Angela Davis. Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945-2000. New York: Manchester University Press, 2012. vii + 242 pp. $90.00 (978-0-7190-8455-3).

摘要

Angela Davis's Modern Motherhood: Women and Family in England, 1945-2000 contributes to the growing oral-history-based scholarship concerning everyday life in twentieth-century Britain. She interviewed 166 women from Berkshire and Oxfordshire, born between 1912 and 1962, deliberately representing rural and urban locations and social class origins ranging from upper-middle to working class. She also made extensive use of archived oral history evidence to provide a basis for comparison of her observations and conclusions about women's experience of and attitudes toward mothering in England during the second half of the twentieth century. The book is thematically organized. Its six substantive chapters cover social survey findings regarding postwar family life, formal education of girls and young women for motherhood, experience of pregnancy and childbirth, experts' advice on baby care, mothers' work both within and outside the home, and the shifting roles of men and women in late-twentieth-century English households. Davis's intention was to explore change and continuity regarding these matters. She finds generally that attitudes toward and experiences of motherhood during the period under consideration were diverse and nuanced. However, it is clear that for Davis, continuities outweigh changes in mothers' perspectives.