Thanks to my wife: gender and politics in the academy
Mar 19, 2024Season 1Episode 1
The Sociological Review
Have you ever thought about the contributions that the wives of academics have made to their husband’s work and how those contributions have been acknowledged? In Episode 1 we’re looking at the Thanks For Typing hashtag that went viral in 2017, shining a spotlight onto the often hidden work of wives over the years. Ros and Val are joined by the hashtag’s originator, Bruce Holsinger, an author and academic based at the University of Virginia. They’re also joined by Miriam David, a feminist educator at University College London, who has written about gender and the academy. They discuss how the hashtag came about and consider how and why it went viral. They go on to reflect on the unseen contributions of wives to their husbands’ academic work and the implications of that in the past and today.
Episode Credits
Guests: Bruce Holsinger and Miriam David Hosts: Ros Edwards and Val Gillies Producer: Chris Garrington Music: The Beat of Nature, Olexy Artwork: Krissie Brighty-Glover
Have you ever thought about the contributions that the wives of academics have made to their husband’s work and how those contributions have been acknowledged? In Episode 1 we’re looking at the Thanks For Typing hashtag that went viral in 2017, shining a spotlight onto the often hidden work of wives over the years. Ros and Val are joined by the hashtag’s originator, Bruce Holsinger, an author and academic based at the University of Virginia. They’re also joined by Miriam David, a feminist educator at University College London, who has written about gender and the academy. They discuss how the hashtag came about and consider how and why it went viral. They go on to reflect on the unseen contributions of wives to their husbands’ academic work and the implications of that in the past and today.
Episode Credits
Guests: Bruce Holsinger and Miriam David Hosts: Ros Edwards and Val Gillies Producer: Chris Garrington Music: The Beat of Nature, Olexy Artwork: Krissie Brighty-Glover
Hello and welcome. Thanks for typing is a podcast that uncovers the largely invisible contribution of social researchers wives to studies that laid the foundations of modern sociology.
Val Gillies:
A podcast that we hope will make contemporary sociologists think about whose shoulders they stand on, and which will raise questions about the gender division of labour in today's academia.
Ros Edwards:
I'm Ros Edwards, Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton.
Val Gillies:
And I'm Val Gillies, Professor of Social Policy at the University of Westminster.
Ros Edwards:
Over the last decade, Val and I have been researching the role that the wives of social researchers played in post war British studies, using archive materials and diaries kept by the wives of well known sociologists. We've been piecing together their central involvement in groundbreaking social research on families, class and community life
Val Gillies:
Across the Thanks for Typing podcast, we're considering the implications of these often overlooked collaborations for the development of social knowledge, both then and now.
Ros Edwards:
In this our first episode, we're looking at the Thanks for Typing hashtag that went viral in 2017, shining a spotlight on the hidden work of academic and other authors' wives. We're delighted to be joined by the hashtag's originator, Bruce Holsinger, an author and academic based at the University of Virginia. We're also delighted to be joined by Miriam David, a feminist educator based at the University College London, who's written about gender and the Academy. Bruce, if we could start with you, since it was your hashtag that inspired us. Could you just tell me, how did you even begin to think of looking at book acknowledgments for wives' input?
Bruce Holsinger:
Yeah, so I, you know, I was at a soccer tournament, one Saturday morning, back in 2017. And I was just exchanging some tweets with a friend of mine, we were laughing together about this kind of language and acknowledgements. And I just took a couple screenshots of some acknowledgments in, in Google Books, where I just did a little search for, I think it's, quote, unquote, my wife, and thanks and typing, because any academic, you know, you're used to seeing that kind of languages and language and, in older monographs, and you're in New York, in any subject. My subject is mediaeval literature. And suddenly, there were 2030 examples just from the get go. I just took little screenshots and posted them on Twitter with snarky little captions with the hashtag, thanks for typing. And we just started having fun, and it just kind of spread. And it was just the response on Twitter back when X was Twitter was just crazy. It just went viral for some reason, but reasons I think you're probably exploring in your project in some way. So that's really how it began, it was just completely off the cuff. Hashtags are not owned by anyone. It was just something to mark this particular subject. And so that's that's the I guess, if it has a quasi origin story, it would be that morning.
