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Father and Daughter: Patriarchy, Gender and Social Science
Father and daughter provides an unique ‘insider perspective’ on two key figures in twentieth-century British social science. Ann Oakley, a highly respected sociologist and best-selling writer, draws on her own life and that of her father, Richard Titmuss, a well-known policy analyst and defender of the welfare state, to offer an absorbing view of the connections between private lives and public work. Using an innovative mix of biography, autobiography, intellectual history, archives, and personal interviews, some of which have not been previously available to the public, she provides a compelling narrative about gender, patriarchy, methodology, and the politics of memory and identity. This fascinating analysis defies the usual social science publications to offer a truly distinctive account which will be of wide interest.
- GenresNonfiction
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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March 20, 2020
This is a beautiful book, beautifully written, and in many ways it is a book about itself. By that I mean that part of the point seems to be not the end product but the act of writing, and that makes it slightly whimsical but also a pleasure to read, sometimes just for its language or for its frequent witticisms. I have long believed that the proper way to respect parents is not to idealise them, to live in their shadow as it were, but to try and understand them and yourself well enough to be able at least to forgive them. Ann Oakley, who is very securely placed in the field of sociology, reflects on her father’s no less secure position in the same field, and examines the many layers of difference to their experiences and their approaches. In effect, that entails a historical overview of the subject’s evolution over two generations, the different and conflicting contributions of men and women to that history, some of the strategies enabling women to survive against grossly unfair odds, the ways in which those conflicts both weakened and enriched the field, and eventual similarities and contrasts between her history and that of her father. The book is too amusing (I often laughed out loud) to ever become bitter, too interested in its subject to waste time being (too) angry, too committed to the truth to mind about who is more right (though she is) and more wrong (though he was), honest enough to make clear that they each belonged to their own time and context, that while she devoted her own career to overturning his world, the world he made and she rejected, even so his failings were also his humanity. Sadly, she suggests that instead of being at odds with each other, they could have made a very good partnership, but I suspect that would have required that he change his mind and agree with her.
Quotes
This, then, is /was my family..The blemished record isn’t exactly that model of family and community and altruistic spirit my father preached in his public life... No wonder I grew up wondering why people so glorify The Family that they are quite unable to see how actual families behave. ... I wondered if he pondered on the huge paradox of all this: the unsatisfactory family of the real world versus the vainglorious family of the cereal packet. And there was I, his only child, busy erecting a destruction of the whole sex/gender system, even as he took it for granted and lived in it and even, one might suggest, prospered from it. [p56]
Doing sociology, I read about The Family – how it is universal (or might not be, depending on how you define it), how it is functional (for whom, in what ways?), how it is extended or nuclear (explosive), how it is an engine for meeting (or not) and containing (or not) individual needs for sex, love and intimacy... It was quite possibly my anger at the smirking self-satisfaction of the men who theorised about The Family or claimed to find their theories supported by observations of real families that first propelled me on the path to developing a less prejudiced kind of sociology. [p57]
When I first started to spend time in my rural retreat, i was afraid to be alone, particularly at night. Solitude and silence both impose disciplines quite alien to the main drift of modern culture. They drive one into the mania of one’s own head, demanding the cultivation fo a special sort of vigilance... At first I didn’t grasp the difference between loneliness and solitude. One is about pain, the other about the intense pleasure of being free from the constraints of others. [p83]
Brian Abel-Smith’s biographer, Sally Sheard, says the welfare state we have in Britain today is essentially the dream of three men: Richard Titmuss, Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith, otherwise known as ‘the Titmice’. Through a variety of routes – academic analysis, policy research, political networking – they adapted and promoted the implementation of the ‘cradle-to-grave’ philosophy of William Beveridge’s vision. [p85]
Pearl Jephcott’s career illustrates another critical feature of academic social science: its dependence on the labours of contract research workers who don;t really – compared to teaching staff – have ‘careers’ at all. They lurch from one short-term contract to another, outside the main frame of reference of university life; their social investigations, despite adding enormously to knowledge, all happen at the margins, where they can safely be either forgotten or claimed by those on positions of greater security and power... Carr Saunders and Titmuss clearly had very little idea of Pearl Jephcott’s importance when they decided not to hold on to her at LSE. She, like some of tghe other women in this story, was a missed opportunity for the male academic establishment, but, then, missing such opportunities is part-and-parcel of how it constitutes itself. [p120]
