I

In this first section, we explore the historiography of maternalism. By this, we mean histories that highlight how mothers and their needs have been used to facilitate broader ideological agendas, such as pronatalism. The needs of ordinary mothers themselves have often not been the focus of these policies; instead, mothers’ functions as carers or domestic managers have been foregrounded. This deeply political approach to writing the histories of motherhood is evident in, but not confined to, feminists of a pioneering generation of historians of women, many of whom criticized statutory legislation around maternity. While the early literature was often sharply derisive towards legislation framed in this way, and this approach is now somewhat in abeyance, others have been more nuanced. Jane Lewis, for example, makes the central point that, to understand social policy decisions around motherhood, we need to understand why certain approaches were adopted and others ignored, and that these choices were often made because of political and ideological assumptions, many of which did not actually address the real needs or lives of mothers themselves, particularly those from the working classes.Footnote ⁵ The entanglements – many of which are contested and controversial – of mothers, activists, policy experts, and politicians thus sit at the heart of the politics of motherhood. The fight for mothers’ rights therefore reveals much about the wider ideology and politics of society at any moment in time.

Anna Davin’s pathbreaking article ‘Imperialism and motherhood’ offers one of the first histories of motherhood in Britain. She examined early efforts to improve infant welfare in Britain from the late nineteenth century onwards, arguing that these efforts were informed by imperialist and eugenicist discourses and particularly the impact of the Boer wars on revealing the inadequacies of welfare provision in Britain. Davin identified a range of voluntary associations and statutory organizations which began to provide basic maternity care in very local, exclusively urban, areas in an effort to improve infant mortality rates, and the corresponding tensions which evolved between working-class mothers and the often middle-class women and medical professionals who sought to teach ‘mothercraft’.Footnote ⁶ In identifying the combination of voluntary and state-funded organizations which sought to provide this support, Davin anticipated by some years what Geoffrey Finlayson termed the ‘mixed economy of welfare’ in early twentieth-century Britain.Footnote ⁷ Many feminist historians followed Davin’s lead in examining the mixed economy of maternity care and, in particular, the inherent class tensions within the infant welfare movement, particularly as it existed before 1914. Carol Dyhouse, Jane Lewis, and Ellen Ross argued that women voluntary workers within infant welfare organizations, although often well-meaning, lacked an understanding of the reality of working-class motherhood and that, in many cases, these women were more concerned with controlling mothers from the lower classes.Footnote ⁸ Social class, and more specifically class tensions, were therefore at the forefront of early histories of maternalism.

Discussion of women and welfare more broadly were part of a ferment of thinking being developed by activists within the women’s liberation movement (WLM). In 1977, Elizabeth Wilson argued that ‘only feminism has made it possible for us to see how the State defines femininity, and this definition is … central to the purposes of welfarism’.Footnote ⁹ For Wilson, this definition included values of submission, nurturance, and passivity. She suggested that these values were encouraged to keep women in their roles as reproducers and carers, and that the welfare state was thus not just a set of services but also a set of ideas about society and about the family. Since then, there have been a number of developments to this analysis. Critiques of state policy have been maintained by feminists in the WLM and after: for example, in protests against measures such as the cohabitation rule, the lack of childcare facilities, or the dependence of wives within taxation and benefit policies.Footnote ¹⁰ These critiques, in the view of Mary McIntosh, did not go far enough in challenging women’s dependency within state welfare; she argued for work that did not simply ‘snipe’ at the existing welfare state but instead outlined what sort of welfare state feminists want, such as challenging the basis of the family and the wage system.Footnote ¹¹ Sheila Blackburn argued that the main feminist appraisers of the welfare state were socialist feminists, for whom Beveridge was the main culprit of establishing women’s dependent status.Footnote ¹²

