We don’t talk of a ‘working father’ — so why do we still refer to a ‘working mother’?

The phrase ‘working mother’ ought to be as redundant sounding as ‘working father’ would be if anyone ever said that: in the UK three-quarters of women with dependent children work. Yet the working mother still feels provisional, something that lockdown has made sharply apparent to many women. Will it be Mum or Dad who claims the spare room, while the loser retreats to the kitchen table? Mum or Dad who does the home-schooling? Who will preserve their professional status, and who will slide into the domestic? The answer is that, in most cases, the woman loses, and her male partner quietly gathers the spoils.

Although the ability to do our jobs from our homes seems like a splendidly modern thing that could never have happened before broadband, it actually signals a return to an older style of working for women. Where child care responsibilities made going into a factory impossible, Helen McCarthy explains, working-class women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries often took on what was called ‘home work’: assembling boxes of artificial flowers or strips of hook-and-eye fastenings, all paid by the piece and all possible to do with children around.

For socially minded onlookers, this kind of ‘sweated labour’ was a subject of much horror: in 1906, the Sweated Industries Exhibition in London made a human zoo of these workers, so visitors could thrill to the depravity of it all. The concerns about this kind of employment are echoed by contemporary debates about the gig economy, and there was undoubtedly exploitation. But there was also freedom for women in being able to make their own money. ‘A shilling of your own is worth two that he gives you,’ said one working mother in a survey of 1909.

And this freedom was itself a source of anxiety.