Introduction

Summary

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 births and work/life balance as part of potent, maternal prenatal imaginings. But birth continues to change everything, and the qualitative, longitudinal and comparative data show these ideas to be, too often, illusory.