Living and working in urban working class communities
Kevin Ward a,¤, Colette Fagan b, Linda McDowell c, Diane Perrons d, Kath Ray e
a Geography, School of Environment and Development, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdomb Sociology, School of Social Sciences, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom
c School of Geography University of Oxford, MansWeld Road, Oxford OX1 3TB, United Kingdomd Gender Institute and Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom
e Policy Studies Institute, 100 Park Village East, London NW1 3SR, United Kingdom
Received 28 June 2005; received in revised form 15 May 2006
Keywords: Working class; Social reproduction; Work-life balance; Manchester
1. Introduction
Abigail is 30. She has Wve children, all aged under 15. Shedoes the bulk of the caring, getting the kids up and ready forschool and ensuring that each child arrives when and wherethey should be. She also does the bulk of the shopping andthe cooking. Her husband plays only a minor role in thesocial reproduction of the household. This gender divisionof labour manifests, for example, when they both go to thesupermarket, for, as she describes it, ‘when we go togetherhe sits in the car and I go round the shop’. Abigail and herhusband have both been in employment for most of their
* Corresponding author.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (K. Ward), Colette.
adult lives, one of them organising their hours around thoseof the other, and around looking after the children. Untilrecently she worked seventeen hours over the weekend as acare assistant at the local hospital while her husbandworked nights Monday through to Friday at a local ware-house. These one and a-half incomes have been crucial forhousehold reproduction. Recently he lost his job and shehas felt under pressure to compensate for his lost earnings.Yet she is reluctant to increase her paid hours. She has aclear stance on the importance of ‘being there’, especiallywhen the kids arrive home from school. She does not mindbeing tired at the weekends – that is time spent at work. Forher, balancing work and life is about Wtting work aroundwhat she sees as her primary role, the household carer. Asshe puts it, ‘it’s hustle and bustle but you get used to it.’
This account is neither unique nor is it entirely generalisa-ble. It is a mix of speciWc details interwoven with responses
to, and reXections on, far wider and more deep-rootedrestructuring processes. Abigail believes that she is the onewho has to juggle more paid work with the responsibilityfor, and the doing of, the chores necessary for reproducingthe household. At the end of the day – quite literally – thereis little time or energy left to meet her own needs as a,daughter, friend, mother, sister, and wife. She makes ethicaldecisions about her family responsibilities but these are sit-uated contextually, that is, she authors her own life, but notin circumstances of her own choosing. In making decisions,over when to work, when to shop, when to sleep, she is act-ing in response to the economic and social forces that madeher husband redundant and the wider political decisionsthat shape the social and physical infrastructure, for exam-ple the cost and quality of local childcare and the level andquality of public transport provision. Each day Abigail’s‘local’ life is one in which the coordination of activities is aprecarious, yet critical, accomplishment. Recent research inthe welfare states of Europe and North America indicatesthat Abigail is not alone in this respect. Terms such as ‘timepoor’, ‘time starved’, and ‘time squeezed’ are used todescribe contemporary life, as the employment-caring inter-face has been remade, resulting in reworked conWgurationsof paid and unpaid work alongside continuities in the gen-der division of labour within the household (Hochschild,1997; Jarvis, 2005; Perrsons et al., 2006; Schor, 1992).Women’s work continues to be central at home andbeyond, their unpaid and paid labour absolutely necessaryin the production and the maintenance of the social fabric(Wheelock and Jones, 2002; Wheelock et al., 2003). Withinthis work, the way time pressures are experienced is shownto vary by social class,1 although this aspect perhaps hasnot always got the attention it deserves (Hill, 1987).
Since the mid-1990s we have witnessed a mushroomingof work on ‘middle class formation’, which largely focuseson professional and/or dual full-time households, and thevariety of ways in which the diVerent fractions that make-up this group have ‘reacted to the eVect of globalisation ontheir careers and lives’ (Butler and Robson, 2003, p. 1791;see also Ball, 2002; Butler and Savage, 1995; Butler andRobson, 2001, 2003; Crompton et al., 1999; Devine et al.,2004; Robson and Butler, 2001; Vincent et al., 2004). Thesestudies have examined their general patterns of consump-tion, their use of time, willingness to relocate physically toget their children into the ‘right school’, their leisure timepreferences and voting habits (Savage et al., 2005). Evi-dence conWrms that middle-class households are able toease time pressures by buying in services such as ironingand cleaning, ordering shopping on line and out-sourcingchildcare (Cox and Watt, 2002; Cox, 2006; Gregson andLowe, 1994). Working class households, on the other hand,have been found to be less likely to buy in services. Rather,the time pressures from performing paid work and manag-
1 Social class is a term that appears in UK social statistics and is pro-duced through the use of a range of socio-economic indicators.
ing the household are experience in a rather diVerent way –with ‘hustle and bustle’ as Abigail described. The lives ofthese households may appear to be less glamorous, oftenplaying out in places within the ‘post-industrial’ city thatappear to be less altered, but so far there has been relativelylittle research on these issues, and what they mean for thispopulation. Yet it is their work, their paid activities, thatunderpins the more high proWle and apparently ‘paradig-matic’ shifts in the economy. It is their labour that makesurban economies function. The security guards protectingthe refurbished Wnance Wrms in revitalised urban cores; thecleaners dusting the oYces of the web designers whosework is celebrated in narratives in ‘local’ ‘cultural’ econo-mies; the carers of for the parents and the children of thewell-paid accountants and lawyers of city centre Wrms. Andthrough their practices, much like those of the middle clas-ses, the working class are actively deWning what is meant bytheir ‘class’ and by their ‘culture’ (Haylett, 2003; Savageet al., 2004a,b, p. 337), constituting their own ‘urban worlds’(Bondi and Christie, 2000, p. 337), in which the infrastruc-ture of everyday life is constituted and sustained (Jarvis,2005). In this paper we use the term ‘working class’ as ameans of capturing the economic, social and culturalaspects of everyday life. As well as being about the types ofwork those with whom we spoke performed and the controlthey had over their labour process, our understanding ofthe term ‘working class’ is inXuenced by the ‘new workingclass studies’ (Russo and Linkon, 2005), in which workingclass-ness is about classiWcation and about the productionof meanings and understanding through interactionsbetween work, place and community.