These criticisms have been nuanced in recent years; as Blackburn also pointed out, there were many voices, including women, that contributed to the development of the welfare state. She argued that socialist feminists have made a significant contribution through centring family and its relationship to work, paid and unpaid, in discussion of welfare, but she also suggested that we need to look at the complex interactions, of which gender is only one.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, as Helen McCarthy has noted, mothers, and women’s, needs were considered in the provisions of the Beveridge Report, with some subsequent material benefits.Footnote ¹⁴ Laura Schwartz, meanwhile, draws attention to feminist critiques of the 1911 National Insurance Act and particularly ‘its failure to recognize the economic contribution of women’s unwaged reproductive labour’.Footnote ¹⁵ This body of work has offered a framework for how to treat the family and women’s dependent status within analysis of the welfare state. As Susan Pederson argued, ‘the British welfare state developed along deeply gendered lines. Both labor [sic] and social policies were premised on a normative vision of the family in which men were presumed to be the principal family breadwinners, and dependence was considered the normal destiny of wives.’Footnote ¹⁶ This has led to a focus on the family as a central part of any analysis of motherhood.

More recently, social policy academics have focused on the role of family policy in addressing issues around the ‘male breadwinner’ model. Jane Lewis noted that the post-war settlement between capital and the Labour government inscribed female dependence into this model, but that this never fully reflected reality. She suggested that this model existed at the level of policy prescription but that, since 1997, there has been a shift to an ‘adult worker’ model (AWM). This shift, she argued, is not necessarily a bad thing for women, given the ‘dependence inherent in the male breadwinner model’. But the problem with the AWM is that policies which assume full individualization of support do not recognize the reality of women’s dual role as earners and carers; until they do this, women’s needs will remain unmet.Footnote ¹⁷ Mary Daly concurs and has noted that the UK has lacked an activist family policy, unlike European states such as France and Germany, and that, while some financial supports were in place, such as child benefit, support for the family as a ‘social institution’ never really developed in the UK.Footnote ¹⁸

Feminist approaches, then, have been important in asserting the problems of assigning to women the role of mothers and carers and to men the role of breadwinners, and in tracing how this has inscribed dependence for women. This literature has moved historiographical debates on from the poverty focus of earlier social policy literature. It enriches and expands the top-down perspectives of broader histories of welfare. But it also exposes the complications that a focus on families has in then isolating the needs of mothers apart from women, or parents more generally. Some key examples of this work come from Jane Lewis, Denise Riley, and Deborah Dwork. Lewis’s influential work centres the development of medical services for women in the pre-welfare era: the decisions made by policy-makers and politicians that impacted the care that mothers – particularly more impoverished mothers – were offered. She examined issues of social control and the ways in which ordinary women’s agency over their pregnancies, births, and reproductive rights, while improving in some ways, were at times taken out of their hands.Footnote ¹⁹ Riley, meanwhile, focused on nursery provision and the way that this was offered during the Second World War to promote women’s engagement in the workforce, before being withdrawn at the end of the war as part of a pronatalist agenda that leant on the work of psychoanalytic theories of motherhood promoted by experts such as John Bowlby.Footnote ²⁰ Dwork’s work argued that war was ‘good for babies and young children’, suggesting that the First World War added impetus to pre-existing efforts to improve infant welfare and especially mortality rates in Britain, culminating in the passage of the 1918 Maternity and Child Welfare Act.Footnote ²¹ These studies were complemented by examinations of the role of politically engaged women in challenging and evolving party policy on motherhood and maternity, such as Pat Thane’s exploration of Labour women’s role in advancing maternity policy.Footnote ²² Motherhood, therefore, has been part of many assessments of social policy legislation, but we would argue that this work must be revisited in the different legislative and more challenging welfare landscape of the twenty-first century.

II

In this section, we thus explore histories of maternity policy and politics: we trace the development of maternity services, from either the local or the central state. We draw, too, on policy literature, which, we argue, highlights how slightly the needs of mothers have been directly addressed in the modern British context. As the previous section outlined, much of the early work uses ‘maternity’ as a central frame. However, when we look more broadly at policy literature, the focus is often on the wider legislation and its impact on ‘the family’ or children, rather than mothers themselves.

