Historically, did women ever devote themselves entirely to their children?

No, I don't think so! It depends when you look, obviously. I will try to dig out figures, but medieval tracts on wet nursing make it very clear it wasn't particularly a poor woman's occupation. There are recommendations about how the woman should have a good 'character' (ie., for those medieval snobs, she should be a 'naice' woman ), and good health. Which the very poor have not historically had.

I am sure it will have been a last resort at some point in society, of course. But not typically, I think.

FWIW, when there are famines or food shortages, one of the biggest causes of infant mortality amongst the poor is thought to be that their mothers didn't produce enough/any milk, so they were fed other things, which pre-formula is pretty dangerous. It's really sad. But obviously, you're not going to hire a desparate and emaciated woman as a wet nurse.

"wet nursing is mega lucrative"

I am very curious to learn when and where wet nursing was a lucrative career option. All my reading about wet nursing indicates that it was a last resort option for the very poorest women in society.

This is something that always bugs me, people describing SAHMs as 'traditional'. It's certainly more 'traditional' for women to spend their lives in a domestic setting rather than being out and about among the public but that doesn't mean that women didn't work.

Most work was within the home until the Industrial Revolution so it was only after this that 'work' became conflicted with 'family'. The truly traditional set-up is for men, women and children to all work together in a home setting as part a family enterprise like a farm, business etc. You don't hear many people saying that we should all move to that lifestyle though because it's 'traditional' because that's in conflict with how work is in modern society.

Personally, my view on things, having been an accidental SAHM since having DS a year ago (due to move abroad where I don't have a visa to work), is that the SAHM role was a deliberate social construct to dump drudge-work on women for the benefit of men and the rich. It lets men work long hours in jobs for The Man while women get poorer and less powerful.

Btw, I don't know if well-paid careers after childbirth are that recent. I guess it depends what someone means by 'career' - wet nursing is mega lucrative and you could do if for years, but it might not feel like a career! But back when cottage industries were a very normal way of making a living, lots of women had work that was as well paid, or better, than men.

There are women who worked making books (and there are still extant manuscripts with illuminations done by women, which means they did the bits with gold leaf and I'd judge that adds more value to a book that the writing bit!). And brewing/running a pub was often done by women, not always widows.

The issue is that ownership of property is difficult for women, so it's so easy to exploit women even if the wife earns more than the husband. In some ways I think that still hasn't really changed enough.

I don't get the impression women did happily give up jobs after the war. I talked about it a lot with my granny when she was reminiscing and she had great anecdotes (I know anecdotes aren't data). But I also found out that there were lots of magazines and clubs formed by women for 'self improvement' (= getting yourself out of the house/finding something to do!) and included women who were living on very low wages but who'd been pushed out of jobs by returning servicemen. And all that prescription valium/ cocktails at 5 in the 50s speaks for itself a bit.

My granny worked pretty much her whole life, she has a year off on maternity for her first child and went part-time with her second for a couple of years, but after that she worked full-time until she was in her 60s. She was still doing volunteer teaching once a week until the summer before she died. So I think the cosy, 'mum devoted to children' thing was definitely a myth for her!

I totally agree with summer about it probably not being 'sacrifice' so much as pressures that made it easier - some people would find that quite nice, others would hate it.

wanderingalbatross "Which got me wondering, has there ever really been a time when women sacrificed work for their kids? I'd like to say people, but I suppose that men didn't do all that much of the child raising."

Possibly not many career choices available until recent history, where women would feel it was a better option than looking after her children ?

"I admit that my historical knowledge is poor and mostly gained from fiction(!) but I get the impression that this 'golden age' when kids were looked after by a dedicated parent is a figment of our collective imagination."

Times changed last century - healthcare, decent single wage, not living with inlaws all allowed children being regarded as very different from adults. Childhood became a time of play, diminished work responsibilities, and formal learning. You could choose the size of your family (unless devout Catholic). Well paid careers to go back to after childbirth's a recent thing for women.

