Motherhood, mothering, being a mother, and other concepts about women having children, caring for them or giving birth to them are important and scientifically relevant themes due to the strong, socially constructed meanings that have been transmitted into everyday lives and experiences of women around the world. As Sarah Knott notes, mothering is plural and specific at the same time; there is no universal, single meaning of being a mother, as there is no one way of being a woman. Any attempt to put motherhood into a fixed set of recommendations, judgments, or images more or less force women to submit to socially desirable requirements—how they should behave, perform, and feel about themselves. All these issues have been broadly researched and theorized since the 1970s. The number of books has increased in recent decades, many of which explore motherhood and mothering as a political issue and not as a private matter.

Knott's book is based on her own experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. She uses archival materials such as letters and diaries to find personal narratives that she intertwines with her personal story. She writes in the first person and her style is an amalgam of biographical notes, personal anecdote, and primary research. Her own experience is a point of departure in exploring how women of different cultural backgrounds and in different countries handle pregnancy and motherhood and how societies and cultures differ in their understanding of the family, childhood, and motherhood. Knott begins the book with a discussion of the size of the family, specifically the number of children among settlers in North America. In the eighteenth century, the average number of children was eight; it dropped to 2.2 in the late twentieth century. The discourse on family planning, fertility rate, on reducing the size of the family, and on childrearing and childbearing is not a gender-neutral discourse, even though demographers (and policy makers) often understand it as such. Knott argues that lowering the number of births was liberating for women; it provided them with a bit more control over their own lives, but they also faced constraints such as rules and images they should follow to be good mothers, good wives, and respected women. Family planning is actually about what women should do to control their own sexuality and the sexuality of their male partners (usually husbands).

Knott continues by exploring the sexual experiences of married women, which were diverse and so was the pleasure they enjoyed (or not). Although sometimes they did not even undress (no naked bodies allowed), they still enjoyed sex, but for a lot of them it was an obligation. They developed sexual practices according to social expectations of the time. Knott emphasizes the absence of words about sexuality in the past. In most cases, sexual communication was a matter of reading signs, for example “go and have a bath upstairs” (22) for women in England during the 1930s and the 1940s, or “go shell corn in the crib” (26) for enslaved women in South Carolina. Safe sex was not an issue that men thought about; pregnancy was women's responsibility.

It was not always easy to recognize pregnancy. Knott quotes various guidelines dating from previous centuries on how to identify pregnancy, most of which involved the observation of urine to spot changes in color or looking for live worms that were supposed to be found in urine. The story continues with “quickening,” which is the moment that baby moves for the first time. In previous times this was the first certain sign of pregnancy. Writing again on enslaved women in South Carolina, Knott recognizes that feeling a baby's inner touch is a privilege of stillness, of which many women are deprived.

In the next chapters, Knott highlights the importance of the child's gender and the preference of having a boy over having a girl that is still present today, even if hidden in small comments and phrases. She then continues to the process of giving birth. Various beliefs regarding pregnancy are reflected in childbirth rituals practiced in various cultures. In some parts of the world, women retreat to special huts to deliver babies; others give birth in hospitals, and still others at home. All ways of giving birth stem from specific meanings and convictions and all imply the interconnection of pregnancy, childbirth, and mother-to-child relation. Knott continues with anecdotes on her own experiences in the first six weeks following the childbirth. The book ends with the night when the child slept throughout the night and motherhood became less about physical attachment.

The book is an important, albeit unusual, work. The intertwining of the author's own experience and literary descriptions of feelings and events, on the one hand, and archive material and historical analysis on the other, demands that the reader adjust to the style and avoid judging it by conventional scholarly criteria. The personal narrative that blends with the narratives of women belonging to different cultures and historical contexts is as much a work of literature as it is a scholarly text. It is a courageous piece in which Knott eschews the safe realm of facts and lets us into her world that intermixes with the worlds of other women. Once the reader adapts to the rhythm and becomes comfortable with the writing style, the book proves to be very interesting and informative while also providing the pleasure of literary experience.