We begin by looking at the historiography of motherhood ‘from the top down’: that is, the perspective of politicians, policy-makers, and legislators. Many social policies include mothers, if only tangentially. For example, mothers benefit from improvements in education, health services, pensions, and social insurance even if they are not the intended beneficiaries of these policies. However, taking a longitudinal view of modern Britain, there have been surprisingly few policies that have specifically targeted mothers. Those that have include policies aimed at improving maternal healthcare (such as the 1918 Maternity and Child Welfare Act); providing maternity benefits (such as the Family Allowances Act of 1945); or providing support for specific categories of mothers such as unmarried mothers or widowed mothers (such as the premium provided for one-parent families in the 1975 Child Benefit Act). In none of the major general surveys of social policy do policies for mothers form a separate section – indeed, ‘mother’ does not even appear in the index of these texts.Footnote ²³ This is arguably unsurprising, as policy-makers and politicians have not considered ‘mothers’ as a separate category (the same is also true of fathers). Nevertheless, we would argue that there is merit in looking at legislation from the perspective of mothers because, in tracing the impact of how the state conceives of, supports, and imagines the responsibilities of mothers, we will be able to understand continuities and changes in the way that the state and policy-makers have overtime understood ‘motherhood’, both progressively and regressively. Maggie Andrews’s important work on evacuation in the Second World War, for example, draws attention to the ways in which government policies around evacuation impacted on experiences and meanings of motherhood during the conflict, both for mothers who sent their children away and for those who cared for evacuees.Footnote ²⁴

One way of understanding cultural constructions of motherhood is to consider how mothers fitted into related policy and legislation, for example, health and social care. Across this period, some specific policies have been framed around benefiting ‘the family’, but importantly have been intended to be for mothers: in many cases, this was as a direct result of feminist campaigning. Examples include family allowances and child benefit; nurseries and childcare; and child support such as free milk or free school meals. While much work has been done around these policies, this has frequently been by social policy scholars.Footnote ²⁵ One key area where legislation has been looked at separately is the development of maternity policies that relate especially to ante- and postnatal care, and to birth itself. However, this work is uneven chronologically: there is a wealth of scholarship on maternity policy before the advent of nationalized healthcare in 1948, which often takes the form of local studies, given the patchy and uneven nature of maternity care in this period.Footnote ²⁶ But much less has been done on the years after 1948. The most significant intervention on maternity policy in the second half of the twentieth century is that of Angela Davis, with recent work by Andrew Seaton also contributing important insights into classed experiences of maternity care in the National Health Service (NHS).Footnote ²⁷

Much of the literature on maternity care in the interwar period focuses on how this was delivered and experienced at local level, which was, of course, where most women experienced it – something which did not change following the introduction of the NHS. Indeed, Davis’s work focuses on women who had their children in Oxfordshire between 1945 and 2000, but it has not been complemented by studies of maternity in other parts of the UK in this period, in which localized experiences may have been significantly different. Furthermore, while government reports such as 1993’s Changing childbirth might set out specific approaches to maternity care, these were often not enacted – for a host of reasons – in hospitals or other care settings, as important forthcoming research by Agnes Arnold-Forster indicates.Footnote ²⁸

Arguably, much more has been written on changes in policy and legislation that relate to the prevention of motherhood and women’s right to choose: specifically, histories of birth control and abortion in modern Britain.Footnote ²⁹ Both of these extremely important aspects of reproductive health, while now championed as part of an individual’s right to choose, were originally advocated as being for the benefit of working-class mothers who lacked the means to control their own fertility, a cause of much poverty and ill-health.Footnote ³⁰ More recently, historians have built on this with a wider emergent literature around the whole reproductive process, including miscarriage, infertility, and menopause, discussed in section IV. This literature reveals the gaps in the welfare state, many of which were missed by policy-makers and politicians as they established health provision for mothers, and in the continued evolution of these services. But it also charts the development of new needs, services, and possibilities. Most significantly, we argue that histories of social policy have been written in a broadly chronological way, which means they can, at times, lead to narratives centred around certain key interventions, or moments of progress or regress. However, by framing these histories through the lens of mothers and motherhood, as some of the emerging literature has begun to do, there is a different chronology and narrative, one we believe needs to be recognized.

