Having a first baby is a journey into the unknown in more senses than one. Apart from the birth, which is the central drama in the transition to motherhood, three changes have to be accomplished more or less simultaneously: giving up paid work; taking up a totally new occupation – that of mother; becoming a housewife. For a minority of women the break in paid-work career will be short, and the necessary adjustment to domesticity only temporary. But most women stay at home for several years. Some may not ‘work’ again for a long time.

Unlike other changes of occupation, this transformation of secretary or shop assistant into mother and housewife entails more than small changes in routine: different hours, different work place, different work-mates, more or less money. The language of capitalism – work (paid) versus housework (unpaid) – masks the actual labour of housework and child care. Cultural images of womanhood have the same effect, inflating the grimy floor and the soiled nappy to the status of personal obligations: an extension of feminine hygiene. But while domesticity may be a theme running through women's lives from birth to death, suddenly having no other occupation to call one's own may seriously injure a woman's self-concept, ideas she has cherished for a long while about herself as a person. The housewife-mother's working conditions may pose extra threats to contentment: isolation, monotony, fragmentation, twenty-four-hour-a-day responsibility, lack of money and, for some, poor housing as well. Such occupational hazards of being female may of course have no impact on some women; but in the mind, in anticipation, they hover as grey possibilities on the horizon.