Home and workplace: women's experience in the urban development of Athens

Abstract

For women, the meaning and the experience of work are much more complex than paid employment. They include processes and relations of work that permeate all aspects of everyday life and do not conform with dualist categorizations: work-non work, working time leisure time, workplace-home. The temporal and geographical boundaries of such categories are often blurred and shift and they are difficult to explain through established analytical categories. Processes of urban development determine to a large extent how everyday life is organized -the uses of time and space that are possible for women. In this paper I try to identify for the case of Athens the conflicting conditions and experiences of work, in the workplace and at home, that form the context of women's everyday life and the realm of their struggle to re-define gender relations.