A fabulous new cultural history of working motherhood over the past 180 years … It is truly Big History and Helen McCarthy has rightly made mothers' feelings and desires her central theme ... McCarthy, measured but sympathetic, has done for working mothers what the historian David Kynaston did for the 1950s

Melanie Reid, The Times

“There are no typical lives,” Helen McCarthy writes in her impressive and nuanced study. Each is unique. But the best history writing, like hers, shows how representative the individual life is … McCarthy's is an economic and social history, but she also wants to give “shade and texture” to what has been thought and said about working mothers. In this she succeeds magnificently

Alison Light, Guardian

Helen McCarthy does a brilliant job of tracking the way attitudes to combining work and motherhood in the UK have changed from the nineteenth century to the present

Vicky Pryce, Literary Review

Groundbreaking … A fascinating read

Herald

Impeccably referenced … For anyone interested not just in female employment, but in the labour market generally, it will be a valuable resource … McCarthy's impressive mining of contemporary sources brings one face to face with grinding toil, inadequate diets, and terror of illness

Alison Wolf, Financial Times

This is an important book … Double Lives is a forceful reminder that attitudes to working mothers change abruptly and that politics, not nature, will decide the future of female employment

Sarah Ditum, Spectator