Inventing the Working Parent

The first historical examination of working parenthood in the late twentieth century—and how the concepts of “family-friendly” work culture and “work–life balance” came to be.

Since the 1980s, families across the developed West have lived through a revolution on a scale unprecedented since industrialization. With more mothers than ever before in paid work and the rise of the middle-class, dual-income household, we have entered a new era in the history of everyday life: the era of the working parent. In Inventing the Working Parent, Sarah E. Stoller charts the politics that shaped the creation of the phenomenon of working parenthood in Britain as it arose out of a new culture of work.

Stoller begins with the first sustained efforts by feminists to mobilize politically on behalf of working parents in the late 1970s and concludes in the context of an emerging national political agenda for working families with the rise of New Labour in the 1990s. She explores how and why the notion of working parenthood emerged as a powerful new political claim and identity category and addresses how feminists used the concept of working parenthood to advocate for new organizational policies and practices. Lastly, Stoller shows how neoliberal capitalism under Margaret Thatcher and subsequent New Labour governments made a family’s ability to survive on one income nearly impossible—with significant consequences for individual experience, the gendered division of labor, and intimate life.Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Who Cares? The Problem of Childcare for Working Parents 21
2 From Women's Liberation to New Ways to Work: Feminist Labor Activism and the Making of Working Parenthood 61
3 From Equality to Diversity: Working Parents in the Public Sector 95
4 Making the Business Case: The Rise of the "Family-Friendly" Private Sector 119
5 Becoming a Working Parent: Labor Intensification and the Pursuit of "Having it All" 161
Conclusion 201
Notes 213
Bibliography 265
Index 279“Inventing the Working Parent maps the entangled histories of parenting, work, and neoliberalism in the late twentieth century.  It is a brilliant, original, and important study of the complex landscape of contemporary work and family.”
—Stephen Brooke, Professor, York University, Toronto
 
“Stoller brilliantly charts the ironies, guilt, hopes, and innovations in an increasingly marketized society where employment and care for children was, and still is, deeply problematic. Inventing the Working Parent gives a history to our current dilemmas.”
—Lucy Delap, Professor, University of Cambridge; author of Feminisms: A Global HistorySarah E. Stoller is a historian and freelance writer. Her writing on care work, feminism, gender, and motherhood as well as popular culture and the crisis of higher education has appeared in Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon Magazine, Salon, Jezebel, the Washington Post, and History Workshop Journal.