CONCLUSIONS
Motherhood could not be every woman's ‘sweet vocation'. Full-time motherhood, as advocated by nineteenth-century romantics and evangelicals and then later by medical professionals and social workers, was only ever an option for a lucky few with the wealth and support that enabled them to give their children the time and the attention, as well as the medical care, they now required.
For the majority, the rise in importance of the mother as moral force, educator and producer of the nation's future citizens, meant greater responsibility with few benefits.Middle-class women had taken on board the notion that full-time motherhood could be both at the heart of one's identity as a woman and constitute one's public duty. The latter was seen in terms of bearing children, continuing the family enterprise, exporting middle-class maternal values to workingclass women and more generally allowing maternalism to inform their public activity. Thus an ideology which was used by supporters of separate spheres to constrain women's participation in education and employment on the grounds that women were fitted for their natural duty and little else, was taken up by women themselves to elevate women's position in society. The main beneficiaries were those who used the halo of motherhood to extend their role into philanthropy, what was called woman's mission. Arguably, in the long term all mothers benefited, as those in positions of influence began to campaign for state support for the most important social duty: motherhood. However, in the short term, working-class mothers were forced to endure a great deal of criticism, patronising advice and condescension from health workers, social reformers and lady philanthropists who saw only ignorant women who required enlightenment so that they might become responsible mothers.
On the eve of the First World War most women still had little choice about whether they became mothers or not, and those who campaigned for women to be educated about birth control were criticised by those who expressed concern at fertility rate decline.
Yet voices were beginning to be raised in support of family limitation on the grounds of maternal and infant health as well as on the grounds of family vitality and the national good. Couples who decided to practise birth control, according to the German welfare reformer Marie Baum, regarded ‘every child... as a possession of high value, whose preservation justified every kind of exertion, because the new pregnancy was not simply willed by God but by the individual.'102 But it was not until after the First World War that women experienced real change, when motherhood ceased to be a constant chore for all of a woman's fertile years, and when the state finally recognised its responsibility to mothers following the decimation of life in that conflict. The nineteenth century saw a shift from a focus on mothers and maternity to a focus on the child and infant health. By 1918 it was finally understood that the two were part of a whole, that the one depended on the other.