to support their demands (Campbell 1984; Milkman 1987, 2006). Over time, however, the norms and values that structure gender divisions of labour in the UK have changed. Assumptions about women’s place both in the labour market and in society more widely have altered radically over the sixty years at issue here. There has been a dramatic transformation in women’s participation in paid work across the world, including in the UK, altering social relations between women, men and children and placing the individual rather than the family at the heart of employment policy.

When migrant women, many of them women of colour, become the particular focus, the ways in which gender and class are refracted though ethnicity, and racialised assumptions about the attributes and talents of par-ticular women, also become clear. The ways in which labour markets work to produce a hierarchy of both desirability and legitimacy are revealed, as potential employees are allocated particular places in the division of labour through systems of regulation, assessments of skills and cultural assump-tions about the appropriateness of particularly embodied individuals for different types of work. Migrant women often find themselves at the bottom of these hierarchies, confined by the dual operation of what Roediger (1991) termed the wages of whiteness and Kessler-Harris (2007) the wages of a normative masculinity. Their intersection excludes women of colour from more privileged and better-paid positions. Through the eyes of migrant women, the ways in which notions of respectability, of inclusion and exclu-sion, of home and homeland, of belonging, and Britishness, as well as the changing hopes and fears of newcomers, are made visible.

The focus on migrant women means that the significance of class, ethnicity and culture, as well as gender, is also revealed. The consciousness and identity of migrant workers are rooted not only in the traditions and practices of the UK but also in their location in other sets of relations and cultural practices. The major flows of people into the UK over the last half-century reflect its imperial history, as I shall show in later chapters, raising complex issues about belonging to Britain, about skin colour and language, about racism and inequality. Many of the post-imperial migrants came to the UK as citizens, but others came as what used to be termed in official discourse ‘aliens’, with little knowledge of the country and fewer rights. The family and community lives of all these migrants are often a significant part of the ways in which they respond to the challenges faced by finding work

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and settling into new patterns of living. For some of the women in this book, community support became a crucial part of their participation in indus-trial action. For others, more personal networks of help within the family from mothers and mothers-in-law or from a wider circle of relatives or friends were the only way in which they were able to participate in the labour force on a continuous basis for many years.

As well as their long employment histories, many of these women became mothers. Over the sixty years there has been a remarkable transformation in ideologies of femininity, domesticity and, especially, maternity. In the early part of the period it was the expectation that women would leave the labour market when their children were young, or at the most work in a part-time capacity. Their domestic labour was supported by the notion of the male breadwinner wage, and married women were assumed, in the social security and tax systems, to be the dependents of men. Migrant women, however, flouted this assumption, largely on the basis of economic necessity. By the end of the century, however, expectations had changed. Not only had women’s overall participation in the labour market grown through gradual and then more rapid rates of increase over the intervening fifty years, but that for married women with children had expanded most rapidly. Further, women’s financial and emotional dependence on men had been challenged by, inter alia, rising rates of divorce, changes in household forms and legislation to improve the civic and labour market rights of women. In the 1990s, women’s growing independence was taken for granted in changes in the welfare state that emphasised the rights and duties of the individual rather than mutual household obligations and joint provision. All women, whatever their familial obligations and marital status, were expected to enter employment, marking a hugely significant shift in the state recognition of and support for the duties of motherhood and transforming the working lives of migrant women into the norm rather than the exception.

The next chapter provides the theoretical and methodological framework for thinking through these questions about and connections between gender, migration and employment. In chapter 2, I outline the key bodies of theory that together provided the questions about migration explored in the interviews, and explain how the stories about migrant women’s working lives were collected. I also explore arguments in feminist theory about the necessity of theoretical complexity in understanding the intersections of class, gender and ethnicity in the labour market. Finally, in the third chapter in Part One, I place the women who came to the UK over the sixty years since the Second World War in their historical and geographical context, outlining the main legislative changes that permitted the entry of women from some parts of the world while excluding others, and the ways in which the labour market operated to segregate women from different places with different social characteristics into particular jobs and occupations. The approach in this chapter is a broad-brush one – the details of particular jobs

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and different localities are found in the chapters in Part Two of the book, which focus on specific periods of time and different types of waged work undertaken by women migrants across the second half of the twentieth century and into the new millennium.

