The subject of Muslim women and employment has attracted considerable attention as statistically participation is lower than the UK average; elsewhere in European countries the story of economic marginalisation is similar. In this book I have taken a longer historical view to contextualise in-depth qualitative research in order to better understand the changing roles of British Muslim women in work. There is some evidence of Muslim women entering the labour market in Britain as ayahs (or nannies) from the early eighteenth century and working in factories and through flexible specialisation, such as home-working on garment sewing, after the Second World War. Stories of Muslim women in work, however, have been obfuscated by a focus on men as the primary economic subject, and the very fact some of this work was ‘hidden’ in the home (and devalued as ‘women's work’), combined with the overlooking of religion as an important index of identity and inclusion. As Avtah Brah (1993) has argued, traditional gendered division of labour has never fully explained relationships with work, nor have culturalist understandings of women as domestically bound. Muslim women's engagement in the labour market needs to also be understood as racialised and in relation to region and location. Home-working reflected what work was available for women, alongside what could flexibly be organised around childcare, with concentrations in migrant South Asian com-munities as much about word-of-mouth networking rather than culture and patriarchalism per se (Brah 1993). In this book I have considered gendered and racialised dimensions within the transitions of cultural labour, and how they interrelate with the privileging of religious or Muslim identities especially evident with younger generations.

Tracing stories of educational aspiration and increasing workforce labour by British Muslim women in many ways mirrors wider structural and attitudinal shifts to women in work in Britain over the twentieth and twenty-first century. More women entered further and higher education and pursued waged labour for longer periods over the life course. Certain continuities exist, too, in the kinds of sector worked in, such as textiles and garment-making. Although the framing of the new economy in the knowledge-based and creative industries has transformed how we talk about work, expectations of the sense of purpose it will bestow on our lives, the type of jobs available, and how and where they are performed.