This essay explores the lives of graduate mothers in 1960s Britain, drawing on a unique archive of survey responses collected by the sociologist Viola Klein. Against a backdrop of earlier marriages, smaller families and the expansion of part-time work, Klein investigated the factors shaping graduate women’s careers and probed her respondents’ feelings about paid work and family. The article draws on this material to do three things: first, it reflects on the questionnaire data as constituting an ‘archive of feeling’ which allows historians to reconstruct intimate relations within the home and see subjectivities in the process of formation. Second, the article examines the ‘emotional work’ which graduate mothers performed for their families, often alongside paid work outside the home. Most respondents were deeply invested in their identities as mothers, which encompassed the task of ‘mothering’ husbands, elderly parents, and, in some cases, domestic staff and clients associated with their husbands’ jobs. Some experienced this as a burden whilst others embraced this home-centredness, balancing domestic duties with creative and useful leisure. The final section of the article shows how these narratives recalled an earlier, interwar model of middle-class domesticity which sat uneasily with Klein’s public advocacy of the ‘dual role’ as an answer to the graduate woman’s dilemmas. In short, the article argues that adopting the lens of emotional work to make sense of this social-scientific encounter enables us to view critically the wider claims being made about women’s professional ambition and career mobility in 1950s and 1960s Britain.