From ‘liberated woman’ and ‘virtuous wife and good mother’ to full-time mother

In the previous chapter, mothering practices were described and analysed through the eyes of daughters. This chapter focuses on women’s accounts of their own childrearing practices. It explores how mothering connects with women’s other roles and practices, including that of worker. The first section reviews some feminist literature on women’s care and work, and clarifies how the varied types of ‘work’ in which these three generations of women engaged are conceptualised and classified. I then analyse six women’s detailed lived lives and told stories from three generations. As in Chapter 4, each generation’s historical context relating to mothering practices and women’s participation in work is described first. Then, in line with the BNIM analytical process explained in Chapter 3, each case is presented in two separate sections: the life history summarised by key ‘life phases’ (Wengraf, 2001, pp. 286–87) and the told stories, before these are synthesised to reach an understanding of the women’s stories of motherhood. In the chapter summary, within- and across-generation comparisons are made to bring out the changes and continuities in mothering practices.