Val Gillies:
So the hashtag really did go viral. It got a lot of publicity, particularly in academic circles. What I really wanted to ask you, Bruce, was whether you've had any interactions with the male authors that were featured in in the hashtags, was there any backlash?
Bruce Holsinger:
There was a little bit of pushback, people would say, Well, come on, this was a different time, it was a, you know, different place. But some of the examples are so extreme, you know, I'd like to thank my wife for collecting 15 years of data, coding it all, typing it all up and compiling it in a sensible way, as I wrote the book, you know, that that kind of thing. So a lot of the the examples weren't just casual, thanks. Most of them that ended up getting posted, either by me or other people who started posting on that hashtag, were pretty astonishing, and it's kind of jaw dropping. So I don't think there was a there wasn't a lot of pushback in that way, the pushback that did come and rightfully so, I got dragged a little bit because not so much me but the coverage of the hashtag, because suddenly there were stories in like National Public Radio, I think the Chronicle of Higher Education, there was one on it might have been the Baffler or The Daily Beast or something. And, you know, a few of them use my author photo, and they post it, you know, Professor discovers that wives are involved in in their husbands research. And, you know, there was there were a couple pieces that pointed out that, you know, other scholars like Alexis Coe, and other historians have been looking at this kind of thing for a long time. So, you know, there was an ironic way that the coverage, the breathless coverage of the not just the virality of it on Twitter, but the news coverage of it kind of proved the point of the hashtag in some ways. So, and that was the only kind of real pushback, and that was just, you know, it wasn't about me or anything, it was just about the way that these things can often get covered.
Ros Edwards:
Well, I hope we're not going to add to that. When people say that, you know, it was a different time. We, Val and I, were looking through all that, all those different tweets and the screenshots that other people were posting as well that male academics thanking their wives in their book acknowledgments, that's been a continuing characteristic I mean through into today. So I wonder if I could just turn to Miriam now to mirror. What was your experience of British sociology when you first began as an academic, in relation to input from wives?
Miriam David:
Well, it's a very, very interesting question. I've done six years of research jobs here at London University. And then I went to to America for a year, when I was in America, I was doing research on educational policy decision making. And I came across a book that was on some aspects of educational policy that I'll never forget, it was a book edited by two people called Kirst and Wirt. And I called them Cursed and Worst, because their book was dedicated to their wives who "stand and wait", quite an extraordinary dedication, except acknowledging their kind of underpinning of the research process.
Bruce Holsinger:
Miriam, can I ask that that language that you just cited from that acknowledgement? Thanks to our wives who stand and wait, that language is can you talk about the word wait or just that phrase in general? Is it like wait on wait on us? Or is it as in a waiter is that ..?
Miriam David:
It is an American book. I remembered it because I was so horrified by it. But I think the word wait is wait on. But you Americans very often don't use the prepositions, do you? I think it meant wait on or stand and tolerate the work that their men do.
Bruce Holsinger:
Stand and tolerate, yeah.
Miriam David:
And then when I got to Bristol, I was invited to the University Wives' Club. But I was the member of the university, and I didn't have a wife, I didn't have a husband either. So it was an extraordinary invitation from the university since I had become, as Americans say, a faculty member.
Ros Edwards:
And do you feel that was related to this expectation that the women were the wives who supported their husbands' work?
Miriam David:
Yes, yes. That's what the university Wives Club was, I think.
Val Gillies:
It's really interesting. I think what stands out to me is the lack of self awareness really in, in a profession, you know, that's so defined by power and status. It does make me wonder what the purpose of these book acknowledgments actually are, you know, is it just about expressing gratitude, do you think? Or is there perhaps something a bit more performative going on? What do you think Miriam?
Miriam David:
A bit of both. And I think heavily patronising, isn't it? There was probably some embarrassment too about because their wives were probably as educated as they were. And it does remind me of Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine Mystique. Her study was a very respectable social psychological study of the women who essentially were the wives of not just male academics, but men who weren't as educated as they were. She did her study in the late 1950s. I think she interviewed about 200 women, but she found of all these middle class women, they all really resented not having jobs on a par with their husbands and talked about all the housework they had to do. And so the book came out in 1963, it was an instant success, because I know there were nearly all middle class white women, but at the time, there was no recognition of how they'd had to give up their jobs in order to be wives and mothers.
