Linda McDowell, Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945-2007, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, West Sussex, 2013, 294 pages, £24.99 paper, ISBN 9781444339185.

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In Working Lives, Linda McDowell draws together over one hundred oral histories that she has collected in the course of various research projects since 1990s, to tell a sweeping story about women who have migrated to Britain from 1945-2007 to work in paid employment. If, after 1945, native-born women tended to withdraw from the labour force when they had children, this has never been the case for immigrant women; even when they came through family reunification schemes (as was the case for many South Asian women migrating to Britain between 1968 and 1979) they have been actively engaged in paid employment.  McDowell breaks her narrative into five periods, defined by changes in immigration policy, transitions in the labour market, political events and the various homelands from which the immigrants came: women who migrated from Eastern Europe from the displaced persons camps between 1945 and 1951; women migrating from Ireland and the Caribbean from 1948 to 1968, in particular those who took up jobs in nursing and transport; South Asian women migrating between 1968 and 1979, including those expelled from East Africa; white professional women from the so-called ‘old commonwealth’ countries (North America and Australasia) who migrated to work in the financial sector in London between 1979 and 1997; and the proliferation of precarious employment, often mediated by labour agencies, between 1997 and 2007.

I found this a fascinating read: so much is so familiar (the deskilling of migrant women, their concentration in low-paid service and care-related occupations; gendered racial stereotyping, discrimination and wage inequality) and yet the particularity of the British case and the variability of different women’s circumstances is equally part of the story.  Britain’s imperial history, such that migrants from the Caribbean who had been educated with British textbooks arrived with expectations of coming home, membership in the European Union, and the specifics of UK immigration policy: these are among the many factors that make this a distinctive story. McDowell does an excellent job of conveying this context, both in a separate chapter at the beginning of the book and through lively prose ‘snapshots’ scattered throughout the text.

The story is of continuity and discontinuity for women migrants to Britain in the post WWII era. The occupations of Latvian and Polish women coming from the displaced persons camps in the late 1940s are not that different from the jobs taken up by women coming from Slovakia today: low level care work. McDowell writes:

“What is perhaps surprising … is the extent of the similarities over time in migrant women’s occupational segregation and the continuing significance of newness, of time of entry, which continues to disadvantage women migrants despite their different national origins, their cultures, religions and skin colour and the differences in their reasons for migration” (page 217).

But the discontinuities in experience between different groups of women and across time are also glaring.  Women migrating from Ireland and the Caribbean were regarded as less respectable and as inferior employees compared to the displaced Baltic women who came a few years earlier as ‘European Volunteer Workers’ (EVWs), the latter judged to be superior (and more easily assimilated) because they were middle class, Protestant and white.  If neither Irish nor Caribbean women were preferred, the latter fared more poorly, even though both groups were recruited to work as nurses for the National Health Service. Especially recruited to come to Britain to train and work as nurses, many Caribbean women expected that they would train to be State Registered Nurses (SRNs) rather than lower qualified State Enrolled Nurses (SENs). Through long interview quotes, women from the Caribbean report on their frustrated attempts to pass the SRN entry exam and their suspicions that, regardless of their actual success on the exam, dishonest managers had actively blocked their chances and streamed them into the SEN.  Unlike the other groups that McDowell considers, most South Asian women migrating to Britain in the late 1960s and 1970s came as family dependents. But though they were admitted as wives and daughters rather than as workers, and few had ever worked outside of the home before migrating, they soon found that paid employment was critical to their household income in Britain. Through their social networks they found jobs in manufacturing and other industrial plants. Neither these manufacturing jobs nor professional or semi-professional training within the NHS seem as available to the more precarious, casualised, mobile (or transnational) migrants of the new millennium.

In one of the first chapters of the book, McDowell offers a comprehensive and critical overview of a variety of relevant literatures and she continues to build her critical engagement with them through the five case-study chapters. McDowell argues, for instance, that much of the contemporary scholarly discourse on precarious and insecure work focuses on “the world lost to men rather than recognizing the long-established pattern of casual and insecure work of women” (page 188).  While recognizing and fully analyzing the impact of neo-liberal social and economic policies on the lives of both men and women, she nonetheless notes that many women have actually increased their security, as measured by length of attachment to any one job. She also criticizes labour studies for underplaying the significance of women’s migration experiences to their identities and orientations as workers.  McDowell seeks to remedy this in her chapter on South Asian migrants. Her oral histories centre on women who took part in one of two industrial strikes: four who worked at the Dagenham Ford plant as sewing machinists and three who took part in the strike at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories. The latter strike is celebrated by the labour movement as a “by-word for solidarity with migrant women workers” (page 144). McDowell is critical, not only of the tendency within even sympathetic accounts to replay orientalist stereotypes about the South Asian women who led the strike, but of the failure to recognize the significance of these women’s experiences as migrants to their solidarity as workers. As McDowell and other feminist scholars have noted, their collective action as workers was a result of “cumulative experiences of injustice” (page 152), including their experiences of migration and associated class dislocation and systemic racism in British society.

So too, McDowell is critical of the tendency within the literature on diaspora to overemphasize loss and nostalgia and to focus on the home and community, rather than the workplace, as the sites where diasporic identities are constructed.  Assessing the tenacious diasporic identities that developed among the Latvian EVWs who came to Britain in the late 1940s, McDowell notes that the initial workplace assignment “set the conditions for the rest of their lives” (page 83).  The  government’s requirement that employers supply housing for the EVWs created their de facto segregation and shaped the conditions that led most EVWs to marry men of their own nationality. Despite government expectations that EVWs would marry British men and assimilate, they developed strong diasporic identities that have persisted for the rest of their lives.

McDowell’s oral histories are a valuable resource and they foreground the complexity of migrant lives so as to complicate issues that too easily narrow into polarised debate, such as the distinction between economic migrant, political refugee, asylum seeker, and trafficked person. Women immigrating from Baltic countries after WWII are a case in point: though the British state reclassified them as EVWs (from an earlier classification of displaced person), the Latvian women migrants with whom McDowell spoke continued to understand themselves as political refugees even a half century later. Migrating from Latvia in the early years of this millennium as a temporary hotel worker, another interviewee tells a harrowing story of narrowly missing being trafficked. The lines, often so firm in policy and popular debate, blur within individual migrants’ lives.

This book, McDowell states, is aimed at students and the general reader; it is certainly a compelling and accessible read that makes important and nuanced theoretical points along the way. McDowell ends with her hope that the stories of women migrants presented in this book will make clear the enduring contributions that these and other migrant women have made to British society and help to build the kind of critical cosmopolitanism to which so many of us have committed.