UC Berkeley

Since the 1980s, it has become commonplace to suggest that families across the developed West have lived through a revolution on a scale unprecedented since industrialization. The rapid rise in maternal employment and the emerging middle class norm of the dual-income household in the last third of the twentieth century heralded declarations of a new era of the ‘working parent.’ My dissertation charts the politics that shaped the invention of the working parent in Britain as it arose out of a new institutional culture of work.

I take as my starting points the shifting political-economic terrain of the 1970s and feminist campaigns for childcare, flexible work, and a more equitable division of affective labor. I tell the story of efforts to embed new forms of support for workers with caring responsibilities in institutions across the charitable, public, and private sectors, and explore the advent of the ‘family friendly’ corporate workplace. I also highlight the ways in which individuals sought to make sense of their day-to-day lives as ‘working parents,’ and to reckon with the associated imperative of ‘work-life balance.’ In the process I engage the classed and racialized notion of a new working parent and touch on the experiences of single parents, childcare workers, and men and women of a variety of backgrounds.

Drawing on previously unstudied archival sources in Britain, as well as oral history interviews with more than a dozen activists, I situate the British experience in a broader Euro-American context. I show that charitable and public sector efforts to remake the workplace on behalf of working parents were a minor detour alongside a more enduring and politically and culturally significant re-imagination of work, and of parents as workers, within the private sector. I argue that while the notion of ‘working parenthood’ has consolidated the gains of second wave feminism – predominately gains for white, middle class women - it has also masked the realities of ongoing inequality in the distribution of caring work and facilitated an intensification of contemporary work culture. It has nonetheless been an enduring category of identity and political mobilization, including for some working class women and men, and people of color, as a result of the abiding feminist promise of more equal marriages, households, and working lives.