This paper analyses the way maternity leave has been reported in the periods 1971 to 1977 and 1997 to 2001 in the right-of-centre British press in relation to economic issues. My aim is to answer the following research question: How has the representation of maternity leave changed (if so) in the right-of-centre press with the introduction of new policies in the UK, within the broader context of economic inequality?
To answer this, I have built a corpus of 773 news stories that include the query phrase ‘maternity leave’ in the Times and Daily Mail in the years in which maternity leave policies were changed in the UK, that is, 1973, 1975, 1999, plus two years before and after. Data has been subsequently divided into two subcorpora: news stories between 1971 and 1977 and news stories between 1997 and 2001. The analysis consists on a first quantitative approach, in which the frequency of use of lexical terms related to economy and equality have been compared (e.g. 'fair', 'class', 'wealth'), and a second qualitative approach, in which I have analysed those stories that contain 'afford' from a more critical perspective.
By combining qualitative with quantitative methods, the analysis shows that maternity leave has become much more monetized in the 1997 to 2001 period. Within this overall trend, the major linguistic shift is represented by a five times increase in the relative frequency of use of ‘afford’ in the 1997-2001 years. The close reading of these stories has revealed a considerable opposition from these newspapers to the introduction of new rights for pregnant women, a hostility that was not shown when first improvements started to be made in the 1970s.
The present paper contributes to CADS in that it explores a topic that has not been addressed by previous studies of mass media (the representation of maternity leave within the broader context of economic inequality) and offers a comparative, diachronic study that affects two different periods in the recent history of Britain.
