Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?

Pat Thane's publications include: Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s (1991); Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (2000); Women and Ageing in Britain since 1500 (2001); Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain since 1945 (2010); Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century: What Difference did the Vote Make? (2010)Tanya Evans is working on a transnational history of the family in Australia and Britain from the eighteenth century through to the present. Previously she was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London. Her publications include 'Unfortunate Objects': Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century London (2005). She is co-editing a Special Issue of Australian Historical Studies on Biography and Life-Writing. She curated an exhibition on Lone Mothers, Past and Present at The Woman's Library, London Metropolitan University in 2007-8 and she has been commissioned to curate another on 'Family Life in Colonial New South Wales' by the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales for the Museum of Sydney in 2013.

The book provides a multi-faceted account of an under-researched area which will appeal to students and academics alike. It is an extremely welcome addition to the historiography of twentieth century family life.

• Introduction ; 1. Secrets and Lies: Being and Becoming an Unmarried Mother in Early Twentieth-Century England ; 2. Between the Wars ; 3. The Second World War: Another Moral Panic ; 4. Unmarried Motherhood in 'Family Britain': Challenging Bowlby ; 5. Unmarried Mothers in the Welfare State ; 6. The Permissive Society? Unmarried Motherhood in the 1960s ; 7. A Finer Future? ; 8. The Struggle Continues : 1980s-90s ; 9. Into the Twenty-First Century: Progress ; Bibliography