In this paper we use material from a part of Manchesterthat constitutes the ‘slower’ half of what Green (2003)terms ‘two speed’ cities – by which she means not the paceof everyday life – though it might be relevant in this case –but rather the ways in which some parts of the city are con-nected into wider networks of economic and social change.It illustrates the rich diversity of the lives of people livingthere and how they ensure the reproduction of their house-holds and community, often in the context of ever morediYcult economic and social conditions. And while thewomen with whom we spoke might, at Wrst glance, appearto be examples of the process of ‘spatial entrapment’, Wrstdiscussed over 20 years ago (England, 1993; Hanson andPratt, 1988, 1991), we argue for an explanation thatacknowledges the range of factors at play in shaping thedecisions working class women make about where to per-form paid employment. Employers moving to the outskirtsof the city – to Wythenshawe’s industrial parks – were nottapping into the army of ‘spatially entrapped’ mothers. Weconcur with England (1993, p. 240) recommendation thatwomen’s commutes need to be understood as ‘enmeshed ina pre-existing and evolving web of localized relations’.Some of the women with whom we spoke had long travel towork journeys. For others there journey to work involved ashort walk around the corner, or trip on public transport.The trade-oV between travel to work commutes and well-paid
314 K. Ward et al. / Geoforum 38 (2007) 312–325
jobs was not a simple one for those with whom we spoke.Only in the case of Dawn, a mother of four in her forties,did we encounter an example of ‘spatial entrapment’, in thestrict sense of the earlier work in geography. She was aqualiWed nurse who worked as a part-time cleaner. Thecleaning company picked her up from her home, droppedher oV and picked her up from the houses she was to cleanand then ran her home at the end of the day. There were anumber of reasons Dawn ‘chose’ this course of action. AsDawn explained it:
At the moment I’m just cleaning. I am a qualiWednurse but ƒ it’s more diYcult because it is shift andfull time and I can’t cope, even with the father here,because you tend to more [caring] as a mother, so I’vetried that and I couldn’t cope and I’ve found it easiereven though it’s just a cleaning job.
For most of the women with whom we spoke structuralconstraints, such as local employment opportunities, child-care facilities and public transport provision shaped theconditions under which they chose whether, when andwhere to perform paid work. As we shall see later in thispaper, in the majority of cases the structured ‘choice’ was towork locally, to minimise the time spent moving betweenthe diVerent sites of social reproduction – dentists, doctors,home, library, school, shops, work etc. (McDowell et al.,2006; Skinner, 2005).
In the paper we Wrst discuss the restructuring of the UKspace economy and then draw on our study of the Sharstonneighbourhood of Wythenshawe in Manchester, to providea situated understanding of how mothers ensure the socialreproduction of the household while performing paid work.Our aims are twofold: Wrst, to draw attention to the lives ofpeople in working class communities in order to address theimbalance caused by the rash of middle-class studies and,second, to emphasise the role played by working mothersand their mothers, in the everyday reproduction of house-holds and communities.
2. Getting by in working class neighbourhoods: economic restructuring, gender, work and the home
2.1. UK economic and social restructuring
Many western economies have experienced systemicrestructuring in recent years with employment decline inmanufacturing and expansion in the service sector, andimportant part of which has been the remaking of the spaceeconomies of cities and regions. Following recessions in theearly 1980s and 1990s, the UK has experienced continualeconomic growth which is reXected in the ‘renaissance’ ofmany city-centres, including Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds,Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and SheYeldas well as London. This revitalization has though yet toreach all parts of these cities, so areas of signiWcant eco-nomic dislocation and multiple deprivations persist. Studiespoint to the deepening class distinctions between and
within UK cities (Turok and Edge, 1999) and in particular,the growing inequalities between those with professional,well-rewarded jobs and those who work long hours on lowrates of pay, with all that this means for the health andwell-being of these workers and their families (Dorling andThomas, 2004; Mitchell et al., 2000). Nevertheless here, aselsewhere, there have been changes in the composition ofemployment and both change and continuity in the gen-dered division of labour.
In the UK between 1984 and 2004 the proportion ofemployed men in manufacturing fell from 28% to 14%, andfor women it fell from 16% to 7%. This is reXective of abroader trend, with a ‘hollowing out’ of the occupationalstructure. Professional and managerial and jobs have beenon the increase, while less-skilled jobs have been declining,and these trends are predicted to continue for the nextdecade (Institute for Employment Research, 2004). Thismeans a squeezing of the jobs available to non-graduateworkers. The decline was initially associated with high lev-els of unemployment, peaking in the early 1990s. Sincethen, while male inactivity has continued to rise, unem-ployment has fallen and employment increased for womenconsistently over this period. However the replacementjobs are diVerent in content, Wnancial reward and gendercoding generally leading to increases in the number ofhours that households with employed members contributeto the labour market. One of the most striking changes hasbeen the feminisation of employment. While the employ-ment rate of men has remained largely unchanged between1984 and 2004 (78% and 79%, respectively), that of womenhas increased from 59% to 70% such that women nowmake up 46% of the total UK workforce. Despite this fem-inisation of employment, divisions between women andmen remain in paid work (National Statistics, 2005) and inwho does the domestic work (Harkness, 2003; NationalStatistics, 2005).
Employment continues to be highly segregated by occu-pation and by time. Women are over represented in thelower paid people related activities or the ‘5 Cs’ cleaning,catering, cashiering, clerical and caring work and are Wvetimes more likely than men to work part time (40% com-pared to 8%). As a consequence, they experience a signiW-cant pay penalty with full time women earning on average18% less per hour than men, while the corresponding Wgurefor part time women is 40% (Manning and Petrongolo,2004). Women’s participation is also inXuenced much morestrongly by their family circumstances. For example, 20%of married or co-habiting but only 12% of single motherswith children less than 5 years are in full time work. In bothcases more mothers in this category work part time 38%and 21%, respectively (National Statistics, 2005). As the ageof the child increases so does the employment rate for bothgroups of women, such that there has been a rapid increasein the proportion of mothers with young children inemployment during this period.
As mothers have (re) turned to paid work, political andacademic attention has turned to the potential care deWcit
K. Ward et al. / Geoforum 38 (2007) 312–325 315
in light of women’s traditional caring role, to the provisionand cost of childcare and to what has been termed ‘an eth-ics of care’ (Williams, 2001; McDowell, 2004). There hasalso been a recurring debate within sociology aboutwhether women’s ‘choices’ regarding labour market partici-pation are inXuenced more by innate preferences (Hakim,2000, 2003) or by social constraints (McRae, 2003).2 Ratherless attention has been given to the ‘everyday geographiesof working mothers’ (England, 1996, p. 13; Jarvis, 2005;McDowell et al., 2006). Our paper seeks to expand this lat-ter literature and to connect some of these debates by dem-onstrating through our case studies that these decisions arenegotiated responses to the constraints of and the empow-erments oVered by; income, job opportunities, support net-works, local services, as well as ideologies of femininity andmothering, in addition to personal preferences which arelikewise shaped by these factors (Duncan et al., 2004; Hol-loway, 1998a,b,c, 1999).
