https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/31/double-lives-review-the-mother-of-all-battles-for-equality

Helen McCarthy’s landmark history of the lives of working mothers highlights the discrimination that remains to this day

Isabel Killick, an impoverished East End tailoress with three children and a sickly husband, appeared before a House of Lords select committee in 1888 and, on one of the rare occasions in which a working-class woman could speak for herself directly to those in power, she explained that she worked from 6am to 8pm in her home to feed her family by “trouser finishing” .

Her own daily diet was a cup of tea and a herring, “as for meat, I do not expect; I get meat once in six months”. Killick was one of 4 million girls and women in paid work in Victorian Britain – 15% of whom were mothers. As historian Helen McCarthy explains in Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood, such women were a well-established feature but were considered a deviancy, far from the social norm.