We cannot understand changes in the ideologies and practices of mothering and motherhood without recognizing that such changes must be connected to changes in the nature and experience of childhood. Anthropologists and historians have long pointed to the culturally and historically variable nature of childhood. The different conditions of children’s lives generate different definitions of […]

The question of whether women’s involvement in waged work leads to an increased sense of independence, as well as improved decisionmaking roles in the household and changes in conjugal role expectations, is impossible to answer in comparative perspective. The empirical findings have been mixed, and it is difficult to know, for example, whether women divorce […]

Certain critics of welfare policy have argued that welfare programmes provide perverse incentives and increase marital dissolution. As Nancy Folbre (1991) points out, economic development and fertility decline have historically been accompanied by increases in the percentage of female-headed households and by institutional changes that redistribute some of the costs of social reproduction from families […]

The overall cost of supporting children is one thing, but from the point of view of family welfare what is important is the distribution of those costs between parents and the pattern of their overall contributions. This section of the chapter examines these issues and argues that women bear a disproportionate share of the costs […]

One major recent change in family/household structure that has attracted much comment has been the reported rise in the proportion of households headed by women. The reasons for this increase, like its rate and magnitude, are diverse, but it is a trend that has been noted for many different countries in the world at varying […]

Henrietta L. Moore Mothering and motherhood are not, contrary to popular belief, ‘the most natural things in the world’. They have taken very different forms in different times and places. What it is to be a ‘mother’ is both cross-culturally and historically variable. Historians writing about wet-nursing and child fostering in Europe remind us how […]

In terms of these prominent discourses of motherhood it is possible to argue that it was in the decade of the 1970s that the boundaries between good and bad motherhood were most blurred. Not only were there increasing material supports for different forms of motherhood, but alternative household organizations were prefigured and motherhood began (symbolically […]

For there to be a normative ideal of motherhood it is perhaps self­evident that there must be those who ‘fall’ outside the norm. These two are in a symbiotic relationship and, although the boundaries between them are redrawn according to fashions in motherhood, without the one, the other could not have a social existence. But […]

I want to suggest that although (obviously) women have always had children, it is only with the rise of late modernity that we see the emergence of the legal institution that we now recognize as motherhood. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, women had no legal status or standing as mothers; put simply, motherhood […]

If a woman has failed to avoid unprotected procreative sex and to organize an abortion, one might imagine that the resulting birth would naturally make her a mother. But even birth has not always led to mothering as we now understand that concept. Women of the upper classes did not (and still do not) ‘mother’ […]