Thanks for Typing

Wives in the archives: researching wives’ contributions to their husbands’ work

• The Sociological Review • Season 1 • Episode 3

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In Episode 3 we’re talking about wives in the archives and asking where we can find out more about the contributions that wives have made to the work of their academic husbands. Joining us are Sophie Bridges, from the Churchill Archives in Cambridge and Chris Renwick, Professor of Modern History at the University of York. Sophie’s work has focused on the personal papers of people involved in social research such as Michael Young and Phyllis Willmott. Chris is the author of British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past, and he is currently writing a book on the life and work of the sociologist Peter Townsend.

Episode credits

Guests: Sophie Bridges and Chris Renwick
Hosts: Ros Edwards and Val Gillies
Producer: Chris Garrington
Music: The Beat of Nature, Olexy
Artwork: Krissie Brighty-Glover

Episode Resources

Find out more about Thanks for Typing at The Sociological Review.

Ros Edwards:

Welcome to Thanks for Typing, a podcast that uncovers the largely invisible contribution of social researchers' wives, to studies that laid the foundations of modern Sociology. I'm Ros Edwards and I'm a 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 of families, class, and community life.

Val Gillies:

In this podcast, we reveal the major but unrecognised contributions sociologists' wives have made to the discipline, and consider the implications of these overlooked collaborations for the development of social knowledge both then and now.

Ros Edwards:

In episode three, we're talking about wives in the archives, and asking where we can find out more about the contributions that wives have made to the work of their academic husbands. Joining us are Sophie Bridges from the Churchill Archives in Cambridge, and Chris Renwick, Professor of Modern History at the University of York. Sophie's work has focused on papers of people involved in social research, such as Michael Young, and Peter and Phyllis Wilmott. Chris is the author of British Sociology's Lost Biological Roots, a history of futures past, and he's currently writing a book on the life and work of the sociologist Peter Townsend. So Sophie, if I could just start with you. This is a simple question. What does an archivist do? Because not everybody will know that. Could you tell us about your work in the archives?

Sophie Bridges:

Yes, absolutely Ros. I work now with the personal papers of individuals and families. I've worked in the past with organisational institutional records. So an archivist collects archives, and what that really means is going out and meeting people in their homes or workplaces and talking to them about their papers, and about transferring them to an archive. And sometimes that's talking to an individual, often at the end of their lives, or talking to their archival intermediaries, who might be partners, family members, biographers, or historians. And once the papers have come into the archive, it's the archivists who catalogue them. And the catalogues are then used by researchers in the reading room, to identify material that could be relevant to their their writing. And of course, the archivists are on hand then also to talk to researchers, and share their expertise and learn from them as well about their insights into the collections. And we work alongside our colleagues who are conservators, who do all the work of the practical preservation of papers, repackaging them and conserving them when they come here.

Val Gillies:

Yes, we're certainly very grateful to the work of archivists. Chris, you must have spent a lot of time in the archives researching sociologists, how did you come to be interested in the history of the discipline?

Chris Renwick:

Yes, yes, you are right. I have spent a very long time in archives, including at Churchill College in fact, looking at the Michael Young papers. I came to the history of Sociology through doing a Master's degree in the history and philosophy of science. I was originally interested in the history of the biological sciences. But I came to be interested in late 19th century debates about how biology related to our ideas about the social. And through that I became interested in the foundation of Sociology as a discipline in this country where there was a big discussion and in fact, the main interest was really in how biology and specifically eugenics was going to be part of this new field called Sociology. And through that I've kind of pursued that through the early 20th century, I came to be interested in the kind of collection of individuals in the mid 20th century who, who kind of put Sociology and Social Policy on a new footing after the Second World War in this country. And it was through that that I got to Peter Townsend.

Ros Edwards:

Us researchers sometimes talk about discovering papers in dusty archives, which I must stress that's not my experience of the absolutely scrupulously clean Churchill archives. So I wonder how you feel about that description, Sophie, if you hear it?

Sophie Bridges:

I know it is a pet peeve of archivists, but I also recognise the truth of it. I mean, you know, Rss, because you've discovered archives in some very insalubrious basements, you know, basically fragile and sort of rotting away so I do recognise that description of the kind of tangibility, the tangible qualities of archives that they are dusty. And I also feel that archivists have to acknowledge that even when we institutionalise collections, and we bring them into an archive, and we always like to stress that they're in these clean or sort of antiseptic, strong rooms that they've been repackaged or Reere-boxed, that sometimes there are collections they're lying neglected and overlooked by us and they haven't received the same care, the same attention. They haven't been catalogued, they have been disregarded. And so often, that is women's papers. So I recognise that element of the description. And it's true also that discoveries happen, I know discovered by a historian is another pet peeve of archivists. But so often that's true, because the new insights that historians bring, make us look again at our collections and reevaluate the ways that we've treated them. But also, of course, we do have expertise to share. And so often things haven't been discovered. They've been known to the archivists, and we've just perhaps been reticent about bringing that collection's knowledge into discussions with historians. And I suppose the part of the description that I do really reject is the sense that archives are irrelevant in some way or can't speak to the present moment.

Ros Edwards:

If I could turn to Chris, I wonder if you could tell us a bit about being an archive user because I'm thinking of Liz Stanley's s chapter in the archive project book, and she's a feminist sociologist, and she conceptualises the practical strategies, the tools of archival research, as working with and making sense of stuff. And I just wonder, what is the process of finding and using archives for you, Chris?

