Based on a new body of 160 oral history interviews, this fascinating volume offers the first comprehensive historical study of the experience of motherhood in the second half of the twentieth century. In her thematic study of an area where a number of discourses and practices meet, Davis sheds new light on aspects of mothers' lives such as education, health care, psychology, labour market trends and state intervention. Looking through the prism of motherhood to provide a way of understanding the complex social changes that have taken place in the post-war world, Davis considers how women's...

This interdisciplinary study of competing representations of the Virgin Mary examines how anxieties about religious and gender identities intersected to create public controversies that, whilst ostensibly about theology and liturgy, were also attempts to define the role and nature of women. Drawing on a variety of sources, this book seeks to revise our understanding of the Victorian religious landscape, both retrieving Catholics from the cultural margins to which they are usually relegated, and calling for a reassessment of the Protestant attitude to the feminine ideal. This book will be...