Through rich personal narratives, Hazel R. Wright reveals how women studying childcare use education to balance a need to be both mothers and workers, and how they manage stasis and change. Informed by data collected from 150 students enrolled on a diploma course in an FE college over a ten-year period, the book challenges the assumption that vocational education cannot embrace broader liberal goals. With its fascinating personalised insights and new theoretical perspectives, it illustrates how the women exercise their right to determine their own lifestyle. "Women Studying Childcare" is for early years workers and managers, adult students and the staff who teach them. It opens with an informative historical overview and concludes with a concept catalogue of the ideas borrowed from sociology, psychology and economics used in education books.