All Day, Every Day: Factory and Family in the Making of Women's Lives

Women are oppressed both in the home and at work, as feminists have painstakingly made clear. All Day Every Day is a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between oppression in these two spheres and of the processes which maintain and reinforce it.*BR**BR*Sallie Westwood spent a year on the shopfloor with women working for the StitchCo hosiery company in Needletown, the centre of the hosiery industry in Britain. With the full cooperation of workers and management, she has been able to produce a richly-textured study of the dramas of everyday life and the complicated interplay of the influences of home and work. It was a factory in which one-third of the workforce were women of colour (mainly Asian) and so complexities of class, race and gender are delicately intertwined. *BR**BR*All Day Every Day describes both the richness of shopfloor culture and the deeprooted spirit of opposition within it. It shows clearly how the challenges from the women on the shopfloor are absorbed and transformed into the traditional romantic and subordinate images of what it is to be a woman in a man's world.