Becoming a mother changes lives in all sorts of ways and this book explores how a group of women make sense of their journeys into motherhood. The seeds for this book were sown many years ago: probably around the time I left school and spent a year in Canada employed as a ‘mother's help’ and had my first taste of doing mothering work. University and a degree in sociology were followed by a number of years living and working in different places – the Solomon Islands and Bangladesh – and observing different practices around pregnancy, birth and childrearing. More recently, university posts have involved my teaching sociology to a range of students from different disciplines, including midwives and other health professionals, and somewhere along the line I became a mother myself to three very lovely daughters. This book then emerges from the criss-crossing of threads that have run through my academic and personal life.

The context in which I became a mother is different from that of my mother, or her mother, but many features have also remained constant. For example, even though fertility rates are declining in many countries in the West, a majority of women will still at some point in their lives become mothers and take primary responsibility for the rearing of their children. To this extent little has changed for women over the centuries. But in other ways there have been significant changes.