It is a well-established fact that over the last 50 years women's labour market participation has increased in all the advanced countries. It is also well established that this increase has mainly concerned the behaviour of married women and mothers and has been due to a constellation of interrelated micro and macro factors. These include the rising demand for female labour, the increasing preference among women for non-domestic roles, the growing opportunity costs of homemaking as women's education and real wages have risen, and the welfare state's increasing support for work–family reconciliation. Also well documented is the cross-country variation in the timing, degree and type of such changing factors and in their implications for women's labour market involvement.

This book has explored changes in women's employment and work–family articulations over the lifecourse using a largely innovative approach, which is simultaneously longitudinal over the lifecourse, and comparative both across cohorts and across countries. Unlike most studies that have only focused on specific lifecourse transitions or on specific cohorts, it has considered the entire work careers of women from the time they leave full-time education until their forties, looking at changes across four birth cohorts in Italy and Britain in the incidence and determinants of first entry and subsequent exits from and re-entries into paid work. A variety of ‘explanans’ have been considered, including supplyside characteristics, gender-role and childcare norms, social policies, labour market regulation, and employment structure and opportunities. By combining insights from different theories, the analysis has been based on an integrated conceptual framework that views the lifecourse as both agency and structure and, in turn, considers how both women's preferences and the wide set of opportunities and constraints have changed from the 1950s to the 2000s in Italy and Britain.

The approach followed in this study has three distinctive features. First, it is based on retrospective longitudinal data, on long periods of individual lives, on a comparison across both time (generations) and space (countries) and on a very rich set of individual and familial covariates. All together, these features have yielded a better understanding of changes over time in women's lifecourses. Although preferences and constraints have not been measured directly, this complex approach has made it possible to suggest causal narratives, looking at the intersections of micro and macro foundations of women's behaviour and choices.