"Parenthood and the care of children is now a highly self-conscious affair in which the maintenance of a high standard is insisted upon, and the pitfalls are forever being exposed," wrote the sociologist Hannah Gavron. The situation for parents, Gavron explained, is made more difficult because "The family today is an isolated unit unable and unwilling to seek assistance in its distress from wider circles of kin (as it has always done in the past)."

As a result, many of the 96 working and middle-class mothers Gavron surveyed for her book, "The Captive Wife," felt like failures. "I felt that I was a failure as a person, too," said one middle-class English mother about her early days raising children, and that the sense of flailing made her "feel lonely and displaced."

This book was not written recently. Gavron, a young mother herself, died by suicide in 1965. I had never heard of her before reading a biography of Sylvia Plath, "Red Comet," which made comparisons between the lives of the two women. Gavron was married to a successful publisher, and even after the two were estranged, she was comfortable enough to afford a nanny to watch her children while she taught and finished her book. Both Plath and Gavron died by the same brutal method: gassing themselves in ovens. Plath died just a few years before Gavron in London. "The Captive Wife" had originally been Gavron's thesis, and was published posthumously in 1966, though it was reissued with a new foreword this year.

In some ways, Gavron was a product of the '60s. Her son, Jeremy, wrote a book in 2015 exploring her life and death, called "Woman on the Edge of Time." He told The Guardian: "It is clear to me that this particular moment in history was in some ways toxic for this particular person ... Hannah was a woman who needed to fulfill herself the way men fulfill themselves. I think the trouble she got into was that she was too far ahead."

Certainly, educated women in wealthy societies have come a long way since Gavron and Plath's time. And as highly sensitive women, they were not representative of the whole population. But it struck me -- as it always does when I read history -- that our environments change but the emotional texture of being alive (and in this case, the experience of parenting) is eternal.

Gavron quotes a 1963 booklet published by Relate, then called the Marriage Guidance Council, which is surprisingly poetic on the range of parental feelings when dealing with young children: "It is the most extraordinary mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, the anxious and the funny, and it goes on and on. This is perhaps the stage of life when men and women have to work harder than ever before or afterwards."