In Victorian Britain, working mothers were generally seen as an economic problem — or at least the symptom of one. A mother who had to work for wages was probably someone whose husband had died, was unemployed, had become disabled or couldn’t earn enough to support the family.
As historian Helen McCarthy writes in Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood, the women didn’t always see themselves as victims. As one woman whose injured husband was well enough to take charge of the home observed to the Fabian Women’s Group: “It is such a nice rest for me to go out to work.”
Almost 150 years later, what it means to be a working mother has changed profoundly. As McCarthy puts it: “What was understood to be a social problem arising from economic pressure on families has become a social norm rooted in a more expansive set of needs, rights and preferences felt and asserted by mothers.”