III

If policy histories at a national level have often elided or made assumptions about the impact of legislation surrounding motherhood, there are two linked and interconnected approaches that have centred mothers: histories that examine activism by mothers themselves, and histories of organizations that overtly seek to represent mothers (which are sometimes, though crucially not always, the same). Many of these histories look at more diverse experiences of motherhood, such as working mothers, single mothers, Black, lesbian, or disabled mothers, and the ways in which policy has impacted on, and been impacted by, them. We examine some of these histories in this section, drawing on the vast literature that demonstrates the ways in which so-called ‘ordinary’ women have supported mothers through activism.Footnote ³¹ In the early twentieth century, this often involved establishing services locally to support mothers, or campaigning directed at the state for improvement in services. But, more recently, scholarship has revealed a diverse activism around motherhood and, significantly, has sought to shine a light on the activism of mothers whose experiences do not fall within the boundaries of affluent, white, heterosexual, or married.

Women’s collective activism, particularly around motherhood, has always been important in pressing for welfare reform. This has been reflected in the historiography, which spans a wide range of groups with different ideological perspectives. There are those from the labour movement, such as the Women’s Co-operative Guild.Footnote ³² Maternity rights, and support for new mothers, have long been a central plank of non-party women’s organizations, as Caitríona Beaumont has demonstrated.Footnote ³³ Motherhood also formed part of the discourse of the WLM, as work by Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, and more recently Eve Setch, Elizabeth Homans, and Sarah Crook, illustrates.Footnote ³⁴ Ann Oakley, sociologist and feminist, has reflected on motherhood and its role within women’s struggles from a historical perspective, following her groundbreaking study of early motherhood in the 1970s.Footnote ³⁵

The place of motherhood activism within the WLM needs careful unpicking, and it is important to recognize that different parts of the movement approached it differently. However, recent work reveals the interactions between WLM organizations, older, non-party women’s associations, and pressure groups in campaigning for support for mothers.Footnote ³⁶ This historiography might indicate a lull in campaigns around motherhood in the immediate post-war era, with little historical work looking at the circumstances and welfare of mothers in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ³⁷ However, there was in fact an uptick in sociological research during this period around the needs of mothers, with significant publications by, for example, Hannah Gavron, Pearl Jephcott, Margaret Wynn, and Harriett Wilson.Footnote ³⁸ These women uncovered the needs of specific cohorts of mothers and, in many cases, used this information to campaign to support them. Their pathbreaking work is now being more widely recognized by historians.Footnote ³⁹ Elsewhere, historians have examined activism that resulted from specific experiences connected to motherhood, with a burgeoning emerging literature on experiences of postnatal depression.Footnote ⁴⁰ Women’s activism around access to childcare provision – one of the seven core demands of the British WLM – is also beginning to be considered by historians.Footnote ⁴¹

An important and developing literature concerns campaigns led by diverse groups of mothers. There were and remain many groups of mothers whom state welfare ignored, or failed to support sensitively and appropriately. At different moments, these have included Black and Asian mothers, single mothers, lesbian mothers, and disabled mothers.Footnote ⁴² While these are very different case-studies, there are some consistent themes across this literature. First, motherhood was often a moment when disadvantage was experienced most keenly, which could lead to activism. Second, for some, being a mother meant that their activism could sometimes be viewed more sympathetically, simply because they were mothers. Indeed, scholars have identified grassroots campaigns where women used their identity as mothers to add legitimacy and force to their activism. For example, Madeline Routon’s study of the squatting movement indicates that some squatters who were mothers were looked on by the press more compassionately than squatters who were not, although conversely she also indicates that at least some social workers believed that involvement in such housing activism made a mother ‘unfit’.Footnote ⁴³ This was similarly the case with grassroots community activism, where housewives and mothers, particularly on council estates, fought for services for their communities.Footnote ⁴⁴ Often these activists used the vernaculars of ‘mothers’ and ‘housewives’ interchangeably, which is something to which we must be attentive.

