This book deals with one of the most important changes that advanced societies have gone through in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, the increasing participation of women in the labour market. More specifically, it focuses on women's transition in and out of paid work in two different countries, Britain and Italy.

Although women's employment and the differences in women's labour force participation across countries and between women have been widely documented in recent decades, this book provides new grounds for understanding women's behaviour as driving social changes.

The most original feature of Solera's book is the fact that it looks at women's transformation in the labour market from a dynamic and multidimensional standpoint. It combines the potential of the life course approach, through an empirical analysis based on retrospective longitudinal data (using event history data and methods), with a comparative perspective used across both time and space. Thus, it compares the work and family careers of four subsequent birth cohorts of women in two countries with different welfare regimes – Italy and Great Britain. This approach makes the work a good example of a study of micro-macro interaction, between transformations over the individual life course and social change at the macro-level.

Combining the potential of the life course approach by simultaneously addressing historical cohort successions and individual life course developments (Elder, 1985) makes it possible to penetrate to the core of the social change which results from the intersection of these two movements: the succession of ‘birth cohorts’ and the transformation in the individual life course. By comparing how women's experiences in combining work and family over the life course have changed since the post-World War II years in Italy and Great Britain, Solera's book sheds light on the micro-macro mechanism that underlies women's new behaviours.

The book is divided into seven chapters in which the author addresses and answers a complex set of questions. The introduction illustrates the main research questions, the analytical approach, and the selection of countries and cohorts. It states the key issues investigated, and the main question: for whom, when and where has women's labour market attachment increased? This is an important research question that seeks not only to understand the ‘degree’ and the ‘type’ of women's changes but also to gain a grasp of the changes in inequalities between women (in social class, education level and family formation) that goes beyond that which can be achieved simply by using aggregated statistics or cross-sectional data.

Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive synthesis and discussion of various sociological and economic theories, which are combined in what the author calls ‘a (gendered) institutional-rational approach’ that incorporates both micro and macro factors and both agency and structure. In this approach, as the author argues, the concept of ‘constrained choices is crucial’, meaning that ‘women's choices in the labour market reflect their preferences and their human capital, but they are embedded in an array of institutional economic and cultural arrangements’ (p. 4). This is an illuminating theoretical chapter that covers a wide range of different theories and provides a final framework for analysing women's labour market transitions. This makes it possible to consider a variety of ‘explanans’, the importance of looking at both agency and structure, and, in turn, to consider how both women's preferences and the wide set of opportunities and constraints affecting them have changed in Italy and Great Britain since the 1950s.

The main findings of empirical analysis are illustrated in chapters 5 and 6. In both countries, younger women are more attached to the labour market than their mothers and grandmothers. This suggests that Italian and British women (the younger cohort) are becoming more similar. But, and this is particularly important in looking for explanations, the type and causes of this stronger attachment are very different in the two countries. In Britain, discontinuous employment around childbearing has continued to be the typical pattern, although to a lesser extent for the younger cohorts of women. However, polarisation among women based on social class continues to be important in Great Britain and seems even to have increased over time.

In Italy, by contrast, the continuous work pattern is the most typical for both young and old cohorts of women. Here, however, women still face a trade-off between work and family, and appear to be polarised in an ‘opt-in/opt-out’ participation pattern. But unlike Great Britain where social class remains strong, it is essentially education (and public employment) that distinguishes between ‘insiders and outsiders’, as well as the North/South divide. More than pointing to the importance of preferences, these differences show the responsiveness of the women in Solera's study to labour market characteristics (a rigid labour market in Italy, and a more flexible, fluid market in Great Britain) and to institutional factors, which are mainly seen in terms of welfare state and gender regimes. Finally, at a policy level, by comparing across both space and time, this work demonstrates how different institutional and normative configurations help or hinder work–family conciliation and, in turn, contributes, although indirectly, to the ongoing debate on welfare and labour market reforms.

The book is very interesting because it provides a wealth of information and theoretical insights into the changes that have occurred over time in Britain and in Italy, both in women's work and family histories and in the institutional, economic and cultural arrangements in which the individual life course is embedded One critique, however, is perhaps the fact that the book relies over-much on an approach centring on women's individual ‘preferences’, though these preferences are admitted to be ‘structural constraints’. Although the author does look at the complex interplay between a woman's own preferences, cultural models and institutional and economic opportunities, she tends to disregard the role of gender, and in particular of ‘gender strategies’ (Hochschild, Reference Hochschild1989). This approach could provide insights into the differences at both macro-level, between the two social contexts, and micro-level between those women who have been able to overcome the obstacle of combining family and work over their life course careers and those who have not.