Val Gillies:
So Bruce, do you think there's an element of embarrassment or self consciousness in the phrasing of these acknowledgments?
Bruce Holsinger:
There's one example I was trying to find out before we came on, where this guy is thanking his wife profusely, while acknowledging that he forgot to thank her in his previous book, and that it had been a source of contention in their marriage for the last 12 years or something like that. There's another one somebody posted, "I turn now to the delicate task of thanking wives", because he's thanking both his past wives and his present wife, my debt to my present wife is even more profound. So it's, you know, why not just thanks to my wife, but thanks to my wives. So it's just this long string of....
Val Gillies:
Yeah - so that's quite sort of personal reasons. Do you think there are any other motivations for writing these acknowledgments?
Unknown:
I would imagine that there's also just a sheer, you know, a sense of maybe keeping domestic harmony. Some of them are very much about, you know, these kind of profuse acknowledgments and expressions of gratitude, as a way of marking, you know, a kind of maybe an attempt to stifle resentment or pushback or something, I don't know.
Val Gillies:
I was just wondering about how they might be read by other academics as well, you know, and how it may position the authors as being, you know, perhaps generous, and, and thoughtful. But that may or may just be me being cynical.
Ros Edwards:
Can I pick up on something you said, right back at the start, you know, that maybe what this podcast was about was this, discovering why the hashtag took off, because it just became this international phenomenon. That is something I do wonder about, because I can see stuff around wives at the moment, absolutely everywhere I was thinking you know. There's books being published, film being made, and so on, you know, sort of, you know, like, when you get a new car, and you you see that new brand of car everywhere on the road, I thought, Is it like that? And it's been around for a while?
Bruce Holsinger:
Yeah, one of the factors is that, you know, it's not just a matter of acknowledgement, and gender politics, and so on. It's also just a matter of the economics of the academy. And this is where is the work of someone like Alexis Coe is really interesting, she had a piece in The Atlantic years ago, probably back in 2013, about how being married helps professors get ahead, especially if they're male, and she has some statistics to back up these kinds of things about like what you know, about the academic labour versus domestic labour. And I think it speaks to, you know, an ongoing truth in in some ways, and you know, where there's, there's this sense that, you know, I see it in the humanities, I realise you all are more in the social sciences, but in the humanities, you know, the idea that, you know, a colleague in the philosophy department needs to get up every morning and, you know, get his briefcase and leave the wife at home and go up to the office to write crucial work of philosophy. You know, that's a kind of myth, I think. And there's a, there's a sense that there's still a lot of kind of old fashioned, retro, gender politics, even among fields where, you know, people boast of their progressivism. And so, you know, I've seen examples of it myself. And so I, you know, I think that the realisation that this is speaking to an ongoing sense of inequality, in and around the academy and all professions is right out there. And that's probably one of the reasons that it struck such a chord.
Ros Edwards:
That's an interesting point there Bruce, about the way that the politics of gender is built into the functioning of the academy. I do wonder, though, are we seeing this now in ways that we didn't previously. Is there something about this current moment in time, Miriam, in terms of a shift towards male academics, demonstrating progressive attitudes?
Miriam David:
Well, I was going to just mention that on the life scientific last week, which is a radio programme, I think it might also be a podcast. On it last week was a an old friend of mine from Bristol University. Now, a rather famous physicist who's called Sir Mike Berry. And he talked in that programme about his relationship with his second wife in Bristol, and the use of the university nursery. Anyway, he mentioned that he had to share childcare with his wife. And so his children went to the nursery. And the times when they didn't go to the nursery, he had them in his office, whilst he wrote theory in physics. And he became a very famous theoretical physicist. And he's been knighted for it. So he saw that as a relevant point to make about his life scientific, which I found quite extraordinary that he would mention this. But this was last week, he was just interviewed. And so I think it's something more than performative. I think it's a way of doing gender politics, as Bruce said, and famous men like him, he felt the need to mention his children, preschool children, and how how they were cared for, and how much he did. And at the same time, come up with these famous theories in physics which struck me as being a bit fanciful.