All of these changes relating to the economy are mir-rored, albeit with some variations, in the North Westregion and within Wythenshawe and are discussed in moredetail in the next section of the paper. Likewise we founddiVerences amongst individuals in terms of their decisionsregarding work life balance, depending on how their indi-vidual circumstances intersected with the wider structuralconstraints. Nevertheless there are also common trends ofsome social concern. Thus the remainder of the paperturns directly to discuss the complex nature of the contem-porary lives of people living in this ‘ordinary’ part ofManchester.
2.2. Local economies and societies
Manchester is the second most deprived local authoritydistrict on the 2004 index of deprivation (ODPM, 2004).Within Manchester, Sharston, is one of four wards inWythenshawe, an area to the far south of the city centre,the others being Brownley Green, Crossacres, and PeelGreen, and is a predominantly white ward3 of the city. AsTable 1 shows, Sharston shares some of the characteristicsof the city’s wider deprivation, with comparatively low levelsof home ownership, and an above average level of economicinactivity and people registered as permanently sick or dis-abled. Educational attainment is comparatively low – fourin 10 of the population having no formal qualiWcations –and the workers of Sharston are more likely than in the UKas a whole to be found labouring in the more mundane androutine economic activities that have expanded in numberof urban economies in the last two decades. Table 1 showsalmost one in three of formally employed workers in ‘rou-
2 For the most recent round in this debate see McRae (2003) and the re-sponse by Hakim (2003).
3 Only 4% of the population describe themselves as belonging to an eth-nic group other than white in the 2001 Census. As such the Wndings of thispaper cannot speak to diVerences in attitudes to work and to caring acrossethnic groups.
tine and semi-routine’ occupations, categories 1 and 2of the socio-economic classiWcation occupations used bythe 2001 Census. In our own sample of 20, 50% classiWedthemselves and their husbands/partners in ‘semi-routineand routine’ jobs. Table 2 details the types of jobs thewomen and their partners performed, illustrating the domi-nance of local, relatively poorly paid service work. So, overhalf the women with whom we spoke earned less than£11,000 a year, and amongst the husbands/partners, amajority of men earned less than £16,000. Given theseincomes it is perhaps no surprise that almost all of thehouseholds in our study received the Working Families TaxCredit.
Between 1991 and 2001 the population of Sharstondropped by 15%, in the context of an increase of just over2% across the city of Manchester as a whole. It is currentlyhome to 10,000 of the wider Wythenshawe area’s 75,000population, a population that itself has dropped by 25%since its heyday in the 1960s when 100,000 residents calledWythenshawe their home. In Sharston only 45% own theirown homes, compared to 70% nationally, with the averageprice of a semi-detached house, which make up the bulk ofthe local housing stock, £119,638, some 30,000 pound lessthan the national average (Land Registry, 2004). In termsof household composition, Sharston embodies the socialmake-up that other work suggests we might expect of eco-nomically poorer, ‘white’ working class urban communities(Holloway, 1998a,b,c, 1999). In particular, twice as manylone parents with dependent children live in Sharston,12.5% of households, as nationally. It has an oYcial unem-ployment rate of 6.9%, below the Manchester average butabove the national mean. One in four people have a ‘limit-ing long-term illness’. Sharston is also the source of morepositive aspects of working class cultures, geographies andidentities (Haylett, 2003; Russo and Linkon, 2005). It is
Table 1Socio economic indicators of Sharston, Wythenshawe in comparison withthe city, region and nation
Source: Statistics for Manchester and Sharston, Census 2001; comparableWgures for NW and UK, Regional Trends 2001.
a First degree or above and equivalents.
Sharston Manchester North West UK
Economically active (%) 72.6 62.3 76.2 78.5Economically inactive (%) 27.4 37.7 23.2 21.6Reasons for economic inactivity
these that Manchester City Council and local groups havesought to emphasise through a range of initiatives (see www.wythit.com), as part of on-going attempts to redevelop thearea.
Local political boundaries that represent the four areasthat make up Wythenshawe – Brownley Green, Crossacres,Peel Green and, of course, Sharston – appeared in our expe-rience to mean very little to the everyday comings andgoings of people in Sharston. Institutionally discrete areasfor sure, nevertheless for many with whom we spoke, con-versations moved eVortlessly between reference to Sharstonand to Wythenshawe. As such, in this paper we draw onWeldwork from Sharston to speak of the experiences of liv-ing and labouring in the wider area, Wythenshawe, whichwas the largest public sector housing estate in Europe in thelate 1930s, at the time a leitmotif of modernist planning,despite its lack of shops, amenities or services. After the ini-tial burst of excitement around the creating of a new estate,Wythenshawe quickly became isolated, physically distantfrom other, more seemingly attractive locations, a disloca-tion made worse by its place at the end of local transportroutes and compounded by the low levels of car ownership
Table 2The work performed by our participants
Source: Authors’ survey, 2002–2004.NB: The total is only 15 due to missing data. In all cases women were theprimary carers.
Pseudonym Current job Husband/partner’s current job
Shirley Counter assistant, local PostOYce branch (full time)
Madi Not doing paid work Bus driver, Stagecoach(full time)
Katherine Dinner lady, local school(part time)
Self-employed painter anddecorator (full time)
Sam Librarian, children’slibrary (part time)
Aircraft worker, ManchesterAirport (full time)
(Massey, 1996).4 As time went on, so the residents ofWythenshawe have become more socially distant – on theoutside looking in at the redevelopment of Manchester andsome of its southern inner-city wards such as Chorlton andDidsbury, which have beneWted from the city’s ‘urbanrenaissance’ (Peck and Ward, 2002; Savage et al., 2004a,2005).
When the attention of local and national politiciansturned slowly to the needs of those living in urban extremesby regulating the over-heating property markets, throughsmart growth initiatives, and by engaging in economic andsocial regeneration, the ordinariness of Wythenshawe, itssheer mundane-ness, its failure to really register on indica-tors of growth or exclusion also meant that it disappearedfrom the geographical imagination of national and localpoliticians. And yet it did suVer, as the city and the widerregion suVered economically. Manufacturing employmenton the local industrial estates fell and the local authoritiesreduced their workforces, contracting out some servicesand privatising others. Traditional routes into employmentfor young working class men were closed-oV. The onlycounter-tendency in this rather bleak economic accountwas the building and the expansion of Manchester Airportnearby, and where a number of the husbands and partnersof those with whom we spoke worked (Table 2).
