While working women have achieved much, the issues of the right to work, equal opportunities and rewards, healthy work environment, unionisation and, in particular, the problems of 'the double working life' are still very much alive.

In Women at Work Kaye Hargreaves examines the crucial issues, many of them forcefully articulated in workers' own lively accounts. She shows that the dramatically increased participation of women in Australia 's paid workforce constitutes a major challenge to organisation in the workplace and to traditional attitudes about women's role in the society at large. The difficulties in the relationship between women's movement and the labour movement will be resolved only as women workers develop new forms of organisation which reach beyond the conventional confines of unionism to change fundamental social relationships. Women at Work also documents the emergence of this process during the past decade and points to directions for its further development.