As the competing demands of care and paid work become increasingly complex, has there ever been a more challenging time to be a woman and a mother? Comparing two studies conducted across two generations, Motherhood explores women's experiences of becoming first-time mothers. Through richly narrated, real-time accounts of transition, Tina Miller examines what has changed since her original study was conducted twenty-one years ago. Using sociological and feminist perspectives, she analyses how motherhood has further intensified against a harsher neoliberal backdrop. The book examines the social, political and moral contours in which motherhood is situated which, in the contemporary context, include ideas of planned labours and work/life balance as part of potent, maternal prenatal imaginings. Birth continues to change everything, and the qualitative, longitudinal and comparative data show these ideas to be, mostly, illusory.

‘‘I had hoped for more.’ So ends Tina Miller’s provocative, historically comparative look at women’s experience of becoming a mother for the first time. Repeating an agenda-setting study she first undertook in the UK 21 years ago, Miller shows that, in many ways, it has never been a more challenging time to be a (working) mother. In this beautifully written, narrative-rich account, she shows how the ‘intensified, individualised and undervalued’ circumstances of motherhood are now deeply intertwined with pernicious (and illusive) ideas around ‘balance’ in the contemporary age. From one of the most authoritative scholars in the field, this book is a delightful - if troubling - read.’

Charlotte Faircloth - UCL Social Research Institute, and author of Couples’ Transitions to Parenthood

‘Tina Miller’s qualitative research provides an illuminating insight into women’s often ambivalent transition to motherhood and how this experience has changed - for better and, worryingly, for worse - since she conducted her original study over 20 years ago. As Miller writes, ‘so much about mothering has become further intensified, responsibility-laden and of course, individualised: locking women in and keeping men out’.’

Eliane Glaser - Author of Motherhood: Feminism's Unfinished Business

‘In spite of the fact that gender relations and norms have undergone radical changes over the past decades, ideas relating to motherhood remain surprisingly essentialist and, in many respects, out of sync with expectant and new mothers’ everyday experiences. Tina Miller’s timely and illuminating book shows how deeply ingrained gender essentialism is in society, and how profoundly this shapes transitions to motherhood.’

Daniela Grunow - Goethe University Frankfurt

‘[A] must-read volume for scholars and parents navigating their own transitions into parenthood. … Essential.’

A. J. Hattery Source: CHOICE