Having set the economic and social background, whichis more than context, but rather structures, the conditionsunder which the people with whom we spoke made theirdecisions, we now draw upon our empirical work to gain agreater understanding of the relations between economicrestructuring and gender roles in this working class neigh-bourhood. We use the words of participants to see howthey view their area, how they have responded to thesecontemporary challenges and how women in general, andmothers in particular, decide how to manage the range ofresponsibilities facing them at diVerent stages over their lifecycle. This material has been generated from a larger ESRCfunded project that examined relations between economicrestructuring and the changing gender division of labour.Overall we interviewed 141 carers (primarily mothers) withdependent children in three contrasting areas in Londonand Manchester, chosen we hoped to reXect intra-nationalurban diVerences: an inner city locality, a neighbourhoodfurther from the centre that included a high proportion ofcouncil tenants and a more suburban neighbourhood thatwas largely dominated by owner occupiers. In the study asa whole our sampling strategy was theoretically driven,designed to reXect a range of household work and familycircumstances, rather than to be representative of thehousehold structure in each small area. We identiWedprospective interviewees at a range of locations in each ofthe localities, including pre-school classes, play groups,libraries, a number of other pre-school facilities and via
4 In Sharston, almost 50% of local residents have no ‘access to a car orvan’, compared to 27% nationally (ONS Neighbourhood statistics, 2004).
snowballing. Each interview lasted between an hour andtwo hours, and took place around a number of themes, aswe tried to understand who did what to ensure the socialreproduction of the household. In terms of work andemployment, we asked women about their work histories,their periods in and out of formal employment, their experi-ence of training, the scheduling of their work across theweek, and where there was a husband or partner, about thenature of their work. In terms of the household, we askedwomen about childcare, extended families and friends, lei-sure, schooling and shopping. Finally, in terms of the issuesthat structure the context in which decisions over work andthe household are made, we asked about local amenities,such as shops and parks, state support in the form of creditsand public transport. For each person we spoke with wewere able to produce a sense of how they and their familymembers got to their current points in their lives, and therange of issues behind the production of their currentwork-life accomplishment.
In this particular paper we draw on 20 long semi-struc-tured interviews, with carers in households in which, in themajority of cases, one or more members were in employ-ment, and which consisted of at least one pre-school child.These interviews were undertaken in Wythenshawe, largelyin the mothers’ own homes, and were recorded, transcribedand analysed, allowing us to produce for each participant apersonal work-life biography. We asked participants toreXect on the past and to think about their current situationand future plans. They talked about where they lived andthe thinking behind their decisions over childcare and paidemployment. They reXected on how they Wtted together thechildcare ‘jigsaw’ (Wheelock and Jones, 2002). They expressedexasperation and frustration with what they were able to dowith ‘their time’, when they had ‘stopped’ being a daughter,mother and/or a partner. The gender imbalance of the par-ticipants was not planned, but nor should it be a surprise.Women continue to be the primary carer in most house-holds. When we did speak to men about our research, wewere often given the wife’s or partner’s name and/or con-tact details, and politely but Wrmly informed that ‘you needto speak to my other half’.
These personal accounts document the complexity offactors that inXuence decisions. They reveal how under-standings of what are and are not ‘appropriate’ caringarrangements have changed over time, demonstrating theimportance of a situated understanding of women’s‘choices’. Table 3 shows the basic socio-demographicdetails of the participants and their households.
3. Inter-generational geographical immobility and a sense of place
The majority of participants had grown up locally (seeTable 4). They had been born and educated in Wythensh-awe. As such, social relations were particularly ‘local’, theresult of a thick set of exchanges and engagements, fallingouts and making ups, shared and individually experienced
events and feelings over many years and generations. Aswe have already seen, most of those with whom we spokeworked and shopped locally, their children went to schoollocally, and the majority had family close at hand. Indeed,as we shall see later in this paper, the support of familymembers in caring for children was taken-for-granted inmany cases, making work-life arrangements feasible. Therewas little geographical mobility amongst those with whomwe spoke. Families grew up with each other and hadshared histories. Unlike the evidence on middle class com-munities, which suggests that geographical mobility is adeWning feature (Savage et al., 2005), shaping the sense ofattachment to a particular place, in Wythenshawe the peo-ple we spoke with had aged with the area. More than 50%of those with whom we spoke lived within a mile of their
Table 3Main summary statistics of our households in Wythenshawea
Sources: Authors’ survey, 2002–2004.a Some missing data.
2 (10%) male full-time/female not employed;5 (25%) male full-time/female part-time; 5 (25%)male and female full-time; 1 (5%) female full-time/male part-time or less; 2 (10%) male andfemale part-time or less; 5 (25%) single parents
Socio economicclassiWcationof main carerand of partner
18 (51%) semi routine and routine; 9 (26%)intermediate occupations/lower supervisoryand technical; 1 (3%) self-employed; 7 (20%)managerial and professional
Housing tenure 8 (40%) owner occupied; 9 (45%) local authority;3 (15%) housing association
Ethnic origin(self-declared)of main carerand of partnera
31 (94%) white British; 1 (3%) other white;1 mixed background (3%)
Table 4Inter-generational mobility
Source: Authors’ survey, 2002–2004.
Number
Birthplace of parentsWithin one mile of interview 7Within Wve miles of interview 6Greater than Wve miles from place of interview 3Not known 4
Place where parents liveWithin one mile of interview 12Within Wve miles of interview 2Greater than Wve miles from place of interview 2Not known 4
Interviewee’s place of birthWithin one mile of interview 8Within Wve miles of interview 5Greater than Wve miles from place of interview 3Not known 4
318 K. Ward et al. / Geoforum 38 (2007) 312–325
parents, reXecting a more general trend which suggeststhat class inXuence the geographical distance betweengrandparents, parents and grandchildren (Dench and Ogg,2002; Murphy et al., 1999). In some cases the grandparentsof those with whom we spoke were part of the originalpopulation, resettled out of some of Manchester’s poorestand most squalid areas and into the UK North’s own‘Garden City’. In this post-optimism, post Second WorldWar context, a particular ‘structure of feeling’, to use thewords of sociologist Raymond Williams (1977), wasforged. While everything – houses, roads, schools etc. – wasnew in the 1930s, by the 1970s, when the bulk of our partic-ipants were born and began their lives, the physical infra-structure had aged considerably, even the shopping centreand entertainment forum that were built in the 1960s wereshowing early signs of aging. Social and economic hard-ship accompanied physical decay. A sharply declining pop-ulation reXected the out-migration of some families,leaving those who stayed behind to suVer deepening hard-ship, and with their very sense of community under threat.Though there remained important spaces in which to meetand to socialise, traditional sites at which community cul-tures were performed, community centres, public houses,public parks and shopping centres came under threat.
