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One of the first steps Margaret Thatcher’s government took following their election in 1979 was to introduce legislation that enabled sitting council tenants to buy their council homes. This chapter assesses the legacy of this policy on the experiences of homelessness and contact with the criminal justice system of two cohorts of UK citizens. Using longitudinal studies of people born in 1958 and 1970, the authors explore how policies intended to turn council tenants into property owners, may have also increased the risks of homelessness, and contact with the criminal justice system for others as well as subsequent generations. The authors assess how legislative changes can shape the lives of citizens, and highlight some of the unintended consequences of the ‘right to buy’ policy. Our chapter, therefore is essentially about the investigation of the outcomes of radical system deregulation. Our chapter draws upon concepts derived from life-course studies and historical institutionalist thinking in order to understand in-depth how radical policy changes may shape and alter the lives of ordinary citizens.

The policy debate on older people's extended participation in working life is not based on a social movement, such as the one putting forward demands on job opportunities for women, and has, by means of categorical stereotypes, mostly characterised older people as the problem. This narrative of individual choices and decisions presents older workers as de-gendered, de-classed individuals, shorn of their individual biographies and social contexts. It also treats the issue of extending working life as a phenomenon disconnected from surrounding society and trends. This line of reasoning points to the need for more sophisticated theoretical foundations. This chapter therefore provides a more encompassing framework for the discussion of extending working lives and outlines a new research agenda, including a power perspective with potential to shed light on age-based inequality, an intersectional perspective and a masculinity perspective which challenges the homogenous descriptions of older workers, a feminist understanding of work and a life course perspective which provides a framework which links the previous three.

To examine the effectiveness of our argument that housework can be used to understand power in families, we apply our theoretical framework across the family life course. In this chapter we empirically examine patterns across the five housework classes (Ultra-traditional, Traditional, Transitional Husbands, Egalitarian, and Egalitarian High Workload) regarding shifts in measures of power. We focus on changes in labor market participation, income, and occupational prestige from NSFH Wave 1 to Wave 2. We find that couples where women secured more economic resources at a pace similar to their husbands were more likely to be more egalitarian in their division of housework over time. However, couples where women secured resources while men did not were likely to exhibit gender deviance neutralization and a traditional division of labor at the second interview.

Chapter 7 of the book reports the results of Latent Trajectory Analysis examining stability and change in class membership over time. Using data from Waves 1 and 2 of the NSFH we document change and stability in class membership in the five classes (Ultra-traditional, Traditional, Transitional Husbands, Egalitarian, and Egalitarian High Workload). We describe the couple and individual level characteristics associated with both change and stability as well as the new class profiles in Wave 2. We find great change in housework class over the time period studied with some couples becoming more egalitarian and others more traditional in their division of labor. Patterns in this change over time are presented and discussed.

Where we introduced this book with Angel’s and Benny’s narratives, we complete the adolescent journey for these teens and others in chapter seven. In this chapter, we examine the different ways that youth prepared for young adulthood. Considering that several teens in this study grew up with chaotic circumstances -- some facing homelessness, multiple foster home placements, and incarceration as teens -- we look at whether supportive and capable adults can intervene in teens’ lives to help them as they prepare for adulthood. Just as gender shaped girls’ and boys’ childhood and teen experiences, transitions out of adolescence differed by gender as the pressures, constraints, and opportunities ranged for girls and boys.