Women members of the network carried out studies of living and working conditions, exposed the policy agenda revealed in these, combined their scientific efforts with practical help for the poor and disadvantaged, and took upon themselves the lobbying and networking needed to bring about effective change. Once change had happened, they did their best to ensure they were put in charge of it. ... The ‘girls’ network’ as they called themselves, made up a sophisticated matrix of ‘women welfare-state builders’. But while the boys’ network and its products have enjoyed global attention, the history of the girls’ network is only just beginning to be written. [p151]
Kendall, another of Younghusband’s correspondents, carried out the first international survey of social work training for the United Nations. ... ‘Social work history and women as leaders are inextricably intertwined,’ she wrote in an article celebrating the achievements of ‘three extraordinary leaders’ – Alice Salomon in Germany, Edith Abbott in the USA and Eileen Younghusband in the UK. These women, she said, were great because of their powerful minds, their incurable curiosity and their scholarship. ‘They believed, perhaps naively, that solid facts, carefully amassed and analyzed, would yield rational answers to troublesome questions.’ This, of course, is a description of what today we would call ‘evidence-based policy’. [p156]
Difficult women are women who don’t need and / or challenge men and their perception of women.[p158]
None of this was talked about at the time. There were few books that even opened a conversation about why the social positions of men and women were so different. [p158]
...the primacy of same-sex relationships was a critical modus operandi for both professional and personal fulfilment in the girls’ network, among those women whose imaginative methodology managed to knit science and passion, evidence and reform, charity and public service, and personal and public life so closely together that none of the elements seemed logical without the other. Relationships between women were the key to female leadership, reform and policy-making, both nationally and internationally, as indeed they were and are for men. ... Women’s independence from men is a notion with which patriarchal culture has always had some difficulty: a collective independence is even more disturbing. Richard Titmuss doesn’t seem to have been at all aware of the operation of the girl’s network in the world he entered at LSE... This was the way things worked in the male world, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the men that women engaged in it too. [p167]
If I thought marriage or a change of name would enable me to become my own person, i was, of course, mistaken. Becoming one’s own person is the project of a lifetime. Yet it’s also a spurious idea: the creation of a culture unwarrantably fixed on this notion that everyone’s task must ultimately be to find their own separate personhood. We are never separate from the lives that produced us: we carry our childhoods and our genealogy within us always. The only thing that changes is our relationship to these, the stories we tell ourselves and others, our ‘reconstructive endeavours’. [p174]
Richard Titmuss’s defence of welfare rights was non-empirical: he never carried out any research of his own which exposed him to ordinary people’s lives and experiences. He lacked a background in tramping the streets and politely intruding into people’s private lives. In this he differed from Peter Townsend’s extensive experience of qualitative interviewing, and his deeply-felt and acted-on empiricism. [p183]
Like Peter Townsend, Tony Lynes discovered that working on the ground with people the welfare state was supposed to benefit revealed cracks and weaknesses, not only in the mechanics of the system, but in its very conception. Both Lynes and Townsend had entered the uncertain land between public policy and activism. This wasn’t a place with which Richard Titmuss was familiar or in which he felt at home. [p185]
Richard Titmuss never wrote about housework, just as he never did any. [p198]
The best questions are simple ones, but the answers can be complex, especially when the social context is, and there’s nothing simple about patriarchy. Why is it assumed that men win bread and women make it? Why does maternal love mean cleaning other people’s shit off lavatory seats and watching out for their delicate egos all the time? [p202]
The difference between men helping and women always keeping the responsibility seemed an aspect of domestic life that other people (including Richard Titmuss in his observations about the changing family) hadn’t noticed. He ‘helps’ her with the children or the housework, but the children and the housework remain hers. Such a simple distinction between responsibility and help hadn’t apparently been made before. It ultimately proved to be an analytically powerful entry into women’s experience of their labour. [p203]
My book Sex, Gender and Society, articulated the conceptual distinction which had until then eluded the comprehension of most people (except for grammarians and a few esoteric medics) between the nature of our material bodies, which are sexed, and our cultural selves, which are gendered. ...time quickly saw it migrate into ‘the standard for most sociology’ and ‘a feminist primer’, enabling a materialist account of women’s oppression, by usefully replacing the sociologically jaded language of sex roles’. The message spread beyond social science by successfully introducing the term gender into the lexicon of ordinary discourse. [p204]
