Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood

Bloomsbury, $32 Reviewed by Melanie Reid

In 1936 the bestselling novelist EM Delafield wrote Faster! Faster! ,a ghastly morality tale of a woman running her own business. Claudia works exceptionally long hours, pays the bills (her husband lost his job after the war), thinks her children are fine, and achieves ‘‘by sheer force of will, the next-toimpossible’’. In reality all around her is unhappiness: sulky husband, miserable children, overburdened staff. Eventually Claudia is exposed as a self-serving hypocrite and dies in a car crash after a fractious day in the office, after which the natural order of womanhood is re-established and everyone lives happily ever after.

Eye-popping prejudice of this kind illuminates a fabulous cultural history of working motherhood over the past 180 years. In that time Claudias went from a symbol of domestic evil to being the economic norm. It is truly Big History and Helen McCarthy has rightly made mothers’ feelings and desires her central theme, acknowledging that even today the position of a mother remains freighted with a complicated psychology of obligation, love, need, self-fulfilment, 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. In 1844 the reforming Tory peer Lord Ashley luridly described a new mother working an average 65-hour week in a Lancashire textile mill – she left her newborn from 5am until 8pm, so that ‘‘during the day milk runs from her breasts until her clothes have been wet as a sop’’. Employing women, he said, removed the rights of men.

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. It must be ‘‘custom’’, because no-one could contemplate a woman driven to seek a higher standard of living. 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.

For a century at least, policymakers, trade unionists and factory owners went along with this. The arguments for decent housing, better food, lighter work, rest and tolerable conditions to raise children were used to shore up the belief that women should be at home to enjoy them. But that undercurrent of female rebellion persisted. The suffragist Clementine Black quoted a mother in 1909: ‘‘A shilling of your own is worth two that he gives you.’’

Within the huge scope of this book, drawing together political, economic and social history, 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. The marriage bar in teaching ended careers hardly had they started. Lower pay in all these sectors persists to this day. Only in a handful of middle-class occupations was maternity ‘‘perceived to be less of a disability’’: writing, the stage, the voluntary sector.

Another strand McCarthy draws out is how the bias by which employment and social policy was developed in favour of male workers persisted under successive governments. In 1978 Merlyn Rees, the UK Labour home secretary, said that funding nurseries ‘‘would raise important questions of principle about the extent to which Government ought to finance programmes designed to make it easier for women to go out to work’’.

And what of women’s inner lives? In 1938 Stephen Taylor, a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital in London, described a new type of patient: married, late 20s, two children, who complained of everything from headaches and bloating to insomnia and loss of appetite. He diagnosed ‘‘suburban neurosis’’, a nervous condition caused by big new housing estates stunting housewives’ minds. The idea spread that women found health and enjoyment in work.

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.

In 1957, Mrs Batty of Swansea wrote to Woman’s Own enthusing about her new parttime job. ‘‘It means being up and out at halfpast six in the morning, but what fun it is! I meet people, have a chat, hear the news... my savings are steadily rising and our family will be able to have a holiday this year. My job? Delivering the morning papers!’’

Then, of course, came the backlash. A special namecheck here for the child guidance expert John Bowlby, whose theories in the 1940s and 1950s about maternal deprivation revived a wave of moral panic and led to decades of guilt being heaped on working mothers. The Church and the press sided with him. Then the expression ‘‘latchkey kids’’ arrived and working mothers endured dire warnings that separation caused irreparable damage to children and fostered delinquence.

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. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s economic reforms hit mothers in lower-skilled occupations hard. Seventy per cent of public sector jobs contracted out were held by females. As unemployment soared, wives with working husbands were ineligible for job schemes.

Today’s female workforce is essential. Dualcareer 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 lowerpaid sector. Women are still juggling difficult choices, still never pleasing everyone, and still their own harshest critics.

This is a doorstopper of a book, more than 500 erudite pages, not one of them dull. McCarthy, measured but sympathetic, has done for working mothers what the historian David Kynaston did for the 1950s. ‘‘What is so astonishing is not that mothers accepted their second-class status in the workplace for so long, but that they pushed back against it at all,’’ she says of the decades of barriers to working women. And 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. – The Times, London