Between Equalization and Marginalization: Women Working Part-Time in Europe and the United States of America - Hardcover

an excellent overview of trends and patterns in part-time work and the explanatory factors behind woemen's labor market decisions ... refreshing reading. (Review of Social Economy)

This particular collection of studies ... succeeds ... in providing focused and rigorously researched detail on the radical change that has occurred in women's family roles and labour market participation since the Second World War ... the analytical standard is uniformly high ... for serious students of the labour market in a global context and the speical role played within it by married women since the 1950s this is an essential and rewarding read, worthy of collective effort so conscientiously deployed. (W R Garside, Labour History Review, Vol 64, No 2, Summer 1999)

"...this is both an informative and challenging collection." Journal of Social Policy April 1999

an impressive cross-national study of the long-term development of part-time work in Europe and the United States ... This book is an important contribution to our understanding of part-time work and women's employment across countries and over time ... contains useful statistics and analyses of part-time work in European countries and the United States, and I can recommend it to anyone interested in labor markets, family research, and comparative welfare state research. (Gunn Elizabeth Birkelund, American Journal of Sociology)

Levels of part-time work vary enormously across industrial society, from 66 per cent among women in the Netherlands to just 8 per cent among women in Greece. Part-time work was almost unknown in Eastern Europe, but is now growing rapidly in the same sectors of industry as in Western Europe and the USA.

Between Equalization and Marginalization provides a comparative analysis of the development of part-time work in Europe and the USA from 1950 onwards, using longitudinal and cross-sectional data, and reassesses the competing theories and conflicting perspectives so far offered on the growth of part-time work among women. It concludes that part-time work does not equalize women's position vis à vis full-time workers, nor does it leave women in part-time jobs wholly marginalized. Instead, it shows that part-time jobs provide new opportunities for secondary earners and play a special role in the context of the sexual division of labour in the family.

The country reports - by national experts - cover the USA, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, West Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Slovenia, and Poland. Two chapters by the editors synthesize the results and assess their theoretical implications.