A maternal identity? The family lives of British women graduates pre‐ and post‐1945

In contrast to the first generations of university‐educated women, this article will suggest that later cohorts no longer transgressed conventional expectations by rejecting marriage and motherhood on the same scale as their predecessors. Post‐1945 society was a period within which theoretically women could ‘have it all’ and arguably graduate women were under even greater pressure to conform. By exploring the life‐histories of a group of women who graduated between 1947 and 1979, this article explores the individual stories behind the quantitative data to consider the attitudes of highly‐educated women to marriage and motherhood and how they have balanced their personal and professional lives.