Inventing motherhood

Mothers have always existed but "motherhood" is a comparatively recent invention. The economic and social developments which, over the past two hundred years, divorced the place of work from the home, separated the elderly from the working population, and virtually abolished the domestic servant, have resulted in a family consisting, for most of the working hours, if not all the time, of the mother and her children. In the first part of her book Ann Dally shows how this trend has run paralled with changes in the theory and practice of mothering which have emphasized the importance and exclusiveness of the mother-child relationship and have idealized it at the expense of the older, wider relationships with family and community.