Motherhood: Contemporary Transitions and Generational Change

Tina Miller

Nov 2023 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

As the competing demands of care and paid work become increasingly complex, has there ever been a more challenging time to be a woman and a mother? Comparing two studies conducted across two generations, Motherhood explores women's experiences of becoming first-time mothers. Through richly narrated, real-time accounts of transition, Tina Miller examines what has changed since her original study was conducted twenty-one years ago. Using sociological and feminist perspectives, she analyses how motherhood has further intensified against a harsher neoliberal backdrop. The book examines the social, political and moral contours in which motherhood is situated which, in the contemporary context, include ideas of planned labours and work/life balance as part of potent, maternal prenatal imaginings. Birth continues to change everything, and the qualitative, longitudinal and comparative data show these ideas to be, mostly, illusory.

About the author

Tina Miller is Professor of Sociology at Oxford Brookes University and an internationally recognised researcher who uses qualitative, longitudinal research to trace real-time experiences of transition. She has collaborated with international organisations, policy makers and the BBC. She is the author of Making Sense of Motherhood (2005), Making Sense of Fatherhood (2010) and Making Sense of Parenthood (2017).