Angela Davis’s Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, c. 1945–2000 is a work of social and gender history, published by Manchester University Press in its “Gender in History” series. It examines how English women learned, practised, and thought about mothering across the second half of the twentieth century, and how the expectations surrounding them shifted. Davis grounds the study in oral history: interviews with 166 women in Oxfordshire and neighbouring Berkshire, alongside Mass Observation material, official reports, and the childcare literature that shaped generations of mothers.
“The expansion of research into the history of women and gender since the 1970s has changed the face of history.”
Motherhood, for Davis, is a prism where discourse and lived practice meet. Education, health care, psychology, the labour market, and state intervention all converge on the mother, and Davis follows Ellen Ross in insisting that very little about motherhood is “natural.” She is sceptical of the shorthand that treats the 1950s as a golden age, noting that many changes attributed to the post-war decades had earlier roots and that continuity, mediated by gender, class, region, and ethnicity, matters as much as rupture. The women she interviewed were born as early as 1912 and as late as 1962; their first children arrived between 1938 and 1996, so the testimony spans the century’s middle with unusual texture.
The Series, the Sources, and the Scope
The book appears in Manchester University Press’s “Gender in History” series, whose editors describe gender history as a feminist-theory-informed field concerned with gender identities, relations between the sexes, sexuality, family relations, and ideals of masculinity and femininity, while still carrying forward women’s history’s project of recovering lived experience; the series ranges from medieval to modern times and across the globe. The contents promise chapters on family and community, educating mothers, pregnancy and childbirth, childcare experts and their “bibles,” working and caring, breadwinners and homemakers, and a conclusion, backed by appendices listing the interview schedule and the Oxfordshire interviewees’ biographical details. The acknowledgements thank the women interviewed and name the archives drawn on—the Bodleian, the British Library, the Centre for Oxfordshire Studies, Elizabeth Roberts’s archive at Lancaster, the Mass Observation Archive at Sussex, the Wellcome Library and the Women’s Library—and trace the research from a Oxford DPhil between 2003 and 2007 to completion under a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Warwick in 2008–2010.
Why the Post-War Years Matter
The introduction takes historians to task for neglecting the post-war decades and for over-generalising them—above all the notion of the 1950s as a golden age of family life. Much that looks like change after 1945 had roots before the war, and much that looks like transformation is continuity, filtered through gender, class, region and ethnicity. Motherhood, the argument runs, is a prism where discourse meets practice: education, health care, psychology, the labour market and state intervention all converge on it. Following Ellen Ross, there is little that is “natural” about mothering; Ann Dally found the word “motherhood” in the Oxford English Dictionary only from 1597, as a fact rather than an ideology, with the concept proper emerging in the Victorian era. Post-1945 understandings were forged by mother-centred psychoanalysis, structural-functionalist sociology and second-wave feminism. Carol Dyhouse points to the contradiction of a home-centred ideology peddled by women’s magazines at the very moment more women returned to paid work, and housewives were redescribed as workers; Denise Riley calls mothers “the true target of postwar social philosophy”; Dennis Dean notes that equal pay and careers were dismissed as minority preoccupations; the Birmingham Feminist History Group stresses “equal but different.”
Legislation, Feminism, and Changing Families
The legal landscape shifted quickly: the pill in 1961, the NHS Family Planning Act of 1967 making contraceptives free (at first only to married women), the Abortion Act of 1967 permitting termination where two practitioners agreed on physical or mental risk, and the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, which allowed divorce on the ground of irretrievable breakdown proven in one of five ways. The Women’s Liberation Movement pushed women to reassess their lives. Susan McRae saw long-term trends merely interrupted by the “ideal family” of the 1950s and 60s; Jane Lewis found family arrangements growing “messier”; Judy Giles and Sally Alexander describe girls’ horizons widening and aspirations changing as early as the 1920s and 30s.
The Oxfordshire Interviews
The evidence base is oral history: 166 women interviewed across Oxfordshire—Benson and Ewelme, the Wychwood villages, the Banbury-area district surveyed in the 1944 Country Planning study, Thame, Oxford city centre, Cowley and Florence Park, North Oxford and Summertown—alongside Crowthorne and Sandhurst in Berkshire and Somerville College graduates. Kate Fisher is invoked for the density of oral testimony; interviewees were recruited through community groups and snowballing. Maurice Halbwachs on social memory, Julia Brannen and Ann Nilsen on intergenerational transmission, Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet on moving past survey “surface assertions,” and Alessandro Portelli on oral sources revealing what people wanted and believed all shape the method, as do Sally Alexander and Melanie Klein by way of Graham Dawson’s “cultural imaginaries.”
