Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain (MIT Press) is now available for order online!
Inventing the Working Parent traces the politics that surrounded the invention of working parenthood in Britain. It tells the story of feminist campaigns for flexible work, childcare, and a more equitable division of affective labor in the 1970s and explores the legacies of this activism for our contemporary gendered experience of work – both paid and unpaid. Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, in the context of Britain’s neoliberalization and emerging crisis of care, activism on behalf of working parents drove the advent of ‘family friendly’ workplaces. It also helped generate a new aspirational cultural figure of the working parent. Inventing the Working Parent aims to shed light on the tangle of work and family demands and pleasures that we live with today in an era of heightened strain for parents.
Advance Praise
“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 History