I can’t emphasise enough the significant failure of both public and academic understandings to grasp that gender us about men as well as women. [p205]
Richard Titmuss wrote about medical sociology, about medicine as a social service, and Ann Oakley started her journey as a sociologist of health and illness with studies of maternity care. His interest was in the NHS as an organisation, in the development of destructive ‘organisational fetishes’, but he also saw the effect on both providers and users of health care of increasing science and specialisation, the disappearance of whole person medicine, and the therapeutic importance of courtesy and sociability. Her focus has been on the absence of science from many health care practices, on the risks and long-term impacts of interventions. We would, it occurs to me now, have made a good team. [p206]
As Wright Mills said, the good writer tries to enrich private life by making it publicly relevant and to humanise public affairs by giving them personal meaning. I hope I’ve done some of that in this book. [p213]
Richard Titmuss was a legend in his own time, revered by many, hailed as the founder of social policy and/or a scion of the welfare state, revealing to us secrets about the social divison of welfare, and mapping for us the inequitable allocation of benefits and risks in an irresponsible society. His daughter grew up puzzling about the celebration of legendary men, its place in relation to the achievements of ordinary people. ... Richard Titmuss wasn’t a saint, and he was my father. The contradictions evident in his philosophy of welfare played out in his private life. [p243]
Those of us who show how scholarship has been a singularly biased pursuit are called ‘feminists’ or ‘qualitative’ or both, and thus placed in a special room of our own. The clamour of our voices in that room is indeed like that famous quotation form George Eliot’s Middlemarch: ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’ [p249]
The story of father and Daughter has settled on two small moments in this convoluted history: the separation during the 1950s and 1960s in Britain of social policy from the older linked traditions of social administration and social work; and the emergence, since the 1960s, of gender analysis. The first moment is associated with the legend of Richard Titmuss, the second with the legend of the ‘feminist pioneer’, his daughter, Ann Oakley. [p250]
The reason why Settlement social science happened outside universities was because it was largely the province of women, who weren’t welcome inside them. [p250]
So called ‘qualitative’ research or ‘qualitative’ sociology is the poor relation of quantitative social science; it’s the view from outside the ivory tower, the science of the outsider. It’s a label, a designation, a value-judgement, and, since the launch of second wave feminism, it’s been part of the hermeneutics of gender. Hence its disposal on my shoulders, where it wears me down with the tedium of having to perpetually engage with it. ...but it’s unproductive... The question is: What is the question this research is trying to answer and what kind of method is it therefore appropriate to use. [p252]
It wasn’t the welfare state which prompted the study of social administration, but the heritage of social work effort and education. More or less the same argument can be made for the history of sociology: that its post-war development was altogether shaped by the links between social reform, social work and social research facilitated by the international project of the ‘girls’ network’. [p253]
Sociology wasn’t a label Richard Titmuss himself used; indeed, once the political radicals that infested LSE in the 1960s arrived contaminated by sociology, he became particularly anxious not to have anything to do with it, and even found himself making liaisons with the economists whose right-wing views hadn’t previously appealed to him. [p254]
The divorce of social work, of female social science, from institutionalised sociology, allowed sociology to repeat all the mistakes of male socialisation. [p255]
Quotes
This, then, is /was my family..The blemished record isn’t exactly that model of family and community and altruistic spirit my father preached in his public life... No wonder I grew up wondering why people so glorify The Family that they are quite unable to see how actual families behave. ... I wondered if he pondered on the huge paradox of all this: the unsatisfactory family of the real world versus the vainglorious family of the cereal packet. And there was I, his only child, busy erecting a destruction of the whole sex/gender system, even as he took it for granted and lived in it and even, one might suggest, prospered from it. [p56]
Doing sociology, I read about The Family – how it is universal (or might not be, depending on how you define it), how it is functional (for whom, in what ways?), how it is extended or nuclear (explosive), how it is an engine for meeting (or not) and containing (or not) individual needs for sex, love and intimacy... It was quite possibly my anger at the smirking self-satisfaction of the men who theorised about The Family or claimed to find their theories supported by observations of real families that first propelled me on the path to developing a less prejudiced kind of sociology. [p57]