WitchesTitWhistles "Work in the home would be ideal. I could easily have a house full of toddlers running around my feet""

the general answer in your situation is outwork - could be ironing / putting together jewellery / envelope stuffing etc etc or otherwise going out cleaning (taking your dc along with you). Unfortunately, as for most women throughout history probably, of course its all rubbish pay and conditions.

Yes, there were grants for childcare facilities in the war. But it seems that there were tensions between nurseries as educational and as childcare which allowed mothers to work. In the war, because of the emergency, childcare became primarily about allowing mothers to work, and it would seem that inspectors were concerned about the levels of overcrowding, lack of play and interaction and educational value of war time nurseries. The inspectors recommended that children under 2 should not be in day childcare facilities, but looked after at home, even if the home was poor.

After the war (in 1946), grants for nurseries ceased and they became the responsibility of Local Education Authorities, who maintained limited facilities for children between 2 and 5 which were seen to be part of the education system and not childcare for working mothers. I guess that is the origin of what we have today.

Interestingly, it seems that working mothers did complain about this, but didn?t get very far.

To acknowledge my source, this is a from an article in Paedagogica Historica 2011 issue 1 - 2 by Amy Palmer, I have skimmed it very quickly, so hopefully got the argument correct.

I tend to think it is not really that women sacrificed work for their children, but there were so many constraints and societal pressures that it was easier not to work, if that makes sense. I also think that many of these constaints and expectations still exist, we just call it ?choice?. Anyway, I need to get back to my own bread and butter now.

Totally agree that sahm-hood is a modern phenomenon. I hope that evolving work patterns mean that more flexible working will make working round childcare and home responsibilities becomes more common.

Just an idea for titwhistles.

I'm a disabled mum. I work out of the home about 2 days a week, but also at home 2 days freelance. My dc are all at school now.

You said "who needs sewing/laundry done these days". I do! I can work I'm working right now but I can't turn socks the right way out or sew badges on cub uniforms or make the cleopatra outfit dd2 wants for halloween. So I have a Personal Assistant. She comes twice a week to do allnthe things I can't (which varies week to week). My PA is single with no kids, but I have another disabled friend who has a PA with a child she brings along. I'd think that was great.

In the past I would have been helped by nearby family etc but I live far from family. My friends and neighbours all work. A PA helps me by being an extension of the hands and feet that don't work. Often we work together. And my current PA is dyslexic and I'm a literacy teacher/writer so I can help her too, it's a partnership.

Sounds like the sort of thing you'd like and be good at!

Also post war technology, ie household appliances. Which meant advertising, all those images of the ideal wife at home.

Er no. A book well worth reading is Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. REally excellent book about how women have managed children & life since the dawn of time. I think most of us have more time to spend with our kids now than we did 100 years ago. Life used to be either hideous drudgery, with sourcing food, preparing food, cooking food and trying to keep clothed & housed taking up an enormous amount of time or it was managing a household, which again took up an enormous amount of time.
There was a brief hiatus after the 2nd world war until the late 70s where a fairly large propoportion of first world women didn't have to work - but that is the historical exception.

Does it have something to do with child care becoming a paid profession? What happened before nurseries?

I ask because I certainly can't afford to work and pay a childminder or nursery to take day to day charge of my child (Even if I wanted to).

Work in the home would be ideal. I could easily have a house full of toddlers running around my feet but have no certification (and wouldn't want the paperwork!) and who on earth needs laundry/mending/weaving doing these days?

i think that we dedicate much more time and energy to our offspring now because we know so much more about the development of the young brain.

I have heard also that children were seen as merely immature humans, just biding time growing until they became useful adults, do you think this is true?

I am a child of the 50s. I always remember my mother doing housework (boiling the white linen etc) in the kitchen. My mother said that my memories weren't accurate but I don't remember her spending hours reading to me/playing with me.
Historically - back before the development of large factories - many women working at home were spinning/weaving/using some potentially dangerous machinery so babies/toddlers were tied up or swaddled so that they wouldn't have an accident/be a menace. Older children were farmed out until they were economically useful.

