Stay-at-home mothers in the UK are deserting the Labour Party because of its policy focus on women who earn a wage according to a new study from a leading sociologist.

Mr Geoff Dench, who revealed his findings at a seminar organised by influential centre-right think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, said: “Women who value home and family life above a career are becoming disenfranchised.

“The feminist ‘sisterhood’ has clearly failed them, and the result is that they are withdrawing their support from the mainstream parties.”

The figures showed that in 1986, 52 per cent of economically inactive women supported Labour, but by 2008 this figure had plunged to 27 per cent.

However, the Conservative Party has failed to capitalise on this drop, and the proportion of women who have no political allegiance increased from 8 to 24 per cent between 1986 and 2006.

Support for the Conservatives among economically inactive women has remained steady at around 20 per cent.

During his presentation Mr Dench argued that women who are active in politics tend to be middle-class and in favour of working mothers, but this often meant that the interests of stay-at-home mums were overlooked.

Mr Dench, whose research was based on an analysis of the British Social Attitudes survey, said: “Politicians of all parties should be concerned about this, because the proportion of young women who prioritise home and family has been growing steadily in recent years, and so their votes matter.”

Prof Dench studied the responses given over the past 20 years in British Social Attitude surveys to questions about family life, happiness and political allegiance.

He found that fewer women now believe that their place is in the home and that men should be the breadwinners, following the campaign for greater equality of the sexes in the 1960s and 70s.

But a majority (57 per cent) of women from working-class backgrounds still believed that “family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job” in 2006, compared with 47 per cent of middle-class females.

Earlier in the same series Mr Dench revealed that young mothers are increasingly turning their backs on high profile careers and looking to men as the main breadwinners.

He said: “Women with young children are going back to the very traditional division of labour in which they want the husband as the breadwinner.

“Having tried full-time working themselves they have found the home much more interesting and want to be enabled to have that”.