Homeworking Women: Gender, Racism and Class at Work - Hardcover

Phizacklea, Annie; Wolkowitz, Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803988737 ISBN 13: 9780803988736

Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd, 1995

Synopsis

An up-to-date overview of all types of home-based work is provided in this volume, which makes an important contribution to sociological and policy debates on homeworking.

The authors argue that homeworking replicates wider divisions in the labour force and that its potential for improving women′s employment opportunities is therefore limited. Using original research, they outline the advantages and disadvantages, the pay and conditions, and the family situations for contemporary women homeworkers. Gender, class, racism and ethnicity are shown to be key factors in constructing the homeworking labour force. The authors acknowledge the shared position that homeworkers occupy as women, as well as the differences experienced by clerical, manufacturing and professional homeworkers, and question whether new technology in itself can be the way forward to a better paid, less onerous form of homeworking.

About this title

About the Author

Carol Wolkowitz is a Reader in the Department of Sociology. Her research has involved a number of different areas of gender studies. She has a long-standing interest in gender in Indian history and politics, stemming from her doctoral research on women politicians′ careers in South India. Since then much of her work has focused on gender and employment. She is co-author of two books on homeworking and home-located work, Homeworking Women: Gender, Class and Racism at Work (1995) and Homeworking: Myths and Realities (1987). In 2006 she published Bodies at Work (Sage), exploring ′body work′ and the relation between embodiment, gender and the labour process. Her other publications include the Glossary of Feminist Theory (1997), with Terry Lovell and Sonya Andermahr, and several articles exploring the use of personal narratives to understand women′s roles in the American communities established by the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. She was also co-editor of Of Marriage and the Market: Women′s Subordination in International Perspective (1981 and 1985). Besides supervising PhD theses on a wide range of topics, she teaches a postgraduate module on Sex, Gender and Power and the visual methods component of the MA qualitative methods module.  At undergraduate level she convenes Sexuality and Society and co-teaches Visual Sociology

From the Back Cover

In this book the authors argue that homeworking replicates wider divisions in the labour force and that its potential for improving women's employment opportunities is therefore limited. Using original research, they outline the advantages and disadvantages, the pay and conditions, and the family situations for contemporary women homeworkers. Gender, class, racism and ethnicity are shown to be key factors in constructing the homeworking labour force.

Edition details

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803988737
• ISBN 13: 9780803988736
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160