In 1974 I began an academic research project called, rather grandly, ‘Transition to Motherhood: Social and Medical Aspects of First Childbirth’. It was planned as a three-year study of a sample of women having their first babies, and the idea was that it would expose and clarify some of the problems involved in becoming a mother in modern society.

I became interested in this subject I suppose directly through my previous work on housewives’ attitudes to housework. I began to see that however much one separated housework off from women's other work, becoming a housewife was synonymous with becoming a mother. Whereas fifty or even twenty years ago women gave up their jobs on marriage, now they do so during their first pregnancies, and it is the moment when she becomes a mother that a woman first confronts the full reality of what it means to be a woman in our society. Motherhood entails a great deal of domestic work – servicing the child, keeping its clothes and its body clean, preparing food. The demarcation lines between this and house- or husband-work blur. It is a crisis in the life of a woman, a point of no return. Evidence accumulated since the 1950s about how the principle of sex equality works in practice shows conclusively that the options available for women outside the home are severely affected by motherhood, and remain so even where ‘officially’ the commitment is to equal chances for all.

I therefore chose to look at this moment in a woman's history, to catch it and describe it and explore it through the eyes of some of those who experience it. I was interested in every dimension of becoming a mother: changes in life-style – giving up work, staying at home, becoming isolated or making new friends – the impact of, and effect on, marriage, the relationship between mother and child, the medical management of childbirth. I wanted to show that the advent of motherhood is not only an event of importance to the individual woman, but a moment in the history of all women.

I am a feminist, an academic sociologist, and a woman with children. I was not a feminist until I had children, and I became a sociologist as an escape from the problems of having children.