Abstract
Lives, whether lived, observed or imagined (or all three) can be written about in many ways. As we all know, the notion of truth as life-writing’s ineluctable aim is seductively false, although this does not prevent it from haunting us. Some things are perhaps still more true than others. Father and Daughter was not a programmatic book – I did not have an agenda (personal or public) to satisfy in writing it. I came to it with three concerns, which were/are all about the disjunctions between publicly accepted knowledge (otherwise known as ideology) on the one hand, and authentic personal experiences, on the other. The first concern was about how people’s reputations, accepted stories about their natures and achievements, can effectively cloak who they actually were and what they actually did. Second, there is the way this mechanism operates in the case of The Family, so that families in practice, with all their emotional untidiness, love, joy, anger and despair, disappear behind a gauzy screen of what we imagine The Family ought to be. Third, there is, in Father and Daughter, that story in the middle chapters about the amazing network of women whose place at LSE was marginal, and became more so under the aegis of my father, who reproduced, unthinkingly I suspect, the masculinist regime of academia in automatically perceiving the work of women to be of less significance than the work of men.
All three reviews note that they found this part of the book the most interesting (not only because it seems the least problematic). I am heartened by this, as my current research is into the background of the women who found themselves in Richard Titmuss’s Department at LSE in the 1950s, some a lingering legacy of the old Ratan Tata Department, the provenance of RH Tawney and Clement Attlee, and its historic links to the Webbs. Beatrice Webb was an honorary, rather than perhaps a fully accredited, member, of a gargantuan network of women reformers, researchers, social scientists and participants in campaigns for the emancipation of both women and the world from the destructive strictures of the patriarchal, capitalist, militaristic nation state. The disappearance of this history is not anybody’s fault, of course, yet in seeking explanations we do have to look at the way in which academic social science developed so as to remove from the centre work which challenged all-important (within the academy) distinctions between theory and practice, between speculation and observation, between the study of the public and the private, quietly insisting, to help this sleight of hand on its way, that these dichotomies must be regarded as a matter of moral respectability.
I also enjoyed David Morgan’s observation that he would like to have known more about my own social networks. These are now being studied by a PhD student at Edinburgh who is bravely embarking on the task of combining formal social network analysis with narrative case-studies, using my work as an example. Morgan observes that my work is embedded in wider sets of influences: of course it is. Father and Daughter is not about those influences, which is why ‘Father’ comes first in the title. But even the ambition of writing such a book would have been inconceivable without the background of others’ attempts to render more porous the classical boundaries between what one may write about and may not, and in what terms. Liz Stanley mentions Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son in her review, which I did read, although I did not reference it, perhaps partly because I found it very depressing. Lonely childhoods with unsympathetic parents are depressing. I find them even more so when they are inscribed with the kind of caution Gosse applied to his. He published his memoir anonymously at first, because he was worried about how much he might be attacked for his lack of filial piety. This worried me, too. It worried me not because I mind being criticized (if I did I would hardly have become an academic in the first place), but because such criticism invariably misses the point. We all love our parents and also reject them: but are there not far more interesting and unusual stories to be told?
Sasha Roseneil’s struggle to get into the book reminded me of many such I have experienced in the past, especially with books whose accessibility is depressed by weighty language and irrelevant detours. I wish I could share her belief in the ‘moral bonds’ of academic networks, and hope that she did not write this review purely because of her transactional debt to Sociology for publishing her own work. ‘Filial loyalty’ raises its distracting head again in her review. I wonder whether this accusation is more likely to be thrown at women than men, given the greater sanctions normally applied to women’s ‘deviant’ behaviour? Do we still expect men to be competitive and women to fall into line? Is this a theme in what was happening at LSE in the 1950s? There are so many interesting questions, and they are not at all depressing, nor, I think, despite Roseneil’s view, can it really be counted depressing to gain a more informed sense – not of course merely through Father and Daughter, but by means of much other literature as well – on the origin of welfare states, on the ‘affective crucible’ to which our many current, and also extremely interesting struggles about welfare, can be traced. Nostalgia is a powerful business, but it is not another name for truth.