The phrase ‘working mother’ was a mid-nineteenth-century addition to the English lexicon that would have been incomprehensible to the inhabitants of early modern Britain. There were very few circumstances in which a mother did not work, whether in return for income, as a producer for home consumption, and/or as a provider of ‘subsistence services’ (involving unpaid laundry, housework, meal preparation, and the personal care of dependents). The majority of mothers who managed households – either jointly as wives or singly as widows – also undertook responsibility for delegating work to others, especially (but not exclusively) to servants. Illness was as likely a diversion for mothers from income-generating work as either unpaid childcare or leisure. The common perception that women combining motherhood with other employment is a relatively recent phenomenon overlooks a much longer history of maternal duty, understood as much in terms of provision as in terms of a unique and irreplaceable affective commitment to the personal care and socialization of children.

Published on History Workshop Journal, Volume 96, Autumn 2023, Pages 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbad008

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