Rosemary Crompton gives a full account of the recent changes in the structure of women's employment, incorporating a comprehensive review of the relevant theoretical concepts and the arguments developed to explain them. Discussing the pattern of women's paid employment from the standpoint of both constraint and individual choice, she begins by examining the variety of explanations offered to understand the situation of women at work in twentieth-century Britain. Subsequent chapters focus on the nature and extent of female employment in Britain today; cross-national comparisons of the differential structuring of women's employment; women as employees; and the changes in the lives of women and men as caused by the fluctuating employment/family interface. The implications of these changes for Britain's wider structures of inequality and social polarization are also studied.