Val Gillies:
If we could just talk about the sort of key implications then of the hashtag and, and all the work that's been done around wives' contributions. How relevant Do you think that is then to today's academia?
Bruce Holsinger:
I guess in my field, and in my generation, I wouldn't say it's irrelevant. Maybe it's relevant in a different way with different kinds of stakes. You know, I would hesitate to generalise because I don't have any data again, one of the things that I've talked about this so many times every year, it's just it was just a hashtag, you know, for me, it was a, and that and that kind of proves maybe the point in some way or one of the points of the project is, I was I was just kind of laughing about how silly it was all the, the piling on of this stuff by husbands doing these kinds of unthinking acknowledgments, you know, I think it would take more, you know, more investigation of the kinds of differential work expectations and tenure expectations, and, you know, things like parental leave, it would be interesting to know, you know, if academic wives if they have their tenure clocks, more delayed, for example, than academic fathers? And what are the implications of that? I'm sure that kind of work is being done. But to me, I think that there's a part of the wider resonance. But
Ros Edwards:
One comment I read in one of the articles that I think was talking about your hashtag, was that the fact that wives had supported their husband's work in the past unpaid and unacknowledged set expectations for what we as academics, what our workload could possibly be today.
Bruce Holsinger:
Oh, that's a great point. I hadn't Of course, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If the work expectation of someone from 40 years ago, let's say was set, you're using the gauge of, you know, men with with wives who are taking care of everything at home. Oh, of course. That's yeah, that's, that's, that's a really interesting way of looking at it.
Ros Edwards:
Maybe that expectation that men were academics, and had wives who took care of everything at home for them. Maybe that not only shaped workload, expectations, but also who should be an academic and what was worthy of study. Miriam, I think that this was part of your own experience as an academic.
Miriam David:
A group of us. Well, there were three of us who struggled to get the first feminist course done at the University. And we called it eventually, because we were frightened of using the word women or whatever we call it Family and Social Policy. At the time, we were so concerned to get it embedded. And it was so difficult for it to be acknowledged that women were academics, and that this was a relevant, appropriate academic subject. My experiences is of the fight that women had to be established on an equal footing with men, as academics in the social sciences.
Ros Edwards:
Oh, I hesitate to ask this question of you, Bruce, so I'm not going to. Miriam is there anybody that you would think in your book acknowledgments? Anyone you'd like to thank for typing?
Miriam David:
I do I do all my own typing now.
Bruce Holsinger:
As do I, as do I.
Ros Edwards:
Sorry I was only teasing.
Miriam David:
I do think that's an interesting shift. Bruce, in a way, pointed me back to this. In the post war period in academia, up until I think, the early 1960s, men got a family allowance for their wives and children, in addition to the State family allowance. So universities were paying men to have housebound housewives and children, that acknowledges the burdens that men have, if they've got dependent wives and children, compared with those who no longer have dependent wives and children. In a way, it kind of feeds the notion that men could depend upon their wives' domestic labour. My boss in Bristol, my head of department used to talk about having this allowance, and he had four or five children.
Val Gillies:
So that's interesting universities, then were paying men for the domestic and the administrative labour of their wives, so that they could then take credit for the intellectual insights. Bruce, do you have any perspectives on this, as a historian?
