Full Circle, 1945–2007

This chapter focuses on the connections between migration and labour market participation, but moving across national boundaries also disrupts and recasts more personal and intimate connections across geographic scales. Most of the women came to the UK as young single women, almost all of them before they had children, and, as the author has explained, their reasons for migration varied, as did the consequences. The author wonders about the extent to which women originally from Eastern European countries felt or desired connections across the generations with those currently living in the UK. The chapter ends with a plea that greater tolerance of difference and celebration of diversity are goals that must not be relinquished in a new period of austerity and recession.