Abstract
‘Father and Daughter’ are two public social scientists, the author, Ann Oakley, and her father, Richard Titmuss. The words after the colon are ‘big’ words, complex in their range of meanings and usages and in the historical circumstances that gave rise to their development. To break the title down in this way sets up a set of questions about the use of auto/biography in the exploration of these more general concerns.
To a large extent, Oakley succeeds in this task. This is achieved partly by her seeing her book as a series of linked essays rather than as a straightforward chronological account. A broad temporal sequence is maintained but the longer chapters dealing with the linked lives of father and daughter are interspersed with shorter reflective chapters dealing with more intimate but memorable moments of being. Even within the longer chapters, we do not always get what might be expected. Chapter 15, for example, begins with a contrast between Titmuss’s late entry into academic life at 43 and his daughter’s beginning a more or less life-long academic career at the age of 18. This leads, via Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) to a detailed consideration of the patriarchal structure and practices of academic life.
Another distinctive feature of this book is that way in which Oakley constantly returns to the ‘Blue Plaque House’. This is the London house which now tells passers-by that Richard Titmuss, ‘Social Scientist’ lived there between 1951 and 1973. However, to the young Ann this was a family home for a family that ‘didn’t ever really […] feel like one’ (p. 2). It was a place where Titmuss, Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend – the ‘Titmice’ – engaged in their detailed exploration of the welfare state. This house is significant not so much as a repository of happy or unhappy memories but as a nagging reminder of the meeting of the public and the private and how this impacted on the author as she was growing up.
Oakley defines patriarchy as ‘a system of society or government ruled by men’ (p. xii). But, playing alongside this formal definition is the older, more literal, idea of the rule of the father. This is clearly seen at home when everyday life and routines revolve around Titmuss and his work. This impact of this domestic patriarchy is seen vividly in Oakley’s account of her mother, Kay, and of ‘the frustrated spirit inside my mother’s edgy body’ (p. 68). She was easily overlooked in the comings and goings at the house, but essential to its everyday life and to maintaining the memory of her husband.
But this older sense of patriarchy can also be seen in Oakley’s account of the working relationships of the Titmice. Oakley details the homosociable – and homoerotic – relationships among the Titmice and other men based at the LSE. The links between academic practices and masculinities are clearly demonstrated but it is also clear that the power of men – over women and over other men – is bound up with these other emotional, quasi-familial relationships: ‘[w]omen, in their roles as hostesses, wives and daughters, were marginal to them’ (p. 96).
This account clearly highlights the gender themes in the conflicts between the developing discipline of Social Administration and the theory and practice of Social Work. But Oakley is generally skilful in remaining alive to the complexities of academic politics and in not reducing the key players to actors reading from patriarchal scripts. For the most part she aims to show, rather than to tell, the reader about the workings of patriarchy.
And patriarchy is not the whole story. There are, for example, themes of class divisions as well as of gender in her accounts of the LSE struggles. We are also shown accounts of resistances to patriarchy. One of the most fascinating chapters deals with relationships between women, in some cases going back to the days of Hull House in Chicago, on both sides of the Atlantic. The ‘difficult women’ did not struggle as individuals but had numerous supportive friendship and sexual ties. Clearly, also, the development of feminism was a central part of Ann Oakley’s career (and some of the tensions between her and her parents), a development to which she has made major contributions. However, just as she looks at the networks between women in earlier generations I should have liked to have read more about Oakley’s own social networks and the influences on her own work. How important, for one example, was Hannah Gavron’s The Captive Wife published in 1966? This is not to diminish Oakley’s achievements but to want to see them as embedded in wider sets of influences in the way that she demonstrates for earlier generations of women scholars and activists.
My concern here has been with the use of auto/biographical account in social enquiry. One of the many strengths of this book is how she constantly reminds readers of the complexities of such work. We are shown how important it is to look critically at the letters, the diaries, the photographs and the interviews which are at the heart of work of this kind. Anyone considering embarking on any kind of life study would profit from a close reading of this book.
‘Richard Titmuss wasn’t a saint and he was my father’ (p. 243). In a sense this says it all. We read about the attempts that were made to present Titmuss as some kind of secular saint and the ways in which he, inevitably, fell short of this ideal. We read about the complexities of being the daughter of someone who was celebrated by a Blue Plaque. Ultimately, what this book tells us is that the complexities of lives lived always fall short of the more abstract categories which social scientists construct to make sense of, to contextualise, these lives. Fortunately.