In Silas Marner (written in 1861 but I don't know if it was set earlier), the 2yo girl he finds and adopts gets tied to his loom by a long piece of cloth to stop her from running off, so I think just being underfoot was probably the norm while the adult looking after them needed to get on with their work.

Hi again,

I've been mulling over the question of whether women just went quietly back home when the men returned from the war - I really don't know. I'm wondering whether the golden age of the traditional family was a reality or a construct - I mean, if you think about it, there must have been a lot of female headed households, given the death toll in World War Two. On the other hand, the marriage bar still operated, so there was the expectation that married women would leave the workplace anyway. The evidence is mixed, as far as I can make out, some women were invested in making nice, new homes and rebuilding their families, others continued to work. But in the absence of childcare and practical support for working mothers, it really must have been more difficult (lots of corporation childcare facilities closed after the war).

Pre-industrial revolution: Alice Clark (a historian) wrote in 1919 that this was a golden age for women, because both men and women contributed equally to work and this kind of argument seems to have been picked up by feminists in the 1970s. But the evidence really doesn't seem to support the idea that women worked as men's equals, they weren't members of craft societies, for example, and tended to pick up the 'women's work' which men didn't do. In other words, the labour market was segmented along gender lines. That said, there doesn't seem to have been the moral objection to women (mothers) working which later arose, and they were expected to earn a living. But again, there is the question of who looked after the children, did they just patter about underfoot among the bits and pieces of sewing or weaving or whatever? They probably also helped out as soon as they were old enough!

It's an interesting question.

I was born in the early 1960s and my mum didn't work until I was 19. I don't believe that my classmates' mums worked either while I was at primary. OTOH my MIL always worked - fruit picking/ potato picking/ cleaning etc and DH remembers having to go with her as a very small child.

I left work in 1985 to have DC1 and nobody expected me to go back. In fact the only woman in the office with a young child was a lone parent. The other women either had no children or they were teens and up.

Thanks!

Kate Figes was Life After Birth. I read it in 2001 just after ds1 was born and found it deeply reassuring re going back to work (after a fairly major assualt by MIL).

Am in tech too and seem to have got a work life balance that is great for our family.

The second half of the article talks about women being judged harsher than men if they show selfish or aggressive tendencies. Surely it is better for wider society if the standards that men are judged by was raised rather than lowering the bar for women? In the example the article, if a male co-worker goes to a party leaving some emergency work to his team mates everyone should think he is a bit a knob too like his female counterpart?

The stereotypically female characteristics are necessary for society to function. Don't know how asking men to be more feminine would go down for the majority. Just musing really....

Is that "Because of Her Sex" Hanah?

Agree about the post-war emphasis on domesticity - though a similar thing happened after World War One, despite women getting the vote.

post World War Two, there was also Bowlby and the development of attachment theory, which I think had an impact too. Although his work was, as I understand it, looking at the impact of evacuation and long term separation on children, it was seen as highlighting the role of a stable primary carer (seen usually as the mother in society).

I also think that in WW2, women had been working and raising children in very difficult circumstances, they were times of shortages and austerity, so maybe there was a point where people wanted to concentrate on family for good reason. I mean, if your kids have been evacuated, you've been working and keeping house and home together in difficult circumstances, your husband has just returned, it is probably not the ideal time to start challenging gender roles. I don't really think it is surprising that you have such an emphasis on the traditional family in the 1950s. Also, the new welfare state - was that not pretty much built around the breadwinner model?

No. The stay at home full-time mother (because mostly it is mothers we are talking about) is a very recent construct (I'm thinking post-war, to get mothers out of the menz job and and back to the kitchen sink). Before that, mothers either worked or paid other people to come and work for them in their houses. Children either went to baby minders or were looked after by grannies or nannies or other staff or family members.