Oxfordshire’s Uneven Modernity
The local setting was sharply divided. Oxford had antenatal clinics in the 1930s while rural areas waited until the late 1960s; the city’s antenatal classes began in 1961 with two classes, mothercraft classes by 1947, and Dr Mary Fisher opened its birth control clinic in May 1935—the county’s first followed the 1967 Act, and Reading’s came in 1966, thirty-one years behind Oxford. Country Planning found the countryman disadvantaged, with mains water and sewerage lagging into the 1960s. The Morris works opened at Cowley in 1913; agricultural employment in the county roughly halved between 1911 and 1931, some 3,000 ex-farmworkers were in the motor industry by 1936, and in the 1930s 43 percent of insured male workers in Oxford were recent migrants, mostly from the south-west. By early 1959 perhaps 400–500 non-white workers lived in the city, 60–70 percent West Indian, with South Asian women arriving in larger numbers from the late 1960s after the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts; by 1981 some 3,500 people of South Asian origin lived among 93,500 residents. Banbury’s aluminium factory opened in 1931, Benson was classed an expanding village in the late 1950s, and St Ebbe’s was demolished as a slum in the 1960s.
Immigrant Mothers and New Family Forms
Beryl Gilroy, a teacher and novelist from British Guiana, recalled the pressure “to be the perfect housewife and perfect mother” and to stand “above all possible white criticism.” South Asian women initially escaped such scrutiny through smaller numbers and tight family structures—Elspeth Huxley credited Indians and Pakistanis with the “tightest family formations” and “strictest moral code,” though they were still reproached for large families burdening health and welfare services. By the century’s end new family forms drew attention: Jacqueline Burgoyne and David Clark found step-family life saturated with public encounters—solicitors, courts, welfare and probation officers, doctors, social workers—and second marriages shadowed by custody, maintenance and ambivalence about a previous partner. A 1994 Exeter study found that although half the sampled children lived in families “re-ordered” by separation or divorce, people clung to traditional ideas, and lone parents and children felt outside a “real” family.
The Persistence of Kin
Restudies confirmed continuity. Geoff Dench, Kate Gavron and Michael Young returned to Bethnal Green, “transformed beyond recognition” in ethnic composition—in 1953 no non-white residents were recorded, in 1992 only two-thirds called themselves white and over one in five were born in Bangladesh—yet family still ordered life, following “broadly the same path,” since “No one with children dependent on them can be independent of others.” Nickie Charles and colleagues’ 2002 restudy of Swansea found “
Antenatal Classes and the Lottery of Locality
Where a woman gave birth in post-war Britain largely determined what preparation she received. Through the 1960s many interviewees attended no antenatal classes at all. Mildred, whose first child arrived in 1965 in Haddenham, was given neither education nor even a tour of the hospital; for her second, in Thame, classes existed but she declined them. Fiona, expecting in Brighton in 1966, found classes simply “didn’t happen… on the National Health” because the senior consultant at the Sussex Maternity—herself a mother of four—did not believe in them. That the sceptic was a woman punctures any assumption that female doctors were automatically more progressive about maternal care. Fiona paid privately for her second child and found excellent classes by her third, in Benson. Such variation mirrored deep uncertainty within the health service about its role in preparing women for motherhood: local authorities accepted wildly different levels of responsibility, and Oxford’s forward-thinking authority was the exception, not the rule.
Who Stayed Away, and Why
Women were not passive recipients of care. The “old hard-core” of non-attenders were older mothers of many pregnancies, class V in the Registrar General’s scale. Young mothers, working mothers and ethnic-minority women also stayed away, deterred by long journeys, transport costs, other children to mind and interminable clinic waits. Valerie, with three children in the 1970s, worked until a month before giving birth and managed only a couple of classes that made no allowance for working women. Yvonne, nineteen and unmarried when her first child came in 1959, had to wear a ring and pose as a wife at the Radcliffe antenatal department. Minority women met language barriers, intrusive examinations, unexplained procedures, racist stereotyping and the ignorance of other mothers.
The Ambivalence of Knowing
Even women who sought out information doubted its worth. Fiona, for all her private classes, thought not knowing was a blessing: when her first baby arrived with the cord around his neck and did not cry, she was “so ignorant” she never realised anything was wrong, and after her second needed a transfusion she concluded “ignorance is bliss.” Polly felt modern antenatal care manufactured stress through scans and tests. Siobhan saw access to information as the great divide between the 1970s and the 2000s, warning that the internet delivered “a worrying amount of information” impossible to sort, whereas “you just went and asked your mother.” Harriet found the web empowering yet confusing; Kaye said people could “worry themselves sick.” The women found the dilemma—ignorance breeds anxiety, knowledge breeds worry—genuinely irresolvable.
