I was very pleased to be invited to review this book as its subject matter is pertinent to my own research on ethnicity, gender and migration, but also (and perhaps not coincidentally) because the book is apposite to my own Irish family's migration journey. The book is about the migration to the UK of women in search of work and a better standard of living over six decades. McDowell's purpose is to explore the changing character of the British economy and society over the long post-war years between 1945 through the eyes of women who were born elsewhere. What is distinctive about the book is the placing of women’s, particularly (although not exclusively) working class women’s, lives and voices to the forefront. While the book is ostensibly a geographical account of gender and migration, it also takes a multidisciplinary perspective, drawing on sociology, history and economics in the investigation.

The book is organised into two parts, one the broad field of migration and mobilities and the economic changes, including migration since 1945. The second part engages with the major groups who migrated to the UK, separated broadly by the economic significance of the time rather than the default position of a decade at a time (p. 129). This works well as it allows in-depth engagement with numerically significant groups over the decade(s).

Those coming fresh to the field of gender and migration will find Chapter 2 very helpful in locating the main theoretical approaches to the field, or what McDowell calls a ‘broad sweep across a number of theoretical traditions’. The chapter is called ‘Gendering Labour Geographies and Histories’, although it draws widely on the literature from social sciences in order to map the field. In doing so, McDowell revisits and critiques the grand theorisations of economic transformation found in Beck, of intimacy in Giddens and of individualisation and detraditionalisation and the importance of work in people's self identity in Sennett. McDowell notes the neglect of research that focuses on the social construction of identity in the workplace. In this critique, she would find relevant work in the employment relations literature.

Chapter 3 offers a valuable scene setting of the transformation of Britain since 1945. It charts the changing economic context and the importance of migration to the economies in the period under investigation. In doing so, McDowell provides an informed position of migration patterns and changes and provides the context for the heart of the book, the narratives of the lives women made for themselves in a country which for many was never intended to become ‘home’. The chapter begins with a discussion of the complexity of post second world war migration and carefully explains why migration was so important to the post-war economy of the UK. It is refreshing that McDowell reminds us that the post-war discourse of femininity and maternity and the 1950s ‘housewife’ was only part of women's story. In contrast, Irish and continental European women were constructed as workers, which excluded them from the idealised 1950s (middle-class) women of historical imagination. Moreover, she asserts that complex categorisations, based on class, gender, marital status as well as on ethnicity were established at this time, with the effect that a hierarchy of eligibility to the labour market was established with Irish and New Commonwealth in-migrants regarded as less respectable and as inferior employees relative to UK born and Baltic in-migrants (p. 81). Such a hierarchy has re-emerged in a new divisive discourse, this time with the UK British worker seen as inferior to the ‘hard-working Eastern European’.

The remaining chapters are located at economic junctures and uncover the neglected voices and experiences of different migrant women through some 100 interview accounts. Chronicling these voices is important, but particularly so for the early chapters as these stories and experiences are in danger of being lost over time since women are so often invisible even in some social histories. Chapter 4 ‘Post-war Reconstruction, 1945–51’ chronicled women's roles in the post-war reconstruction, including some little charted material on the European Volunteer Workers including Baltic women and the well-charted accounts of post-war recruitment in the Caribbean. Chapter 5, ‘Coming Home: The Heart of the Empire’ focuses on Caribbean and Irish women from 1948 to 1968 and their (low) status in work and society. However, Irish migrants to the UK might question the symbolism and accuracy of the chapter title for them. Chapter 6, ‘Years of Struggle, 1968–79’ covers the emigration of South-Asian women during the years 1968–79 and reminds the reader of the extraordinary industrial relations battles fought by South-Asian women in their struggle for fairness at work. These histories should firmly put to bed the myth of the ‘docile Asian woman’, but as later chapters show such myths and others persist. Tracking the abrupt change in political and economic policy, Chapter 7, ‘Privilege and Inequality’, turns to the 1979–97 era and the rise of free market economics and the dominance of the City. Thus McDowell notes the increasing income inequality alongside the growing demand for service sector jobs, and in doing so records the voices of women's experiences of being both part of, and apart from, the privileged elites, and how women's access to privilege was always partial and constrained by gendered and social practices. Such practices, that included harassment, focused on the female body and meant as one interviewee commented that women had to ‘know how to handle it’. Chapter 8 entitled ‘Back to the Future: Diversity and Precarious Labour 1997–2007’ brings us nearly up-to-date. In particular, it returns to women of the Baltic and to Central and Eastern Europeans more generally, and more importantly it charts the rise of precarious work. Precarious work has always been a characteristic of the employment of some migrant groups (and others) so insecure work is not new. Yet what is new is the employer and government mantra of flexibility (often at all costs) with only lip service to the accompanying need for security of labour. Moreover, the growth and formalisation of agency work and the changing nature of male employment has embedded insecure work into labour market practices. This McDowell covers in its various different sectoral forms. The contemporary debate about the need to restrict zero-hours contracts demonstrates how far precarity has gone.

The final chapter ‘Full Circle, 1945–2007’ was at its most powerful in the section on ‘at home in the UK’ and ‘going home’ and that on cross-generational connections. The impact of migration and the influence of the imagined home are brought to a head through the voices of some migrants who had been in the UK for most of their working lives. Recounting visits to their homeland, the women's narratives, maybe with a heavy heart, saw a different ‘home’ from that they had carried close to their hearts during their years of migration. The imagined home was now less of a home than the home that they had made with their families and that they knew in the UK. McDowell concludes with an exhortation that many of us share, ‘in a new period of austerity and recession, greater tolerance of difference and celebration of diversity are goals that must not be relinquished’ (p. 231).

McDowell offers a broad sweep through theoretical traditions, but she also provides a detailed account of women's migration and how this has differed at different economic moments and changing migration patterns. This is the key strength of the book in that few books seek to pull together the experiences of widely different groups of migrants over time and show the very real similarities, as well as differences, in their working experiences, often governed by societal and economic forces. Moreover, this book provides a space for the voice of the often-neglected woman migrant. Drawing on original research, McDowell has written an excellent account of women and migration since 1945 that will stand the test of time and will encourage readers to delve further into the experiences of different migrant groups.