A groundbreaking history of mothers who worked for pay that will
change the way we think about gender, work and equality in modern
Britain.
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, whose consequences have been momentous for
Britain's society and economy.
Drawing upon a wealth of sources, McCarthy ranges from the smoking
chimney-stacks of nineteenth-century Manchester to the shimmering
skyscrapers of present-day Canary Wharf. She recovers the everyday
worlds of working mothers and traces how women's desires for financial
independence and lives beyond home and family were slowly recognised.
McCarthy reveals the deep and complicated past of a phenomenon so often
assumed to be a product of contemporary lifestyles and aspirations.
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. Through vivid and powerful
storytelling, Double Lives offers a social and cultural history for
our times.
