Double Lives

A History of Working Motherhood

By: Helen McCarthy

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eBook | 16 April 2020 | Edition Number 1

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560 Pages

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'Fabulous' - The Times
'A milestone in women's history' - Observer
'Groundbreaking ... a fascinating read' - Herald

In Britain today, three-quarters of mothers are in employment and paid work is an unremarkable feature of women's lives after childbirth. Yet a century ago, working mothers were in the minority, excluded altogether from many occupations, whilst their wage-earning was widely perceived as a social ill. In Double Lives, Helen McCarthy accounts for this remarkable transformation and the momentous consequences it has had for Britain.

Recovering the everyday worlds of working mothers, this groundbreaking history forces us not only to re-evaluate the past, but to ask anew how current attitudes towards mothers in the workplace have developed and how far we have to go.

'Impressive and nuanced' - Guardian
'Brilliant' - Literary Review

About the Author

Helen McCarthy is University Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College. Her first book was The British People and the League of Nations and her second book, Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat, won Best International Affairs Book at the Political Book Awards 2015. @HistorianHelen

Industry Reviews

"A fabulous new cultural history of working motherhood over the past 180 years ... It is truly Big History and Helen McCarthy has rightly made mothers' feelings and desires her central theme ... McCarthy, measured but sympathetic, has done for working mothers what the historian David Kynaston did for the 1950s"
Melanie Reid, The Times

"There are no typical lives," Helen McCarthy writes in her impressive and nuanced study. Each is unique. But the best history writing, like hers, shows how representative the individual life is ... McCarthy's is an economic and social history, but she also wants to give "shade and texture" to what has been thought and said about working mothers. In this she succeeds magnificently"
Alison Light, Guardian

"Helen McCarthy does a brilliant job of tracking the way attitudes to combining work and motherhood in the UK have changed from the nineteenth century to the present"
Vicky Pryce, Literary Review

"Groundbreaking ... A fascinating read"
Herald