Of course Wythenshawe’s ‘local’ social relations havealso been remade through extra-local processes, includingmacro-economic restructuring, which changed employmentpatterns; and, state policies, which aVected childcare provi-sion, economic development, housing, public transport andsocial beneWts. The ‘local’ component of the local ‘structureof feeling’ was itself the result of Wythenshawe’s position-ing and relative location in the wider socio-economic, cul-tural and geographical landscapes. The restructuring of thehousing sector was one such wider change that shaped theconditions under which those with which we spoke lived.For some they continued to rent their houses from Man-chester City Council or one of the Registered Social Land-lords (RSL)5 that owned/managed houses in the area, whilefor other families, they bought their properties, using theirlong time residence to negotiate large discounts on the mar-ket rates. In a number of our cases, households had movedwithin Wythenshawe, from one street to another, or fromone side of the estate to another, as their circumstanceschanged, families got larger or smaller, or aging relativesneeded more intensive caring. Shirley and her partnerdecided to move from their maisonette to a house once theyfound out she was expecting their second child. Thisinvolved moving within Wythenshawe, from one type ofrented accommodation to another. They have subsequentlydecided to buy their house, as others had done on theirroad, and the amount of time they had spent renting publicsector housing qualiWed them for a signiWcant discountedrate:
5 Although this was changing as we did our interviews, as the Counciltransferred its stock to a Registered Social Landlord (RSL).
We are quite happy about the house, it’s a bit scruVyat the moment ƒ We sort of decided to get, to startbuying it, because [my husband] had like eleven yearstenancy, so of course that is a huge discount on theproperty, so we are paying, we are getting about£17,000 discount on the house, so we are paying nextto nothing for it.
In other cases, the movement across Wythenshawe was notabout buying a property, but was about living closer to par-ticular family members, in order that they could care forone another. Kirsty was a single mother of a three year oldgirl. She had lived with her brother until recently, but waskeen to live nearer her mother. Kirsty wanted to involve hermother in caring for her daughter more, and Kirsty alsowanted to care for her mother, who was getting older andwhose health was getting worse. She kept an eye out forhouses near her mother’s that might be becoming availableto rent, and phoned the Council regularly. As she recounts:
I’ve seen the house, it was a couple of months ago, Iphoned, there was a house three doors away from mymum, on the corner ƒ and I phoned for this onehouse and they said ‘no, it’s gone’, so I thought ‘Wne’.Then the next day I get a phone call from the housingoYce and they say ‘the next house is empty, howabout that?’ So I said ‘yeah, great’.
Linda also wanted to move from one area of Wythenshaweto another to be nearer her mother, who had recently comeout of hospital, and her father, who was struggling to carefor his wife:
The reason I moved here was because my mum wasvery, very ill and I needed to be nearer my dad, tohelp my dad with my mum, so I needed to be closebecause I was coming in the week because I like I usedto say, I used to work at the weekend but in the weekeveryday I used to come. I used to walk from Wood-house Park to Cross Acres with the little one everyday. I wasn’t going home until 9 o’clock at night, afterwe’d got my mum settled in bed and sorted out.
These examples reveal the ‘extension of the boundaries ofthe household decision-making and resource unit beyondthe nuclear family’ (Wheelock et al., 2003, p. 27). They areevidence of how care-giving across the generations was animportant part of producing Wythenshawe, in concreteterms, resulting in the relocation of households. Despitethis movement, and taking up of the ‘right to buy’, thosewith whom we spoke were aware that Wythenshawe – as aplace and as a set of social relations – continued to experi-ence a similar fate to that felt by other working class com-munities since the late 1970s. While it was the place inwhich almost all had grown up, and in which many mem-bers of their families lived, it was not a place without itsproblems. In general none of those with whom we spokeheld a romanticised view of where they had grown up andcontinued to live, but rather were very conscious of its
K. Ward et al. / Geoforum 38 (2007) 312–325 319
problems despite their attachment to it. Kirsty revealed thisacute ambivalence:
The things that I don’t like are all the young kids whohang around the shops and things, all the teenagersthat just cause trouble ƒ What I like about it? I havelived here forever I guess.
Sam, similarly a lifetime resident, told us about her longstanding social connections, her family members who livedon the next street, but also the less desirable features includ-ing:
Joy riders and that coming round at night and policechasing them, we live opposite some really nice woodswhich they [the joy riders] think is a quick escaperoute if they’re getting chased.
Other participants such as Sharon, the half of a one and ahalf earner household with three children, were active incommunity aVairs. She was conscious of the kinds of issuesfaced by local residents but was upbeat about renewedredevelopment eVorts:
It’s going to be fantastic because it’s going to be allrebuilt ƒ they are spending £20 million, and it’s goingto be fantastic, so it will be better.
As Table 3 reveals, almost all our participants had beenborn and brought up in and around Wythenshawe. Somehad moved in and out of the area, often returning to theirparents’ homes when relationships ended or when eco-nomic circumstance left them few other choices. The deci-sion to stay put had often been an un-contentious one,informed by their changing needs, as they became parents,and faced decisions about whether or not to seek ways ofbalancing paid and unpaid work commitments. Being closeto family was seen both as desirable and, in many cases,economically necessary. Despite experiencing the eVects ofanti-social behaviour most participants had not consideredmoving, partly because of the strength and the density oflocal ties relating to exchanges of care, labour, love andmoney, but also because of the lack of any connectionsbeyond the immediate locality through work or social life.
4. A constrained juggling act: balancing paid and unpaid work commitments
Similar to the national trends, mothers of young childrenin Wythenshawe were more likely to be in paid employmentthan their own mothers at a similar stage in their life course(Paull and Taylor, 2000). The majority of participantsbelonged to dual or one and a half earner households, 6working full-time, 11 a range of part time hours and 3 notcurrently in paid employment. The majority of their part-ners were in full time employment (see Tables 2 and 4).
The women with whom we spoke oVered a number ofreasons for doing paid work. They explained that theyrequired one and a half or two incomes to rise out of in-work poverty, and to make good on their aspirations of
what they understood as a ‘good life’. When asked whethershe’d like to work fewer hours, Wilma replied:
I’d love to work less hours ƒ but we’ve got too manycommitments, cos you’re used to the money aren’tyou and I couldn’t do without it now ƒ
Her husband was employed as a HGV driver, often workinginto the evening to make his deliveries. She worked full-timeas a ‘nursery nurse’ at the local state nursery, and was paidfor overtime in ‘time-of in lieu’ – that is she could take paidholiday in return for working extra hours. For her this madeit a less than attractive option. Linda, another one of ourinterviewees, was a single mother. Her choices were evenstarker. She worked as a ‘home carer’ for a Wrm, the bulk ofwhose business was ‘contracted out’ work from local socialservices. She earned less than £11,000 per year after tax andnational insurance. She had a strong commitment to thoseshe termed ‘her regulars’, and worked seven days a week,notching up 50 hours most weeks. As she reXected:
It’s diYcult ƒ sometimes I feel like I am neglectingthe kids ƒ I just feel that I’m spending no time withthem at all ƒ but at the end of the day it’s like I said,if he wants nice clothes and nice shoes and nice train-ers I can’t do that on beneWts. I’ve got to go out andwork.
