Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945–2000 by Angela Davis (review)

Angela Davis’s Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945–2000 contributes to the growing oral-history-based scholarship concerning everyday life in twentieth-century Britain. She interviewed 166 women from Berkshire and Oxfordshire, born between 1912 and 1962, deliberately representing rural and urban locations and social class origins ranging from upper-middle to working class. She also made extensive use of archived oral history evidence to provide a basis for comparison of her observations and conclusions about women’s experience of and attitudes toward mothering in England during the second half of the twentieth century. The book is thematically organized. Its six substantive chapters cover social survey findings regarding postwar family life, formal education of girls and young women for motherhood, experience of pregnancy and childbirth, experts’ advice on baby care, mothers’ work both within and outside the home, and the shifting roles of men and women in late-twentieth-century English households. Davis’s intention was to explore change and continuity regarding these matters. She finds generally that attitudes toward and experiences of motherhood during the period under consideration were diverse and nuanced. However, it is clear that for Davis, continuities outweigh changes in mothers’ perspectives.

Davis argues that well into the second half of the twentieth century, English girls expected to become mothers, and English mothers viewed motherhood as their primary responsibility and identity. This was true despite trends toward increasing educational attainment, employment, and levels of single parenthood among mothers. She perceives continuity of traditional close relationships between mothers and their own mothers and extended families. She mentions married women’s continued dependence on their husbands’ earnings, despite the growing expectation that mothers work part-time. While observing that there was a transition from home to hospital birth, she argues that medicalization of childbearing was less important to women than a close personal relationship with the birth attendant. And she identifies significant dependence of mothers on baby care experts, along with confusing shifts among those experts’ recommendations, from adherence to strict schedules, to demand-driven infant management, and back again.

What she does not do is discuss the impact on mothers of the revolutionary changes affecting the whole of British society during the years following World War II. Women’s unprecedented control over their fertility and the resulting influence on their ability to delay marriage, plan family size, and work outside the home, for example, receive only minimal discussion. Introduction of the birth control pill is dealt with in four sentences, while legalization of abortion gets one (p. 183). The Women’s Movement and changing representation of motherhood in proliferating popular media apparently had little impact on women’s identities, norms, or behavior: Davis says of her interviewees, “The women liked to construct themselves as being unaffected by outside influences such as television and magazines” (p. 178). Although she presents evidence showing the increasing numbers of single-parent, female-headed households during the period under consideration, she (and her informants) seems to view these as unfortunate aberrations from the cultural mainstream of married domestic life.

Perhaps most disappointing is Davis’s failure to engage with the considerable scholarship she cites. She neither mentions nor comments on Jane Lewis’s pathbreaking arguments about early-twentieth-century political perspectives on motherhood and infant welfare. Similarly, she refers to Elizabeth Roberts’s observation of changes in working-class Lancashire families and communities without apparently considering whether these changes existed in the region she studied or, indeed, nationwide. And, while I am honored by her citation of my own work, I am disappointed that she neither agrees nor disagrees with my observation of the transformation of pregnancy, birth, and child care between the 1920s and the 1960s. Thus, the book comes across as surprisingly unhistorical, declining to interpret the sweeping transitions and transformations those old enough to remember—including both Davis’s interviewees and myself—lived through. Her reliance on oral history...