Bruce Holsinger:
You know, in the Middle Ages, there is this kind of theory of authorship, that divided, we didn't have this idea of a unitary author, there would be the Auctor, a kind of authority behind the words, but then there would also be a Scriptor, the scribe, you know, someone who wrote things down, but wasn't necessarily the mind behind the original idea. Or even the, you know, the attributed author of the work. There's an interesting commonality here. I mean, it's very, you know, indirect, of course, but just the idea that, that writing things down labour, that say the labour of typing is a different kind of work, I think and one of the things that comes across in these acknowledgments you because you read some of them, some of the thanks for typing examples, and people would say, Oh, my God, you know, she should be listed as a co author on this book. That's what she is. She's not the wife who typed the manuscript. She's the wife who collected years of data and compiled it and interpreted it in some cases, and she should be the co author of your book, you know, and in the Middle Ages that, you know, the idea that, that often we often have no idea who the scribes were, who the people were, who actually wrote the books down, copied them, and so on. And scribes would sometimes complain in the margins about the grunt work that they had to do copying down the author's words. So there aren't so many, I don't think there any examples of you know, wives, being the scribes for their husbands. But there's a similar kind of division of labour between the intellectual intellectual originality on the one hand, and the brute labour of writing down the words or copying them on the other. So these things have a long history in different ways.
Ros Edwards:
They do don't they and that idea of what is intellectual labour and so on is really fascinating. Bruce and Miriam, thank you so much for joining us for Episode One of thanks for typing. What an interesting start to our podcast Val, it's got me thinking about so many different things, not least my own book acknowledgments and who and how I thank people so I don't have a wife to thank. But I've noticed that I'm mainly referencing other academics who've helped along the way, how about you?
Val Gillies:
It took me an embarrassingly long time really to recognise the significance of acknowledgments in academia. Because I never really bothered to read them myself. I didn't include any acknowledgments in my PhD thesis, or my first book, and then I started to realise just what a massive faux pas that was. Because academic acknowledgments are about etiquette, really, they're often highly strategic, and definitely political. And I do think they're performative because often, they're the only part of a book where the academic actually gets seen as a real person. So I think they're quite revealing in that way. And I think we all know that, really, and I think we choose who and how we thank quite carefully. So
Ros Edwards:
Actually, one big takeaway from me from talking that's all I'll say. about wives' contributions, is how gender divisions of labour are institutionalised and how the academy works in lots of different ways. So, Miriam mentioned the university Wives Club, she was invited to join and the women in those clubs were doing the institutional domestic labour of hosting dinners, organising socials, and so on. In other words, they acted as wives of the institution, as well as being wives of the individual male academics.
Val Gillies:
Yeah, they were doing such a huge amount of work on top of all of the domestic chores, that, of course, would have taken much longer. I mean, there weren't the same kinds of appliances in those days, like dishwashers. I don't think there were even disposable nappies in the 60s and 70s. But also, as well, we're quite quick to say that we all do our own typing. But we've all got computers these days that make it so much easier, but of course these women were using manual typewriters. And that required real skill to be able to type at speed and accurately so I do think it's important not to forget that as well.
Ros Edwards:
Absolutely. I think it's a shame actually, that the contributions to the thanks for typing hashtag, they're disappearing as people leave X formerly Twitter and that makes me think about the way that women's contributions continually get obscured and forgotten over time. And we seem to have to rediscover women's efforts again and again. So I'm really pleased we will look at this in the next episode.
Val Gillies:
Yeah, I think it is a constant struggle to remember and to recognise the contributions of previous generations of women. And it does make me think of Victoria Smith's book, Hags about the demonization of older women. And she makes this really good point, I think about the fact there's this pernicious cycle at work, in that women's equality is always positioned as just over the horizon and just about to happen. And so younger women get framed as the bearers of that equality and you know, as the progressive ones, while older women then are seen as failures, essentially, and complicit as well, also as a source of embarrassment and shame. And you've only got to think really about how derided housewives have been as being dupes of patriarchy. And so everything they did gets forgotten. The trouble is that that cycle just is endless through time. And so the really good point, I think that Victoria Smith makes is that women's history always belongs to the women of tomorrow,
Ros Edwards:
Well, we've got this podcast, so that's an opportunity to bring that to attention. We've got a few thanks of our own to make here on the podcast. Thanks once again to our guests, Miriam David and Bruce Holsinger and thank you to you, our listeners. And thanks also to the production team of Chris Garrington and Krissie Brighty-Glover at Research Podcasts.
Val Gillies:
Thanks for Typing is brought to you in partnership with the Sociological Review Foundation whose mission is to share sociologically imaginative insights on our world and help pave the way towards a more just future. Find out more about all of the Foundation's podcasts at thesociologicalreview.org