In the case of the Wrst Shirley in our study, she returned topart-time work as a shop assistant at a local store, aftersplitting up with her working partner. She had recentlyincreased her hours to full-time ‘because I couldn’t live onbeneWts ƒ I couldn’t aVord, just Wnancial, couldn’t man-age.’
For others the challenges associated with performingboth paid and unpaid caring work was too much: some-thing had to give. In the case of Kirsty, a single mother, shehad worked as a legal secretary in Altrincham, only four orWve miles from where she lived with her daughter. Shethought that she would be able to manage but after onlyfour months she quit her full-time job:
It was winter ƒ I was getting up at half past six, hav-ing to get Kylie up at about seven o’clock, going towork, getting her home. Kylie was tired; she has hertea, she goes to bed. I didn’t see her. So I thought ‘no’,I am not doing it anymore.
Spending two hours a day commuting by public transportproved to be too much, so she moved employers to reduceher working hours and travel time. She also called upon hermother for more childcare support, a situation that wasmade easier when Kirsty was allocated to a nearby house.6
With car ownership low in the area (ONS Neighbourhood
6 Kirsty has lived all of her life in a very small area. Her grandmother,mother and auntie all live within a two-mile radius of one another. Hermother was born in Chorlton, an area to the south west of the centre, andless than three miles away from where Kirsty lived and worked, althoughdespite this proximity Kirsty had never been there.
320 K. Ward et al. / Geoforum 38 (2007) 312–325
statistics, 2004), the availability and reliability of publictransport was an important variable in whether a particulartravel to work was viable in the context of other timedemands. In the case of Kirtsy hers clearly wasn’t. Gailworked as a care assistant while her husband worked intransport and had recently been promoted to a manage-ment grade. She, like Kirsty, switched from full to part-timework and dispensed with her childminder in order to, ‘getmore time with the children and to keep on top of every-thing.’ Similar to other participants working part-timehours, this was enough she felt for her to play her role in theone and half earner model. Gail’s case was not exceptional.Her resistance to working longer hours was shared by oth-ers with whom we spoke. She wanted to spend more timewith her children. Gail also acknowledged begrudginglythat if she didn’t ensure the social reproduction of thehousehold no one would, certainly not her husband.
Of course, if mothers in Wythenshawe are performingpaid work then someone needs to be looking after the pre-School children. We found and were told by participantsthat local childcare services were getting better. On the onehand, national initiatives like Sure Start were slowlyimproving the volume and the quality of state funded child-care provision in Wythenshawe, in keeping with other areasaround the country (Department for Education andEmployment, 1998). On the other hand, private nurserieswhich have been expanding rapidly in other areas of Man-chester and in the rest of the country were not prevalent inthe area. There was not the market, nor the means to paythe going rate, which was approximately £600–700 permonth for a full time place in the more aZuent areas ofChorlton, Didsbury and the centre of Manchester. In addi-tion to buying in childcare services – formal care – wefound lots of evidence of the use of family members to carefor children, what Wheelock and Jones (2002) term as‘complementary care’ – care of children provided by rela-tives, friends or neighbours.7 This is perhaps not surprising,due on the one hand to the density of local family networks,and in particular, high number of mothers and grandmoth-ers who lived close by, and on the other hand, the more gen-eral evidence of the rising role of grandparents in caring fortheir grandchildren (Dench and Ogg, 2002; Gray, 2005;Murphy et al., 1999; Wheelock and Jones, 2002; Wheelocket al., 2003).
5. Unpaid and informal extended family caring
The rise in the labour market participation rates forwomen and the accompanying expansion of the privatechildcare sector in recent years has been well-documented.At the same time, however, the use of family members toperform childcare has remained important, with somerecent national studies claiming that ‘[r]elatives’ contribu-
7 They use this term rather than the more widely deployed ‘informalcare’ for the following reasons: ‘because of the problems of deWning infor-mal childcare, we prefer to use the term complementary childcare.’
tion to childcare has been particularly important for moth-ers of children under the age of Wve, and most of all formothers of four year olds, whose employment rate hasshown a major increase [over the period 1991 and 2000]’(Gray, 2005, p. 574). This Wnding is conWrmed by local stud-ies (Cotterill, 1992; Wheelock and Jones, 2002; Wheelocket al., 2003), where the ‘complex ‘jigsaws” of childcare con-tained a high proportion of complementary care giving bygrandparents. In some ways this marks a return to the pre-Beveridge era, when the extended family was central toallowing women to return to work (Hewitt, 1958). In theVictorian era, for example, when the labour market partici-pation rate for women was almost as high as it currently is,Veum and Gleason (1991) argue that almost a third of allmothers used a member of their family in their childcarearrangements. So perhaps on the face of it there is nothingnew in family members doing all manner of things to sup-port mothers returning to paid work. Nevertheless, thesesimilarities are rather overshadowed by the deep social andeconomic transformations that have taken place over thelast couple of hundred years, and which means that ‘a giftof caring time given by grandparents to parents providingfamily based life-cycle insurance’ (Wheelock and Jones,2002, p. 458) now takes place in all together diVerent widercontext.
In Wythenshawe, the need for almost all our mothers toperform some paid work, combined with the limited state-Wnanced formal care arrangements available, and the beliefthat in-kind inter-generational caring was the best ‘substi-tute’ for parents being there, meant that households weredependent on other members of the family being involvedin the caring arrangements. Perhaps in this type of commu-nity, in which diVerent generations of the same family liveclose to one another, it is not surprising that the residents ofWythenshawe provide more unpaid care than the averageacross England: at the 2001 census over 27% of respondentsin the Sharston area of Wythenshawe reported providing‘50 or more hours per week’ or ‘unpaid care’, compared toonly 20% across England, and much of this was within theextended family (National Statistics, 2005) (Table 5).
In our study half of the participants used only onesource of child-care; those that used more than one oftencombined paid or formal support with one or more form of‘complementary’ caring and no one used more than onetype of paid care (Table 6). The relatively low weekly costof this paid care, with only three households paying over£50 per week, and six paying under £20, reveals that thiscare was almost completely provided by the state, and con-
Table 5Paid work: number of hours per week
Source: Authors’ survey, 2002–2004.NB: The total for men is only 14 due to missing data. In all cases womenwere the primary carers.
0 1–10 11–20 21–30 31–40 41+
Women (n D 20) 3 1 6 4 4 2Men (n D 14) 3 0 0 0 6 5
K. Ward et al. / Geoforum 38 (2007) 312–325 321
sisted largely of part-time provision, around the workinghours of parents and the care provided by the extendedfamily.
Wilma, for example, was only able to return to work andthe children go to the part-time nursery with the help of hermother:
Well, they started oV ƒ for about 6, 7 or 8 monthsthey started part-time and then it went to full-timeplaces ƒ cos I had my mum to have them while I wasat work so it wasn’t a problem.