The assertion of motherhood as a political identity is an important facet of campaigning in modern Britain. The implicit and explicit assertion under social democracy that everyone has rights to equality of services makes starker the disadvantages faced by some mothers, and has spurred demands for equity. Some of these disadvantages were filled by activism of a practical nature, such as the establishment of refuges for mothers escaping domestic violence.Footnote ⁴⁵ Increasingly, however, pressure groups with a focus on mothers began to press for policy change, as did women within political parties. While there is a politics and social policy literature around some of these groups, the historical literature is slight.Footnote ⁴⁶

Third, and perhaps most significantly, the literature highlights that motherhood as an identity could be used regressively, whether by mothers themselves or by others seeking to act on their behalf. This could be a notable feature of the early twentieth-century maternalist movement, discussed above, where middle-class ‘do-gooders’ foisted their ideals onto working-class mothers. As the twentieth century progressed, race became a central dividing line within activism related to motherhood. For example, Jessica White’s exploration of activism by Black mothers argues that racism often meant that, despite their participation in activism alongside white mothers, the needs of Black working-class mothers remained unmet and they were isolated from mother-centred community groups.Footnote ⁴⁷ The experiences of Black and ethnic minority women were particularly significant around issues of reproductive justice, as the Campaign Against Depo-Provera (CADP) demonstrates. As Caitlin Lambert argues, campaigns for reproductive freedom include the right to have children as well as not to. She argues that the CADP demonstrates that, while working-class and ethnic minority women could have different experiences of gender oppression, white feminists could engage with ‘axes of difference’ to fight an oppression that was not their own.Footnote ⁴⁸ Earlier work by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe makes this point in relation to abortion access for Black women.Footnote ⁴⁹ Elsewhere, historians have noted examples where those on the political right claim to speak ‘as a mother’ in order to lay claim to specific agendas. Victoria Gillick, for example, ‘aimed to bolster, exert, and protect parental rights over the bodies of children, especially girls’, in bringing a case to try to prevent health authorities providing contraceptive information to under sixteens without parental knowledge.Footnote ⁵⁰

What activism around motherhood and social policy reveals is that there is a clear need to knit together these discrete histories. Taking a frame of motherhood across a range of activist groups and cohorts of mothers opens up new narratives of social policy and welfare in the twentieth century. It identifies which mothers were being unsupported within welfare regimes, and the lack of understanding by central policy-makers of the experiences of mothers themselves. Mapping this literature reveals gaps: chronologically, where decades are less well researched, but also geographically, socially, and economically. Developing a more systematic, historically nuanced understanding of how women experienced motherhood, and what they did about it, allows for a more careful reading of the successes and failures of British welfare policy. It might also offer some pointers to how to improve it in the future.

IV

This final section is most focused on the embodied experiences of mothering, which can, at times, be hard to untangle from activism or memoir. Historians can find themselves reflecting explicitly on their own lived experiences in writing histories of mothering. Sarah Fox, in her history of birth in eighteenth-century England, notes that ‘It is no coincidence that conferences about the history of birth and midwifery are one of the few academic arenas in which delegates share their personal experiences … alongside those of their historical subjects’, while Jessica Cox’s history of the maternal body in the nineteenth century also contains her reflections on her own pregnancies and births in the twenty-first.Footnote ⁵¹ Both monographs fall outside of our period of study, but illustrate that the recent turn towards embodied or experiential histories of motherhood are far from limited to historians of modern Britain.

In contemporary Britain, there has been an explosive rise in the ‘motherhood memoir’. Journalists, politicians, writers, and celebrities among many others seek to contextualize their own experiences and often draw on historical examples of mothering alongside those of their contemporaries: recent examples include books which consider everything from the decision to (not) have a baby, and infertility, to birth trauma, matresence, and conditions such as postnatal depression. These memoirs are, of course, not just a phenomenon within modern Britain and, although many of these writers are from white, affluent backgrounds, an increasing number of such accounts focus on the experiences of mothers from Black and minority ethnic communities, disabled mothers, mothers who are homeless or from impoverished backgrounds, or mothers who are in other ways minoritized, such as being from the LGBT+ community. These are not presented as academic texts, but their influence can be seen in academic work, most significantly in the groundbreaking work of Sarah Knott.

Knott’s Mother: an unconventional history (published, notably, as Mother is a verb in the United States) has centred the ‘lived experiences’ of mothers across time and space (albeit the largely modern, anglophone world) and draws out the archival traces of the everyday, ordinary, and even mundane. She blends this with her own experiences of becoming a mother, taking a new and exciting methodological approach – history as ‘anecdote’ – reflecting the scattered, interrupted experience of mothering infants. Knott argues, here and elsewhere, for the importance of viewing motherhood as ‘labour’ or (usually unpaid) work.Footnote ⁵² This argument for motherhood as work is distinct from working motherhood – that is, mothers who returned to (or indeed did not stop) paid employment after birth. These histories, too, have been recently recovered by historians including Helen McCarthy, Eve Worth, Laura Paterson, and Eve Pennington.Footnote ⁵³ But striking omissions still remain: there is, for example, no history of maternity leave in the British context.

