Women, The Family and Unemployment

Abstract

For more than two decades following the Second World War the mass unemployment of the 1930s appeared to be a thing of the past, never to return. Hopes ran high as official figures for unemployment between 1948 and 1968 averaged around 1.6 per cent of the labour force, or 360,000 people. These golden days seem as distant now as the black days of the 1930s must have appeared to people during the 1950s and 1960s. In the past decade, unemployment has risen at an alarming rate, from 2.6 per cent of the labour force, or 600,000 people, in 1974, to over three million people, or one in seven of the labour force, in 1984.