Helen McCarthy is University Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College. Her first book was The British People and the League of Nations and her second book, Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat, won Best International Affairs Book at the Political Book Awards 2015.

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A groundbreaking history of mothers who worked for pay that will change the way we think about gender, work and equality in modern Britain.

In Britain today, three-quarters of mothers are in employment and paid work is an unremarkable feature of women's lives after childbirth. Yet a century ago, working mothers were in the minority, excluded altogether from many occupations, whilst their wage-earning was widely perceived as a social ill. In Double Lives, Helen McCarthy accounts for this remarkable transformation, whose consequences have been momentous for Britain's society and economy.

Drawing upon a wealth of sources, McCarthy ranges from the smoking chimney-stacks of nineteenth-century Manchester to the shimmering skyscrapers of present-day Canary Wharf. She recovers the everyday worlds of working mothers and traces how women's desires for financial independence and lives beyond home and family were slowly recognised. McCarthy reveals the deep and complicated past of a phenomenon so often assumed to be a product of contemporary lifestyles and aspirations.

This groundbreaking history forces us not only to re-evaluate the past, but to ask anew how current attitudes towards mothers in the workplace have developed and how far we have to go. Through vivid and powerful storytelling, Double Lives offers a social and cultural history for our times.

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

"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

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

Groundbreaking. A fascinating read

[A] landmark history. McCarthy's triumph lies in listening to many voices, revealing a complexity and richness that challenges the simple narrative that the working-class female has always needed to work for survival, the educated woman wants employment as a legitimate aspiration. Double Lives is a milestone in women's history

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

A thoroughly researched monograph that leaves no stone unturned . A riveting read filled with the sounds, textures and emotions of the past. While we are often told that women of the previous generations were silent, here you can hear their voices - exhausted and defiant

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

Authoritative in scope and calmly judged, but with an ear for voices and an eye for detail, Double Lives is the history we have long wanted of a subject still freighted with emotion and misunderstanding

[McCarthy] unrolls a richly intricate narrative about how social change inches forward (and then back, and then forward again). McCarthy has a sharp eye for the contrasting, often conflicting, ideological elements of any given era. [An] impressive study