Reconciling Instinct and Instruction
Preparation for motherhood was a battleground of competing discourses, and women picked through them to assemble a workable identity. Bronwen Davies describes “taking up as one’s own those discourses through which one is constituted as female” as inherent to womanhood itself. The contradictions ran deep: many insisted mothering was innate while also conceding it had to be learned, squaring the fantasy of instinct with the reality of instruction. Sally Alexander’s point that fantasy draws on “the immediate and historical” for its content helps explain why fantasies of being a “natural” mother betray the pressure to fulfil the perfect-mother ideal. Experience rarely matched the portrayals. Families would not discuss sex or childbirth, so home learning often never happened, and many women had barely handled a baby. Schools abdicated sex education on the pretext that parents wanted the job; national government’s reluctance left many taught only animal reproduction. Into the 1960s the antenatal period was, for many, their first real education about pregnancy—and they still felt ill-equipped. Their attitudes stayed equivocal, and they hesitated to advise their own daughters for fear of being unwelcome. To them, none of this was inconsistent; they had simply reconciled conflicting ideals.
From Home to Hospital
Amanda remembered the stress of a home birth in 1966 and the difficulty of reaching her midwife; Tina haemorrhaged at hers. A home birth that went well satisfied women deeply, but one that went wrong was as traumatic as any hospital delivery, and the fear drove women hospitalward. Oxfordshire statistics did not actually show home births to be riskier—complicated deliveries were transferred to hospital—yet women were told hospital was safer, and by the 1970s hospitals held neonatal equipment unavailable at home. Before that, the case for hospital was far less certain. In 1958 Oxfordshire’s medical officer P. W. Bothwell called the question of birthplace genuinely open, noting that home preserved contact with family, children and the GP, while specialist help was scarce even with a Flying Squad unit, and many GPs preferred to handle cases at home or in a GP hospital bed. The Cranbrook report of 1959, demanding seventy per cent hospital births, ended the debate; by 1966 Oxfordshire introduced early discharge from consultant units to maximise hospital deliveries. Elsewhere the shift came sooner: Preston saw only nineteen per cent home births in 1957, and Mrs Barlow’s doctor in 1958 “definitely pushed me towards hospital,” she suspected because he “didn’t want to be bothered with it.”
The Vanishing Home Birth
By the 1970s home births had all but disappeared, the Peel Report of 1970 advocating one hundred per cent hospitalisation marking the turning point. Margaret managed home births in 1969 and 1970 only through sympathetic Berkshire midwives, against her GP’s pressure. Midwife Kaye found large consultant hospitals too interventionist, preferring small midwife-run units, yet was “never that happy with homebirths”—seven in three years in Oxford, none before—calling it “a pointless risk.” For women after 1970 the midwife-attended home birth was no longer mainstream: old-fashioned, their mothers’ practice, or the preserve of eccentrics. “No, I’m not that adventurous,” said Jean; April thought it “something hippyish”; Bev said it “didn’t occur to me.” Only Amelia was refused outright, for being over thirty and “too old.” Within a decade, home birth had gone from normal to extraordinary.
Induction, Intervention and the Hospital’s Power
Induction and acceleration became routine in many 1970s hospitals, varying sharply by institution. Kaye condemned St Thomas’ in London, where consultants induced whenever it suited them—never at weekends—and praised smaller hospitals where midwives handled normal deliveries without routine episiotomies; Royal Bucks was “not very good,” with doctors interfering and drips speeding labour, and she refused the John Radcliffe because its induction rate sat near thirty-seven per cent. Care followed hospital policy, not medical need. Patsy found her induced second birth in 1972 a great improvement, home within twenty-four hours. Liz, induced in 1980 for slow weight gain, wanted “to do it the way I know,” but the doctor broke her waters roughly while the midwife looked on sympathetically—an episode exposing the fault lines between doctors and midwives.