When I first started to spend time in my rural retreat, i was afraid to be alone, particularly at night. Solitude and silence both impose disciplines quite alien to the main drift of modern culture. They drive one into the mania of one’s own head, demanding the cultivation fo a special sort of vigilance... At first I didn’t grasp the difference between loneliness and solitude. One is about pain, the other about the intense pleasure of being free from the constraints of others. [p83]
Brian Abel-Smith’s biographer, Sally Sheard, says the welfare state we have in Britain today is essentially the dream of three men: Richard Titmuss, Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith, otherwise known as ‘the Titmice’. Through a variety of routes – academic analysis, policy research, political networking – they adapted and promoted the implementation of the ‘cradle-to-grave’ philosophy of William Beveridge’s vision. [p85]
Pearl Jephcott’s career illustrates another critical feature of academic social science: its dependence on the labours of contract research workers who don;t really – compared to teaching staff – have ‘careers’ at all. They lurch from one short-term contract to another, outside the main frame of reference of university life; their social investigations, despite adding enormously to knowledge, all happen at the margins, where they can safely be either forgotten or claimed by those on positions of greater security and power... Carr Saunders and Titmuss clearly had very little idea of Pearl Jephcott’s importance when they decided not to hold on to her at LSE. She, like some of tghe other women in this story, was a missed opportunity for the male academic establishment, but, then, missing such opportunities is part-and-parcel of how it constitutes itself. [p120]
Women members of the network carried out studies of living and working conditions, exposed the policy agenda revealed in these, combined their scientific efforts with practical help for the poor and disadvantaged, and took upon themselves the lobbying and networking needed to bring about effective change. Once change had happened, they did their best to ensure they were put in charge of it. ... The ‘girls’ network’ as they called themselves, made up a sophisticated matrix of ‘women welfare-state builders’. But while the boys’ network and its products have enjoyed global attention, the history of the girls’ network is only just beginning to be written. [p151]
Kendall, another of Younghusband’s correspondents, carried out the first international survey of social work training for the United Nations. ... ‘Social work history and women as leaders are inextricably intertwined,’ she wrote in an article celebrating the achievements of ‘three extraordinary leaders’ – Alice Salomon in Germany, Edith Abbott in the USA and Eileen Younghusband in the UK. These women, she said, were great because of their powerful minds, their incurable curiosity and their scholarship. ‘They believed, perhaps naively, that solid facts, carefully amassed and analyzed, would yield rational answers to troublesome questions.’ This, of course, is a description of what today we would call ‘evidence-based policy’. [p156]
Difficult women are women who don’t need and / or challenge men and their perception of women.[p158]
None of this was talked about at the time. There were few books that even opened a conversation about why the social positions of men and women were so different. [p158]
...the primacy of same-sex relationships was a critical modus operandi for both professional and personal fulfilment in the girls’ network, among those women whose imaginative methodology managed to knit science and passion, evidence and reform, charity and public service, and personal and public life so closely together that none of the elements seemed logical without the other. Relationships between women were the key to female leadership, reform and policy-making, both nationally and internationally, as indeed they were and are for men. ... Women’s independence from men is a notion with which patriarchal culture has always had some difficulty: a collective independence is even more disturbing. Richard Titmuss doesn’t seem to have been at all aware of the operation of the girl’s network in the world he entered at LSE... This was the way things worked in the male world, but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the men that women engaged in it too. [p167]
If I thought marriage or a change of name would enable me to become my own person, i was, of course, mistaken. Becoming one’s own person is the project of a lifetime. Yet it’s also a spurious idea: the creation of a culture unwarrantably fixed on this notion that everyone’s task must ultimately be to find their own separate personhood. We are never separate from the lives that produced us: we carry our childhoods and our genealogy within us always. The only thing that changes is our relationship to these, the stories we tell ourselves and others, our ‘reconstructive endeavours’. [p174]
Richard Titmuss’s defence of welfare rights was non-empirical: he never carried out any research of his own which exposed him to ordinary people’s lives and experiences. He lacked a background in tramping the streets and politely intruding into people’s private lives. In this he differed from Peter Townsend’s extensive experience of qualitative interviewing, and his deeply-felt and acted-on empiricism. [p183]
Like Peter Townsend, Tony Lynes discovered that working on the ground with people the welfare state was supposed to benefit revealed cracks and weaknesses, not only in the mechanics of the system, but in its very conception. Both Lynes and Townsend had entered the uncertain land between public policy and activism. This wasn’t a place with which Richard Titmuss was familiar or in which he felt at home. [p185]
Richard Titmuss never wrote about housework, just as he never did any. [p198]