And even now the children are in full-time education, sus-taining the household’s reproduction was only possiblebecause of the grandmother’s involvement in its day-to-dayactivities. Nowhere was this clearer than when Wilma’shours of work changed:
If I was on a late shift I’d take them to school and mymum would go and pick them up. But if it was theother way around then she’d take them to school andI’d pick them up, or it if was in the middle she’d takethem and pick them up.
What we found was inter-generational caring: mothers ofmothers looking after their grandchildren in order thattheir daughters could return to work. Sam is a mother ofthree who works between 25 and 30 hours a week in localsocial services. Her partner works full-time at the airport.She had not considered paid childcare, and saw the advan-tages of leaving her youngest child with her own mother astwofold: economic and social:
’cos they enjoy going to my mum’s and it’s like homefrom home, she has all their play stuV and everythingthere, and there’s my brother there and my dad andthey all muck in together ƒ and it’s cheaper, ’cos shedoesn’t charge me.
This suggests a variation on the ‘time-bind’ theme devel-oped by Hochschild (1997). Whereas she talks about thedouble burden of women undertaking paid work and thenreturning home and carrying out the bulk of the care work,we found evidence of grandmothers carrying out some ofthe tasks they Wrst performed as mothers, this time aroundtheir grandchildren, revealing a time-bind across the gener-ations (Wheelock and Jones, 2002). In a sense the decisionto use the family for childcare speaks to the negotiation ofeconomic and moral rationalities. What caring by anothermember of the family allowed, in the minds of the motherswith whom we spoke at least, was the re-creation of the
Table 6The mix of unpaid and paid child-care
Source: Authors’ survey, 2002–2004.
Number of sources of child-care 0 1 2 3 4
Households 0 10 3 6 1
Number using paid child-care 0 1 2 3 4Households 6 14 0 0 0
home, both physically – in terms of toys and other objects –and in terms of a space in which a particular type of caringcan be performed. And when the children got older, theinvolvement often did not stop at dropping oV and collect-ing grandchildren from school. Sometimes grandparentsperformed as parents. So, for example, when asked abouther involvement in the Parent and Teacher Association(PTA) of her children’s school, Sam explained:
It’s ƒ hard with being at work but if I can’t do it mymum ƒ sort of steps in and she goes to ƒ coVeemornings and she’s got involved with a computercourse.
Even when the child was in formal care grandmotherswere sometimes still involved. For example the second Shir-ley in our study, who worked at a counter assistant at thelocal post oYce, explained the role her mother played ingetting her son, the eldest of her two children, into child-care:
Yeah, he is full-time because when he was six months,we put his name down really early, and my mum’s adinner lady there as well, so she’s been able to sort of,you know, get him early.
When the child Wnishes at a quarter past three the grand-mother picks him up, takes him to her house and looksafter him until Shirley’s husband collects him after he hasWnished work. And even though her husband, a plumber,has recently lost his job, the division of responsibilitiesremained unchanged. Although it was normally the grand-mother, or another female member of the family, whohelped in caring, there were the odd examples of grandfa-thers, of mother’s fathers, getting involved. This conWrmsother Wndings, of how support was delivered through thedistaV side of working families, and that inter-generationalcaring was highly gendered (Wheelock et al., 2003). Thisintensive involvement of the extended family in providingchildcare is a profoundly diVerent Wnding from other stud-ies of places, where there is a greater geographical disper-sion of the wider family (Butler and Robson, 2003; Robsonand Butler, 2001; Savage et al., 2005). Of course, in enactingsocial reproduction mothers who perform paid work andwho care for their children – literally and through co-ordi-nating the delivery of care by others – often have little time‘for themselves’, and grandparents too, if still in employ-ment, Wnd their own time squeezed.
6. Not working and not caring, then what to do?
The dominant – although not only – UK post-war babychildrearing ideology emphasised the importance of ‘enjoy-ing your baby’, of needing to outwardly show your lovethrough carers subordinating their own needs. Sub-sequently this stance has been more muted, as a range ofideologies of caring have found public expression. When itcomes to ‘spending’ time the evidence is less clear-cut(Brannen and Moss, 1998; Holloway, 1999), although what
322 K. Ward et al. / Geoforum 38 (2007) 312–325
there is suggests that again, women will often spend time onthe house, the children, and the husband/partner beforethemselves.
In our study, some of the mothers expressed guilt aboutspending time on them selves but claimed that their malepartners had no such reservations. Wilma contrasted heruse of her ‘free’ time with how her partner used his:
ƒIf he takes them out then I’m on my own, but reallyif I am on my own I’m doing cleaning or things I needto be doing ƒ He does, cos I mean he goes to footballmatches and then he goes to the football supportersclub, he goes training and he goes running.
Likewise the second Shirley in our study assumed it was herresponsibility to ensure that the housework got done, evenwhen it compromised her own ‘free’ time (see Holloway,1999) but remarked that her husband was much better atWnding time for himself. As Shirley explained, the volumeof her voice rising and the expression of her words becom-ing more pronounced:
[He] likes to drink in the – [he] is a man’s man – helikes to drink in the pub but usually in the afternoon.So if he is going to the pub I’ll know about – well, no,I won’t know until about 2 o’clock until I phone himand then he says ‘oh, I’m in the pub’. And I hate thosedays because I end up having to drive – go get the vanor car or whatever he has gone there in – I have to goand pick that up. Sometimes I take both kids in a taxi.
These two cases reXect the view amongst the majority ofour participants, and conWrm the Wndings of other studies.Mothers were found to Wnd it hard to identify and to spendtime on their own needs when there were other householdtasks that needed to be done. Fathers, on the other hand,were found to Wnd it easier to ‘switch oV’, to make time forthemselves, to maintain structured social activities. How-ever not all mothers we spoke with were unable to maketime for themselves. Some had managed to maintain someof their pre-parent activities but generally through the sup-port of their mothers rather than partners. So Kirsty, whenasked about her weekends with her daughter, replied:
Depends if Manchester City are playing at home oraway. If Manchester City are playing she’s gone tomothers at 12 and I’m gone to the match.
Shirley is a single mother of a three year old son. She seesher best friend or a Friday night, staying a home with a‘bottle of wine’ because ‘her friend works at Sock Shop’.She doesn’t go out much. If she does go out – and it’s onlyonce every couple of months – she has to involve her ex-partner, which generates its only stresses. Wilma, on theother hand, goes out more regularly. She drops oV her twochildren at her mother’s house, which is not far from whereher and her husband live and they stay the night. However,when she goes out it is almost always with her husband.While he goes out by himself, she does not. This was a dis-cernible pattern amongst those with whom we spoke. And
this was the minority. Most of the mothers we spoke with inWythenshawe used the time away from their child or chil-dren, or performing paid work, to do other socially repro-ductive chores. It was a rare that they took to and forthemselves. This Wnding is also linked to social class, withmiddle class mothers more likely to Wnd time for themselvesand much less likely to accept or legitimate these traditionalgender roles. Shirley’s collection of her inebriated husbandfrom the local public house and Abigail, whose biographywith which we began this paper, feeling under pressure toexpand her working hours while retaining the role of pri-mary carer, exemplify this Wnding.
