The Captive Wife

In 1965, at the age of twenty-nine, the young sociologist Hannah Gavron took her own life. A year later, the book based on the research she carried out for her thesis was published as The Captive Wife. Based on first-hand accounts of the lives of working-class and middle-class women in Kentish Town in London, it was one of the earliest works of British, sociological feminism and has since become a feminist classic.

Arguing that motherhood stripped women of independence as it often brought an...