Labouring Lives unravels the huge changes which have so fundamentally altered the life courses
of ordinary women over the past one hundred and fifty years namely the changes in marriage and
fertility patterns. Using dynamic data from Dutch population registers and analytical
techniques from the life course approach the book offers new evidence on women's changing
position in the labour market their role in pre-nuptial sexuality and their contribution to
marriage and fertility change in the Netherlands between 1880 and 1960. The author reconstructs
the socio-economic and demographic worlds of different groups of working and non-working women
and by doing so she is able to locate the various groups driving the changes. Advanced
statistical tools enable the author to analyse differences in fertility strategies stopping
versus spacing employed by various social and cultural groups in the Netherlands. This book
leads to conclusions which challenge a number of orthodoxies in the field.
