Love and Toil : Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918

The history of the British working classes has until recently been written with a focus on the workplace or on such male organizations as clubs, unions, or national political parties. This study of mothers in London before the First World War stresses the distinctiveness of their experiences from those of other classes, and of the post World War I period, and demonstrates the ways in which mothers and their domestic choices were essential to the survival and cultural perpetuation of the working classes.