From Here to Maternity was originally published as Becoming a Mother in 1979. It was the report of a research project I carried out as a follow-on from my study of housework. The housework study had alerted me to the importance of first-time motherhood in changing the trajectory and tenor of women's lives, and in playing a key role in erecting those gender divisions that construct women as an oppressed social group. ‘Oppression’ was the language of the 1970s, a time when feminist activists and academics in Europe and North America were stitching together an analysis of the structures, systems and ideologies of women's confinement to a special place in a man's world. From Here to Maternity and the research on which it draws reflected this renewed focus on understanding how women and motherhood are gendered in a patriarchal social system, but what the book set out to deliver was not an academic treatise: the aim was to provide an account of the transition to motherhood in the words and through the eyes of women who experienced it. Most of the text consists of direct quotations from taped interviews with women having their first babies in London in the mid-1970s. These are framed with short commentaries by me as the principal researcher on the project, and they are laced with a few simple statistics showing the generalities of the women's replies to a series of four searching interviews conducted in pregnancy and the early months of motherhood. I insisted (with some difficulty) that the publisher should reverse normal typesetting practice, placing the women's words in a bold font, and mine in the more hesitant italics. Not only were the women's narratives (in my view) far more succinctly articulated and entertaining than any sociological analysis could ever be, but there was also a strong need at the time to insist on the importance of women's own knowledge about motherhood. For too long, motherhood had been the territory of expert proclamations and distortions; obstetricians and paediatricians and psychologists and philosophers and an industry of ‘popular’ advisors had all insisted that they knew better than women themselves what happens to women's bodies, minds and lives when they have babies.