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. @HistorianHelen
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 -- Melanie Reid * The Times * 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 -- Alison Light * Guardian * 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 -- Vicky Pryce * Literary Review * Groundbreaking ... A fascinating read * Herald * 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 -- Alison Wolf * Financial Times * 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 -- Emma Lundin * Prospect * 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 -- Sarah Ditum * Spectator * 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 -- David Kynaston [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 -- Melissa Benn * New Statesman *