This is a cracker of a book. It is about the greatest social issue of our age: who cares? Who should care, in particular, for the very young, for the disabled and for those who, as they grow older, can no longer care for themselves? What makes the book stand out is the quality and depth of the research and the focus on the central questions that have arisen in the past sixty years: how to manage the consequences of the movement of women into the paid workforce, of families becoming smaller and more fragmented, and of life expectancy rising. 

The book opens with the assertion that ‘women’s autonomy and financial independence have been the biggest steps forward in human freedom in high-income countries since 1945’. Women accounted for around 25 per cent of the UK’s paid workforce in the late 1950s and over 70 per cent by the late 1990s. This surge gave a one-off boost to GDP. Women are now making big inroads into what were once majority-male fields (men, by contrast, are making almost no headway in majority-­female sectors). But all this has been accompanied by other changes.

Among the most dramatic has been the fall in the birth rate in Britain: last year was the fiftieth anniversary of its first fall below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman. The average family size, around 2.8 children per woman in the late 1960s, is now 1.49, the