The best questions are simple ones, but the answers can be complex, especially when the social context is, and there’s nothing simple about patriarchy. Why is it assumed that men win bread and women make it? Why does maternal love mean cleaning other people’s shit off lavatory seats and watching out for their delicate egos all the time? [p202]
The difference between men helping and women always keeping the responsibility seemed an aspect of domestic life that other people (including Richard Titmuss in his observations about the changing family) hadn’t noticed. He ‘helps’ her with the children or the housework, but the children and the housework remain hers. Such a simple distinction between responsibility and help hadn’t apparently been made before. It ultimately proved to be an analytically powerful entry into women’s experience of their labour. [p203]
My book Sex, Gender and Society, articulated the conceptual distinction which had until then eluded the comprehension of most people (except for grammarians and a few esoteric medics) between the nature of our material bodies, which are sexed, and our cultural selves, which are gendered. ...time quickly saw it migrate into ‘the standard for most sociology’ and ‘a feminist primer’, enabling a materialist account of women’s oppression, by usefully replacing the sociologically jaded language of sex roles’. The message spread beyond social science by successfully introducing the term gender into the lexicon of ordinary discourse. [p204]
I can’t emphasise enough the significant failure of both public and academic understandings to grasp that gender us about men as well as women. [p205]
Richard Titmuss wrote about medical sociology, about medicine as a social service, and Ann Oakley started her journey as a sociologist of health and illness with studies of maternity care. His interest was in the NHS as an organisation, in the development of destructive ‘organisational fetishes’, but he also saw the effect on both providers and users of health care of increasing science and specialisation, the disappearance of whole person medicine, and the therapeutic importance of courtesy and sociability. Her focus has been on the absence of science from many health care practices, on the risks and long-term impacts of interventions. We would, it occurs to me now, have made a good team. [p206]
As Wright Mills said, the good writer tries to enrich private life by making it publicly relevant and to humanise public affairs by giving them personal meaning. I hope I’ve done some of that in this book. [p213]
Richard Titmuss was a legend in his own time, revered by many, hailed as the founder of social policy and/or a scion of the welfare state, revealing to us secrets about the social divison of welfare, and mapping for us the inequitable allocation of benefits and risks in an irresponsible society. His daughter grew up puzzling about the celebration of legendary men, its place in relation to the achievements of ordinary people. ... Richard Titmuss wasn’t a saint, and he was my father. The contradictions evident in his philosophy of welfare played out in his private life. [p243]
Those of us who show how scholarship has been a singularly biased pursuit are called ‘feminists’ or ‘qualitative’ or both, and thus placed in a special room of our own. The clamour of our voices in that room is indeed like that famous quotation form George Eliot’s Middlemarch: ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’ [p249]
The story of father and Daughter has settled on two small moments in this convoluted history: the separation during the 1950s and 1960s in Britain of social policy from the older linked traditions of social administration and social work; and the emergence, since the 1960s, of gender analysis. The first moment is associated with the legend of Richard Titmuss, the second with the legend of the ‘feminist pioneer’, his daughter, Ann Oakley. [p250]
The reason why Settlement social science happened outside universities was because it was largely the province of women, who weren’t welcome inside them. [p250]
So called ‘qualitative’ research or ‘qualitative’ sociology is the poor relation of quantitative social science; it’s the view from outside the ivory tower, the science of the outsider. It’s a label, a designation, a value-judgement, and, since the launch of second wave feminism, it’s been part of the hermeneutics of gender. Hence its disposal on my shoulders, where it wears me down with the tedium of having to perpetually engage with it. ...but it’s unproductive... The question is: What is the question this research is trying to answer and what kind of method is it therefore appropriate to use. [p252]
It wasn’t the welfare state which prompted the study of social administration, but the heritage of social work effort and education. More or less the same argument can be made for the history of sociology: that its post-war development was altogether shaped by the links between social reform, social work and social research facilitated by the international project of the ‘girls’ network’. [p253]
Sociology wasn’t a label Richard Titmuss himself used; indeed, once the political radicals that infested LSE in the 1960s arrived contaminated by sociology, he became particularly anxious not to have anything to do with it, and even found himself making liaisons with the economists whose right-wing views hadn’t previously appealed to him. [p254]
The divorce of social work, of female social science, from institutionalised sociology, allowed sociology to repeat all the mistakes of male socialisation. [p255]
December 6, 2014
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