ABSTRACT
The women's accounts of their employment decisions are constructed within a rhetoric of obligations to other family members, as wives and mothers, responsible for child care and unpaid domestic work. Hence paid work has to 'fit in' with their primary role as caregivers. It was therefore tempting for us to analyse the women's accounts as the counterpart of the men's - as accounts in terms of a 'caregiver' role which neatly complemented the 'breadwinner' role in which the men's versions are constructed.! However this does no justice to the complexity of the different aspects of being a woman in this community, or the rhetorical skills with which the women interviewees describe how these 'fit' together. The role of women can better be seen as fitting in all these different elements, under an overall requirement that children's needs come first, and that women have primary responsibility for child care.