Status Lost Through Motherhood
The book turns to the later decades of the century, when women could feel they were losing status through motherhood rather than gaining it. Kaye, a former community midwife with two children born in 1981 and 1984, put the loss plainly: as a community midwife she had felt important in the community, and then she was “just a mother.” The passage then examines the many mothers who took paid work, against a post-war assumption that growing affluence meant fewer women needed jobs. Patsy, whose children were born in 1970 and 1972, called her earnings “pin money,” not a career or a pension. Sharon, blending the old discourse that good husbands should support families with later feminist ideas of a satisfying career, recalled that the only employed women she knew in the early 1970s were working-class women who needed money desperately, not “career-minded, aspiring women.” Yet many working-class mothers did need to work: Peggy of Middleton Cheney, with four children born between 1951 and 1965, worked throughout because her employed husband spent most wages in the pub, and she would have preferred to stay home. Several women felt they had missed out by not being at home. Lily of Ewelme, with five children born between 1946 and 1961, left work at her first baby’s birth but returned after her first husband died, spending two years at a village honey factory—not thoroughly enjoyable but helpful. Rita, widowed, happily resumed seamstress work, partly because working from home preserved her childcare and did not challenge contemporary perceptions of womanhood, paralleling the later popularity of home-work among South Asian women.
Farmers’ Wives and Hidden Services
Farmers’ wives also had to work, their labour crucial to the farm economy. Census statistics showed female agricultural workers in sharp decline over the century’s first half, yet the Oxfordshire interviews showed farmers’ wives still engaged in farm work—likely under-recorded, since farm labour was not seen as suitable for women. Hilary Callan highlighted that wives’ “hidden services” in professions like farming were taken for granted, becoming visible only when withdrawn. Maud, a farmer’s wife, was expected to care for prisoners of war stationed on her husband’s farm during the Second World War, humorously recalling learning to cook pasta, but also describing arduous work. Daisy and her husband bought a smallholding in Shipton-under-Wychwood in the early 1950s, keeping chickens and pigs; with her husband working full time she was responsible for the animals while raising two children—”quite tough”—and recalled a traumatic incident when her son was attacked by a pig. In 1955 they took on a milk-round to pay their mortgage; Daisy ran it, taking her three-year-old son in the van while delivering milk—a burden, not an opportunity. Alice, who married a farmer in 1961 at twenty-two, drove tractors and did most hay and straw-baling in summer, working at school in the morning then taking sandwiches to the fields. Zoe, taking over her husband’s family farm in the early 1970s, dealt with farmers’ reps who asked for “the husband” or “the man of the house”; she said “try me first,” learning the farm as a challenge. These wives conceived of their work as simply part of farm life—their duty—without stressing satisfaction.
Lone Mothers and the Cost of Independence
Middle-class women also needed to work for financial reasons, some being their families’ only providers. After 1945, and particularly from the 1970s, increased social security and housing benefits sufficed to facilitate lone mothers’ autonomous existence, through widowhood, never-married motherhood or divorce, albeit at a low level; nonetheless single parenthood remained acutely difficult. Jessica, a doctor, returned to work in the late 1940s when her husband left her with three small children, taking all their money; she had a house, a car, and twenty pounds in the bank, so she “put my plate up on the wall” and gradually built up a practice. Faith’s husband left when their daughter, born in 1971, was six weeks old; she returned to work to pay the rent, and her doctor said she shouldn’t have gone back so soon—she had no choice. Sophie’s two children were ten and twelve when she divorced in 1980; she was compelled to seek full-time work. These women spoke ambivalently, reticently, almost defensively, but with pride at supporting their families. Although changing, the ideal for much of the century’s second half was that women would not be financially responsible for families; single mothers therefore faced acute difficulties reconciling mother and worker roles.
Part-Time Work and the Educated Mother
Norms were changing, however, as more mothers returned to paid work. In her 1957 book Wives Who Went to College, Judith Hubback argued individual methods were always necessary: each woman must work out her own compromise between the three sides of a married woman’s life—wife, mother, individual—and conclusions can only be temporary, since what works at twenty will not satisfy at forty. The most common course was part-time work, usually once children were of school age, prevalent across all classes and educational backgrounds. Pat Thane noted how few married graduates of Girton College, Cambridge, spent adult lives in full-time paid employment, many having career patterns similar to less-educated contemporaries—also the experience of most Oxfordshire interviewees. Jill, an Oxford graduate of the mid-1950s, worked at the university before and after her children, born in 1966 and 1970, sharing childcare with a colleague’s wife.
The Ideal Family and Its Deviations
The chapter proper opens by noting that in the 1950s femininity was intimately associated with domesticity; the ideal mother was a full-time homemaker dependent on a breadwinner husband with two to four children in a nuclear family. John Mogey’s early-1950s study of St Ebbe’s and Barton in Oxford called incomplete families “deviations from the normal state.” Yet significant changes occurred: non-marriage rose, marriage came later, about one in three marriages ended in divorce, cohabitation spread, and lone-parent families reached about 23 percent—1.7 million families, 2.8 million children. Caribbean men and women were less likely to marry or cohabit than white counterparts, while South Asians had higher marriage and lower cohabitation and breakdown rates. Dennis Dean argues post-war reconstruction presented home and family as agents of social cohesion, promoted in schools, cinemas and magazines; Marjorie Ferguson calls women’s magazines agents of socialisation. Interviewees spoke ambivalently—Hayley subscribed to Good Housekeeping but “didn’t take any notice of it really.” A 1943 Mass Observation correspondent dismissed “Housewife” magazine as “gosh awful,” and Tina’s mother-in-law considered reading an “absolute disgrace.”
