Double Lives

by Helen McCarthy (Bloomsbury, $32)

Helen McCarthy has rightly made mothers’ feelings and desires her central theme in this fabulous cultural history of working motherhood over the past 180 years, acknowledging that even today the position of a mother remains freighted with a complicated psychology of obligation, love, need, selffulfilment, guilt and ambition.

Victorians saw work through a male prism. Wage earning was for men; women’s higher duty was as

nurturers of the race. For them to labour (for pay) was abhorrent. When mothers worked, the Victorians decided, dirt, ignorance and poverty followed. They were to blame for moral decline, male idleness, increased infant mortality and neglect. Up sprang middle-class female investigators who pushed for state intervention, free school meals and pensions, always with the aim of getting women back to their real job: motherhood.

They were bewildered to encounter a class of wives who, despite being adequately supported by husbands, still went out to work. This was gloriously expressed by one jam factory employee who said

that staying ‘‘at ’ome all dye [to] mind the blessed byby – it ’ud give me the bloomin’ ’ump!’’

Explanations were clearly needed for this seemingly irrational behaviour, McCarthy says. Worried middle-class women described it as pathological. A moral boundary emerged between the good mother who earned because she had to and the bad mother who did it because she wanted to. Some might say its ghost still haunts us.

Within the huge scope of this book, McCarthy, a Cambridge history lecturer, brilliantly teases out cultural strands that still persist. By 1900 workplace policies

were beginning to institutionalise women into clerical work and the caring professions, nursing and social work, while ensuring promotion for men. Lower pay in all these sectors endures even now.

After World War II, there was a trend for ordinary young wives to work ‘‘for extras’’: a holiday, a fridge, better cuts of meat. But women also began openly to express the psychological satisfaction of independent lives. In south London, at the Peek Frean biscuit factory, a new phenomenon was noted. Women felt empowered. ‘‘How important it sounded to say you ‘must go in tomorrow’, to talk to ‘my mates’ and to refer to rush

jobs and overseas orders,’’ they told a social researcher in 1954.

Then, of course, came the backlash. Buffeted by judgmental attitudes, women did what they’ve always done: gritted their teeth and stayed pragmatic. The cultural influence of Shirley Conran’s book Superwoman in the 1970s waved little magic for households where mushrooms had never been stuffed.

Today’s female workforce is essential. Dual-career marriages are the norm; men no longer feel threatened; and three-quarters of women with dependent children are in jobs, many part-time, and mostly clustered in the lower-paid sector. Women are still juggling difficult choices, still never pleasing everyone, and still their own harshest critics.

‘‘What is so astonishing is not that mothers accepted their secondclass status in the workplace for so long, but that they pushed back against it at all,’’ says McCarthy of the decades of barriers to working women. She quotes the feminist periodical The Freewoman in 1912.

‘‘To whom is her first duty, herself or the coming generation? We hold, her first, second and third duty is to herself, and, that duty being fulfilled, she will have done her duty to the coming generation.’’ And a fraught amen to that.

– Melanie Reid, The Times, London