7. Conclusion
While work on ‘middle class formation’ has mush-roomed in recent years, this paper by contrast has focusedon exploring the workings of a working class area,8 inwhich the pressure for women to perform paid work and todo most of the caring has become more acute. Claims overthe emergence of the post-industrial city, and ‘a new articu-lated Xexibility between work and other dimensions of lifeƒ [with] [p]eople participat[ing] in work over the life cyclein a rhythm determined not simply by the requirements ofthe work setting, but by the development of the rhythm oftheir own lives’ (Hirschorn, 1979, p. 115) rings hollow in thebus shelters, on the streets, and within the houses ofWythenshawe. For much of the twentieth century womenfrom working class families have had to balance multipledemands on their time. However, this is not to claim thatthe conditions under which decisions over the organisationof everyday life have not gone unchanged in these types ofcommunities and households: far from it. Changes in thewelfare state and the organisation of entitlements, the gen-eral dismantling of internal labour markets, rising in-workinsecurity, and in particular, the disappearance of the pub-lic sector as an employer of working class young men, theincreasing hours of business in many service sector jobs, thede-regulation of public transport, the rising mobility offamilies: in combination these tendencies, and others, havecombined to produce a very diVerent economic and socialenvironment from that in the past. Those we interviewedtold us how they organised their lives, and those of theirchildren in such a way as to balance the various Wnancialand time demands on the household, and it was clear thatmany of these wider changes in economy and society wereplacing these women, and the families they are part of,under great strain.
8 Others have argued that it is not possible to read ‘gendered moralrationalities’ from class positions (Duncan et al., 2004), and we would con-cur with this stance. Our intention has not been to read preferences or theirrealisation from positions in relation to the means of production, but rath-er, has been to explore the interaction between preference-shaping (but notdetermining) contexts in the form of restructured places and the decisionsmothers make. It is also to distinguish between preferences and practices.
K. Ward et al. / Geoforum 38 (2007) 312–325 323
Writing the foreword to the second edition of The Sec-ond Shift, Hochschild and Machung (2003, xxv) has arguedthat ‘women’s work is a way the family has absorbed thedeindustrialization of America and the decline in men’swages’. In the US this has clearly been the case, particularlyin those families where men are in the lowest income earn-ing categories, where the increase in the number of womenperforming paid work has just about oVset the decline inmale incomes (Mishel et al., 2005). In the UK, the realwages of the top earners have similarly risen substantiallywhile the real wages of those at the bottom have hardlychanged. The most common way for low earners to avoidpoverty is through both adults – where there are two – per-forming paid work. Indeed only eight per cent of these lowincomes can rely on one income to rise above the povertyline. This is in contrast to Wfty per cent of all earners (Millarand Gardiner, 2004, np). These statistics contains some ofthe families with whom we spoke.
In our Weldwork we found men working long full-timehours and women working medium-to-long part-timehours, largely but not just as the result of Wnancial necessity.Dual low income and one and a half low-income householdsdominated the set of families we spoke with in Wythensh-awe. The majority of our mothers continued to take the leadin organising and ‘doing’ social reproduction. At a generallevel, we found little evidence of any changes in the house-hold gender division of labour. This is perhaps not surpris-ing as other studies have suggested that it this group of menwho have been the least willing to perform household tasks,over and above those that are constructed as ‘the work ofmen’, such as physical and technical tasks (Berk, 1985;Himmelweit, 2000; McRae, 1999; Wheelock, 1990).
Women faced and had to manage all sorts of dilemmas:from how much maternity leave to take to whether toreturn to paid work or not; from whether to work part orfull-time to whether to risk changing jobs for possibly beingable to negotiate more ‘Xexible’ working hours; fromwhether to use formal or informal or ‘complementary’childcare to whether or not to apply for a housing transferin order to make the choreographing of everyday activitiesa little easier. In this respect our qualitative Wndings arecompatible with wider statistical trends. Susan Harkness(2003), on the basis of the British Household Panel Surveydata, has demonstrated little change in the domestic divi-sion of labour, despite the increasing labour force partici-pation rates (see also National Statistics, 2005). That is notsay though that all in the sphere of paid and unpaid work isas it was in the 1960s. It clearly is not. This paper has madea contribution to our understandings of those urban work-ing class neighbourhoods (see also Holloway, 1998a,b,c,1999; Wheelock and Jones, 2002). We have given a sense ofwhat national statistics mean for the patterns of living andalso perhaps, given how the role of gender is sometimesunderstated, why these patterns are reproduced.
Since completing our empirical work Wythenshawe hasre-entered the geographical imagination of local plannersand is scheduled for redevelopment, to become, once again,
Manchester’s ‘garden city’. In many ways the language oftoday is not too dissimilar to that which was used in the1920s and 1930s when the area was Wrst built. These devel-opments could fulWl the hopes of Sharon, the communityactivist, but at present there is cause for concern and reXec-tion, as the increasing local role of the private sector is fur-ther changing the area’s social meaning, and the termsunder which the women we spoke with will have to negoti-ate the multiple, and often contradictory, demands on theirtime. As Massey (1996, p. 75) wrote a decade ago:
[T]oday a changing politics is once again re-castingthe social meaning of this place. Many of the housesare now in private hands. The school we went to onthat corner was a state school, but the nursery homethere now is private. The move from school to nursinghome reXects the wider history of the estate. The lay-ers of memory are now Wltered through a changingpolitics. And every now and then a dreadful rumourbrings the terror that the estate might be sold oV toprivate into private hands.
And she was right. In December 2005 Wythenshawe’scouncil tenants voted ‘yes’ to Manchester City Council’sproposal to switch ownership of more than 6000 councilhomes in the area to a new, not-for-proWt Registered SocialLandlord – Parkway Green Housing Trust. It is not clearwhat this will mean for the mothers we spoke with. It is tobe hoped though that as a minimum the renewed interest inthe area will mark the beginning of a reworking of therelationship between Wythenshawe and the surroundingaZuent suburbs of Southern Manchester, and with it, are-evaluation of the work done inside the house and out bythe mothers of Wythenshawe.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the Economic and SocialResearch Council (R000239470) for Wnancing the researchupon which this paper draws and all those who were inter-viewed as part of it. We thank the three referees and theEditor of Geoforum – Andrew Leyshon – for their construc-tive comments, to which we have done our best to attend.The usual disclaimers apply.
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