Elsewhere, we have seen a turn towards more experiential histories of motherhood, particularly around technological and medical advances since the latter half of the twentieth century, which have shaped how people have become pregnant and experienced pregnancy and birth. For example, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn explores histories of pregnancy testing in Britain from the 1970s, highlighting the grassroots work of the WLM to show women how to undertake pregnancy testing outside of a medical setting.Footnote ⁵⁴ While many of those seeking support in accessing pregnancy tests were young women with a desire not to be pregnant, groups frequently assisted women who were trying to conceive, or older women going through the menopause, to further understand their bodies.

Perhaps surprisingly, though, there is relatively limited work on the embodied experiences of pregnancy in the modern period. While, for example, there is a large and growing literature on abortion, this tends to concentrate on the legislative history behind access to legal terminations, and not the experiences of women who underwent abortion.Footnote ⁵⁵ Similarly, there is limited work reflecting on embodied experiences of infertility, although Gayle Davis and Tracey Loughran’s recent pathbreaking edited collection on infertility, and the work of Laura Beers on the politics of access to fertility treatments, is beginning to change this.Footnote ⁵⁶ Future work on assisted reproductive technologies might well consider the history of surrogate pregnancy, or pregnancy outside of a supposed ‘heterosexual norm’: LGBT+ couples, or single women who might use donated sperm, building on Rebecca Jennings’s important work on lesbian mothers’ use of artificial insemination by donor.Footnote ⁵⁷

If the history of infertility and assisted reproduction is beginning to be uncovered, histories of miscarriage or stillbirth have not generally been considered within the UK context. While there has been limited work done on the history of sudden infant death syndrome, this takes a medical history approach and examines changing understandings of medical technology or diagnosis.Footnote ⁵⁸ Likewise, although there is a very limited literature which considers advances in genetic screening of the foetus (such as ultrasound imaging, commonly offered in the UK as a standard part of maternity care from the 1970s, or screening through blood tests, for conditions such as Down’s syndrome), this tends to focus on the development of such technologies rather than the sociocultural impacts of their use.Footnote ⁵⁹

Similarly, there is at present only a limited historiography of the rituals surrounding pregnancy, which is notable given what the changing nature of these might tell us about understandings of gender and gender roles in contemporary society. Arguably, we know far more about the rituals of pregnancy and birth in the early modern period and nineteenth century than for the twentieth and twenty-first.Footnote ⁶⁰ Notable early works of women’s history ‘recovery’, such as Elizabeth Roberts’s oral histories of Lancashire in the early twentieth century, do cover pregnancy and birth (during which the ‘neighbourliness’ she identifies as central to the culture of these communities was particularly in evidence) but only as part of wider life histories.Footnote ⁶¹ As Britain became an increasingly secularized society, rituals such as ‘churching’ (giving thanks for a mother’s survival of birth) and, to a lesser extent, christenings became less common.Footnote ⁶² Until very recently, within British culture there was much superstition surrounding the purchase of gifts or baby items prior to birth – anecdotally, many people recall storing items like prams at relatives’ or friends’ homes rather than their own – but in recent decades, celebrations such as ‘baby showers’ or ‘gender reveals’ have become more widespread, in part because of the increasing cultural hegemony of the United States, where both originated. Precisely how, when, and why certain rituals fell in and out of fashion, however, has yet to be the subject of sustained historical enquiry.

