"Women's Work in Britain and France is a retheorization of what constitutes 'progress in gender relations'. The book shows that French women, although having more full-time and continuous careers and greater social policy support, retain as great a responsibility for unpaid domestic and caring work as their British counterparts. It challenges the conventional policy of encouraging women's ever greater insertion into employment as the principal strategy for achieving progress in gender relations.

Transcending the traditional focus on women's employment in cross-national analyses to give equal emphasis to all forms of work, this book reveals profound structural changes in the British and French economies which will make it necessary to revalue caring and other unpaid work and to change men's work patterns towards those conventionally associated with women, rather than calling on women to adapt to structures created for and by men."--BOOK JACKET.