
Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood
Helen McCarthy
Double Lives was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize 2021, the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2021, and longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown 2021. 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 and the momentous consequences it has had for Britain. Recovering the everyday worlds of working mothers, 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.
Buy this book at Amazon- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- Year
- 2021
- ISBN-13
- 9781526643766
- Genre
- History
- Topics
- Working motherhoodWomen's historyBritish social history
Awards
- Wolfson History PrizeShortlisted(2021)
If you liked Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood, you could also like these

The Marriage Question: George Eliot's Double Life
Clare Carlisle
1 win · 5 score

The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England
Amanda Vickery
1 win · 8 score

Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860
Thomas Dublin
1 win · 8 score

Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present
Jacqueline Jones
1 win · 12 score

A Midwife's Tale
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
1 win · 12 score

Behind Closed Doors
Polly Curtis
0 wins · 3 score

Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Caroline Criado-Perez
2 wins · 22 score

The Weaker Vessel
Antonia Fraser
1 win · 8 score

A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
1 win · 8 score

At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present
Carl N. Degler
0 wins · 4 score

Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
1 win · 7 score

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Janet Malcolm
1 win · 5 score

Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class
Blair L.M. Kelley
0 wins · 3 score

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
Saidiya Hartman
1 win · 8 score

Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me
Kate Clanchy
1 win · 8 score
Similar Topics

Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
Amy Stanley
1 win · 13 score
Women's history
A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
1 win · 8 score
Women's history
Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger
David M. Kennedy
1 win · 8 score
Women's history
The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860
Suzanne Lebsock
1 win · 8 score
Women's history
The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England
Amanda Vickery
1 win · 8 score
Women's history
The Weaker Vessel
Antonia Fraser
1 win · 8 score
Women's history
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
Ruth Franklin
1 win · 5 score
Women's history
At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present
Carl N. Degler
0 wins · 4 score
Women's history
Betsy Ross and the Making of America
Marla R. Miller
0 wins · 3 score
Women's history