Without their income hefty mortgage payments cannot be met. Young women without good qualifications risk financial hardship if they have children young because their earned contributions to household budgets are vital.

There are now disincentives for women to contemplate maternity before reaching their 30s. The idea of having to sacrifice what are now vital features of female self-presentation becomes another way of warning young women from embarking on motherhood before all the financial details are in place. Being poor within this new moral economy incurs the additional stigma of failed femininity. Without a disposable budget for the accessories that are deemed essential, young women judge themselves more harshly than ever before. Maternity is thus fully incorporated into the language of self-perfectibility (give or take a few bad hair days) and this in turn is dependent on exceptionally high levels of personal consumption. The tribe of yummy mummies - Sadie Frost, for example, or Davina McCall, or Victoria Beckham - also contributes to a redefinition of motherhood for the nation's young women. Such advice dovetails with the wider celebration in the media of wealth and status to create a pervasive system of popular morality.

This keeps the advertisers happy and also, perhaps inadvertently, reinforces the message from government which, fearful of the high rate of teenage pregnancies, advocates planned parenthood embarked upon by stable couples with secure salaries. These glamorous mothers provide the fashion, beauty and lifestyle magazines with an ideal opportunity to extend the grip of consumer culture by suggesting that successful maternity now requires that mother and baby afford highmaintenance pampering techniques as well as a designer wardrobe. In recent months the svelte figure of the high-income yummy mummy who can squeeze into size six jeans a couple of weeks after giving birth, with the help of a personal trainer, has become a favourite front-cover image in the celebrity weeklies.

Gold gucci shoes yummy mummies