In contrast, much recent literature has examined the history of birth. Importantly, this adds to earlier histories of midwifery which focused on developments in this field,Footnote ⁶³ and instead centres the experiences of birthing. Much of this scholarship concentrates on the mid-century onwards, which coincided with the medicalization of childbirth as, increasingly, patients gave birth almost exclusively in hospitals rather than the home – a trend that, historians have pointed out, pre-dates the Peel Report of 1970, which recommended hospital births for all expectant mothers.Footnote ⁶⁴ There is an emerging literature on so-called ‘natural birth’ which considers how women were prepared for birth and phenomena such as ‘twilight sleep’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Most recently, Victoria Bates, Jenny Crane, and Maria Fannin have studied the construction and development of the ‘birth experience’.Footnote ⁶⁶ As this significant literature reveals, the medicalization of childbirth arguably coincided with the politicization of childbirth, as mothers’ choice and agency over what ‘type’ of birth they wanted – and, of course, what ‘type’ of birth they ended up having – has been continually stretched, challenged, and contested. Although our focus in this article is on mothers and motherhood, it is also pertinent to note important work by Laura King on the presence of fathers during the birth itself; as she argues, the reasons behind the shift towards a majority of men being present during birth are complex, but one factor was a desire by both parents to ‘choose’ this.Footnote ⁶⁷

V

In this article we have made a number of broad points on the historiography of motherhood. The first is how historically contingent this has been, and how its focus has evolved over the decades, from a predominantly feminist analysis of the ways in which motherhood policies have been used to control women, through to the spaces where mothers have been politically active, and finally to more experiential and embodied histories of motherhood. Within this analysis we have also sought to emphasize the breadth of ways we think about mothers and motherhood. Nevertheless, we would argue there remain some significant gaps. As we have noted, we know less about how women experienced motherhood in the era immediately following the introduction of the welfare state. We know less, too, about how motherhood was experienced in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland than in England; even in the English context, we know little about how motherhood was experienced in specific locales. In what ways has it been different to be a mother in rural Cornwall, compared with urban Manchester, or the suburbs of London?Footnote ⁶⁸ As we have discussed, important work is being done on the specific experiences of, for example, Black motherhood or lesbian motherhood, but much of the historiography still centres white, middle-class or affluent, able-bodied, and heterosexual experiences of mothering. Our understanding of the history of motherhood will shift and change as greater attention is paid to aspects of motherhood outside of this perceived ‘norm’.

Elsewhere, the role of the state needs to be understood more deeply: both the ways in which mothers collectively and individually have interacted with agencies, and how ‘experts’ and practitioners have thought about the way policies impacting mothers were structured and implemented. We would also stress how limiting it is to think about motherhood purely in the context of maternity and young children. There are many histories to be written about, for example, mothers of older children or adults; grandmothers; or mothers of children who have died. The provision of care for young children by grandparents, especially grandmothers, has a long history, and much resonance in contemporary Britain, given the prohibitive costs of formal childcare. But, at the same time, grandparents do not (at the time of writing) have an automatic right to see their grandchildren in the UK. There is much to be uncovered around the complexities of these histories. In this context we need to think about the experiences of mothers but also how the statutory and voluntary sectors have responded (or, indeed, not responded) to their welfare needs.

The early maternalism literature put the politics of motherhood firmly at the centre of its analysis, but largely examined the interwar years. Future work might connect the mother-centred policies of the nascent welfare state with post-war social democratic and neoliberal approaches. How should we understand the subsuming of motherhood into family policy from the 1980s? Are we as historians equally guilty of not foregrounding the politics of motherhood, for fear of seeing mothering as an old-fashioned, conservative, regressive subject?Footnote ⁶⁹ As we noted in the introduction, there is a risk that, if we do not offer a historically nuanced, carefully traced history of motherhood in Britain, we cede these histories to a more pronatalist agenda. Likewise, it is important to recognize that such agendas often carry with them clear assumptions around who ‘should’ or ‘should not’ be able to become a mother. Race and class, as we have illustrated, have long played a disproportionate role in such debates, but gender identity is being increasingly weaponized, particularly around issues of fertility and surrogacy.Footnote ⁷⁰ We can see in the literature impressive and thoughtful ways of treating motherhood that point to connections between diverse groups of mothers across time and place. The more these approaches speak to one another, challenge stereotypes, and recognize that, while mothers are not homogeneous, there are meaningful ways in which to frame motherhood as a key political concern, the likelier we are to develop a history of motherhood reflective of the politics and society of twenty-first-century Britain.