This is a Thinking Aloud Podcast from the BBC and for more details in our terms of use and much,

much more about thinking aloud. Go to our website at BBC.co.uk. Hello. The first time I realized something had gone wrong was when my father was

unexpectedly present one morning at the breakfast table. Why hasn't daddy gone to

work? my sister asked mother. It was a family convention that all personal questions about father were rooted through mother.

What do you want to tell them down or shall I,, asked. You tell them, Duck, said Dad.

Well, your father has lost his job, said mother.

His job at the Donlot factory.

They've told him his services had become surplus to requirements.

Right, I'd have been about 14 at the time, and although I had no real knowledge of what an earth

dad did every day at the Dunlap factory, I knew he was proud of being the sole breadwinner of bringing enough money to support mom and the family.

So what would happen now?

Now although mother was a train secretary, she boasted sometimes about her 120 WPM speed at Pittman.

There was never any idea that she might undermine Dad's proudly held household role

by going back to work.

But she did take charge of cutting down on household expenses, substituting margarine for butter and spam for meat and paraffin heaters for coal fires until fortunes improved when father found a supply teaching job miles and miles away in Blackpool. But how do

modern couples cope with a similar crisis? And that's the question at the heart of a

new ESRC funded research project which is written up in the journal Work, Employment and Society,

under the title, Householes, Responses to Spousal Job Loss.

All change or carry on as usual.

And one of the co-authors of that article, Karen Gush, who is a senior

research officer at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex,

he's now with me. Now you, Karen, you were looking at couples where one part of the

...