Marriage, Motherhood and Birth Control
Interviewees spanned births from 1912 to 1962, with first children born between 1938 and 1996.
What the Mothers Knew and What They Were Told
The book’s most persistent tension runs between expertise and experience. Two schools of thought dominated ideas about how girls became mothers: psychoanalysis, in which girls unconsciously internalise maternal values and later relive their relationship with their own mothers, and social learning theory, in which mothering is a skill acquired by imitation and reinforcement. Donald Winnicott thought a woman learned little from the medical profession and much from having been an infant and watching her parents; Clare Rayner read a girl’s doll play as rehearsal for her future children. Yet the practical transmission was often thinner than the theory assumed. Families reluctant to discuss sex or childbirth left many women with little preparation at home, schools abdicated sex education on the premise that parents wanted the role, and for plenty of women as late as the 1960s the antenatal period was their first real education about pregnancy at all.
Against this, the experts issued orders. Frederick Truby King demanded strict four-hourly routines, fresh air in all weathers, and weighing before and after feeds; Gina Ford, arriving in the 1990s, revived the same imperative mood and positioned herself against Penelope Leach’s child-centred responsiveness. Davis notices what the experts shared across their quarrels: all of them used the imperative, warned of extreme consequences, and set standards no mother could fully meet, leaving women torn between confidence and the fear of failing. Her interviewees answered ambivalently, embracing one strand and borrowing another to build a workable identity. Many insisted mothering was innate while also conceding it had to be learned, and they reconciled the contradiction without embarrassment. The dilemma of information itself proved irresolvable: not knowing causes stress, but knowledge becomes worry. Fiona, who sought out private classes, concluded that “ignorance is bliss.”
Work, Wages, and the Housewife Ideal
The breadwinner husband and the full-time homemaker wife formed the century’s presiding ideal, promoted in schools, cinemas, and magazines, and reinforced by the practical machinery of hire purchase and mortgages that counted only a husband’s earnings. Davis shows how thoroughly the division of labour was policed at home: husbands who never changed a nappy, an uncle who did housework only when unseen for fear of being thought a “sissy,” neighbours who disapproved of a man filling the copper. Yet the ideal never described the whole country. Farmers’ wives ran milk rounds and drove tractors, their labour crucial and under-recorded because farm work was not thought suitable for women. Working-class mothers took jobs because their husbands’ wages went to the pub. Lone mothers, widowed, divorced, or never married, supported families and spoke of it with reticence and pride.
The later decades loosened the model without dissolving it. Married women returned to work, most often part-time once children reached school age, and the pattern held across classes and educational backgrounds. Davis is careful about what this meant: Kaye, a former community midwife, named her loss of status as the thing she missed most, going from being important in her community to being “just a mother.” Feminism reshaped the vocabulary, and women like Hannah, isolated as the only married woman in Oxford’s Physiology Department in the 1950s, agitated for maternity leave and changed language. But the movement’s reach varied; Sharon observed that feminism “hadn’t reached Wallingford.” By the century’s end Jemma doubted anyone could combine full-time motherhood and a career properly, and Hannah heard a backlash in the phrase “Oh I’m not a feminist.”
The Historian’s Craft and the Book’s Argument
Davis builds her case from memory as much as from record, and she is explicit about method. She draws on Maurice Halbwachs on social memory, Alessandro Portelli on what oral sources reveal about what people wanted and believed, and Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet on moving past the “surface assertions” of survey answers. The result is a history attentive to the gap between how women described their lives and how those lives were lived. Her interviewees did not experience their own accounts as inconsistent; they held conflicting ideals together, and Davis treats that reconciliation as evidence rather than confusion.
The book’s contribution lies in refusing both nostalgia and triumphalism. Motherhood neither steadily improved nor steadily deteriorated; it was remade by legislation, by local variation in services, by class and region and ethnicity, and by women themselves, who took up the discourses available to them and made something acceptable out of the pieces. Bronwen Davies’s phrase for that process, taking up as one’s own the discourses through which one is constituted as female, might stand as the book’s method in miniature. What emerges is a portrait of ordinary women doing the difficult work of mothering under changing instructions, and a historian patient enough to let their contradictions stand.