Ordinary Lives

The six decades since the end of the Second World War have been ones of significant social and economic change, transforming the lives of ordinary women. Thirty years ago, Elizabeth Roberts (1984) published a book with somewhat similar aims to this one. Her focus was the lives of working-class women during the sixty years before the Second World War. The women she interviewed were, she argued, ‘ordinary women in the sense that very few of them achieved even a small degree of public prominence, but they were truly remarkable in the extent of their real achievements’ (p. 1). The women in this book are equally ordinary but also remarkable, perhaps even more so than the women Roberts interviewed as all of them have made a life in Britain after long-distance migrations. For the ‘ordinary women’ in Roberts’ book, family life was at the heart of all that they did: they managed often small budgets, gave birth to and brought up often large families, supported friends and neighbours, and worked for wages, typically on a casual basis. Between the 1880s and the end of the 1930s, only a third of women of working age were in employment, and marriage and children often resulted in withdrawal from the labour market. And the women in Roberts’ study spent most of their lives in a tightly defined geographical locality.

In the next sixty years, however, women, especially women with chil-dren, joined the labour force in growing numbers. For ‘ordinary women’, the negotiation of family responsibilities, at the same time as they strug-gled with the demands of waged work, became a more central part of their lives. In 1945, as this book opens where Roberts’ book ended, many, although not all, British-born women withdrew from the labour force when they had children, but women who came to the UK after the war seldom had this option. Their wages were a crucial part of household budgets and for some migrants, including the women refugees from post-war Europe who came to Britain between 1946 and 1950, employment was a condition of their entry.

Over the next decades, non-British-born women typically had higher labour market participation rates than British-born women. Women from the Caribbean, for example, were, in the 1950s and 1960s, more likely to work for wages than ‘white’ British women, although women from the former Baltic Republics also had high rates of labour market participation and were more likely to be in full-time employment than the British women in the labour force. When the numbers of women migrants from elsewhere

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in the post-colonial world came to the UK in growing numbers – women from South Asia and East Africa, for example – religious beliefs intersected with economic necessity and their labour force participation rates were more variable than those for women who came before them.

As the twentieth century moved towards its end, in-migration became both more common and more varied as women from a diverse range of origin countries moved to the UK and into different types of jobs. It is this story of growing diversity that is told here through the voices of women migrants.

A Recent History: The Post-war Era

Writing a history of women’s changing lives – even the sort that ends in the contemporary period – is never straightforward. There is seldom a clear and uncontested reason for choosing a particular periodisation, although the rise and fall of governments or rulers often mark the beginnings and ends of a regime, and large-scale wars are also a convenient place to start or stop. The length of a century or a decade seems an obvious stretch of time to explore, although as Hobsbawm (1994) noted, the 100 years of a century too often is an arbitrary span of time. In his influential study of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, he chose to begin and end with a revolution. He assessed the key political changes in what he termed the short twentieth century, from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. I too have defined a period through political events: the sixty years from the end of the Second World War to the significant exten-sion of the European Union in 2004 and 2007. The year 1945 saw the end of a major war and the beginnings of post-war reconstruction, the origins of cooperation between Western European countries that resulted in the foun-dation of the European Union, and a Cold War that divided the East from the West for several decades. Almost sixty years later, large parts of former Eastern Europe moved into the heart of the Union.

In 1945, a population of East European refugees – from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine and the Baltic States – anxious to escape the domi-nance of the USSR, settled in the UK. They were joined sixty years later by economic migrants from the same parts of the world, whose migration was made possible by the freedom of movement resulting from both the fall of the USSR and EU expansion. Among these migrants were women from Latvia, with whom the story of post-war migration told here begins and ends, even though these Baltic migrants were little more than a footnote in the larger sweep of Britain’s migration history. In the intervening period, Britain’s imperial history was the key factor influencing migratory move-ments. Most of the migrants came to work, hoping for a higher standard of living than they expected if they remained in their countries of origin. They

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