Chris Renwick:

I mean, this kind of conception of, you know, dusty archives, and also of discovering things, it's, it's what Sophie said there there, I think is true is that it's both true and not true at the same time, in the sense that often, someone has discovered this stuff at some point in time. You know, at the moment, I have sitting in my office, all of Peter Townsend's desk diaries from across his career, because they were just sat in someone's house. Once I'm done with them, I can assure Sophie, they will be deposited in an archive. But Sophie, we've really enjoyed working with the physical that sense of discovering things is I think people's conception of that is often that somehow, you know, the letter or the diary or the you know, whatever the document is, is somehow something that wasn't wasn't known to people that people didn't know it existed. And of course, the thing about writing history is that, yeah, we see different things at different points in time. And we can look at the same document and see documents that have been so carefully preserved in archives. very different things. Thinking about my experience, at the moment of dealing with Peter Townsend's papers, which are at the University of Essex, where he was a founding Professor of Sociology, there's mountains and mountains and mountains of stuff there. Quite a lot of that stuff is stuff that I've seen and read about other historians writing about. So thinking, for example, the stuff that I've worked on, most recently, to do with his surveys in East London and surveys of old people's homes across the country, a number of historians have written about that stuff. But they were looking at those papers for specific reasons. And when I've gone back and looked at them, for the reasons that that I had, which was looking for insights into his working methods in relation to his home life and his personal life, because because I'm interested at the moment in his biography, not not not just those academic studies, I found things in there which which weren't of interest to historians who have looked at those papers before. So actually it's the questions that you go into the archive with are things that frame what you find. No one can ever produce a completely But it does occur to me that researchers in the future won't definitive account of a particular set of papers, because we're all going in there with different questions. necessarily be able to do this because most things today are digital, and they're much less permanent. What impact do you think that might have on archives in the future?

Sophie Bridges:

Well, full disclosure here, I'm just 100% a paper person and not a digital archivist and for me, that is a sad future because I love the material qualities of working with paper archives, and really feel that those material qualities are part of the interpretation and can be part of the interpretation. Thinking about Phyllis Willmott's diary, which Ros and Val have looked at, obviously, it's part of a sort of quite capacious genre of archives, the diary. But it also has these very individual qualities not just in her style of writing, but actually in all of its material being. And so that for me would be something that I feel would be such a loss. And that digital archives will sort of flatten out some of that individual character of papers. As I say, I'm not at all an expert in this field and slightly kind of dread this future and find it very difficult to predict the future as anyone does. But yes, I think there are questions around will it make it more difficult to identify authorship, which is obviously something that's been so key to recognising the research contributions of Phyllis Willmott and in Chris' writing on Ruth Townsend. Will there be questions around authenticity, unless we can preserve email archives, will we lose that sense of people's networks and the interchange of ideas that we have through correspondence, I suppose thinking also about how vulnerable digital archives are and that's very much uppermost in the minds of people working in cultural collections at the moment, because of the cyber attack on the British Library and the damage that's done to their digital collections and the availability of that information.

Val Gillies:

Yes there's a sense, it could all just disappear, isn't there, Chris is the ephemeral nature of digital traces, something that worries you as a historian?

Chris Renwick:

Yeah, I think I think it is, actually. And this is something that I am grappling with, in writing this biography of Peter Townsend. And it isn't something that I actually thought about, when I started the project. It became an issue that I started to think about last year because Townsend's career, it ranges from the early 1950s. But he doesn't retire until the early 21st century. And he kind of retires from Bristol, sorry, in the early 1990s, but he goes back to the LSE. And he never really retires- he's active all the way through, really to his death in 2009. And one thing that became apparent quite early on was that the paper archive, although so there's always paper there it starts to tail off, and it starts to tail off in the in the mid 1980s. And that process accelerates in the 1990s. And if you're someone who's interested in the not published output of somebody's career and their work, you start to have questions about well, actually, how am I going to be able to reconstruct the kinds of relationships and the kinds of networks the kinds of things that Sophie was talking about there, to all intents and purposes, the second half of someone's career that I've been able to do for the first half of their career? I don't have any good answers to that right now. I'm having discussions with with with people who have access to computers and that Townsend used in the second half his career and assure me there are ways to to get at this stuff. But there's then actually an interesting set of questions. Once you've got access to a computer, someone's computer, for example, and their emails. None of that stuff's thrown away, is it? So you don't actually have a massive proliferation of stuff in electronic form and actually trying to handle that stuff, I think is then a quite complicated question. You've got the question about stuff that just kind of disappears in electronic form. But then you've got, well, if we can recover all of that stuff, we've actually got a huge mass of information and data and trying to make sense of it and bring some order to it becomes another kind of challenge. I think.

Sophie Bridges:

That is so true, it feels so much easier. And perhaps that's just, you know, my age and things I'm used to, but it feels so much easier to look through a book or a file than to start laboriously opening documents on the screen to find out what they contain.

Chris Renwick:

I think that's absolutely true. I mean, I guess we only have to think about the incredibly long email chains that we might be involved in at work at some point in time. And, you know, making sense of those in the moment is sometimes challenging, isn't it? And you kind of think, well, what's this gonna look like to someone in 50 years' time?

Ros Edwards:

If I could think about other things that might get lost and forgotten. Sophie, how did you come to think about and recognise the importance of wives and other women in the generation of knowledge because I know that that's an interest of yours?

Sophie Bridges:

I suppose it was really when I came to work at Churchill Archive Centre, and to work with personal papers. And I would quite often hear people say, 'Oh, Churchill Archive Centre is an archive of men'. And on its face, I think that was true. And it was certainly what was reflected in our catalogues and in the collections that we publicised and drew attention to. But once I was digging around behind the scenes in the strong room, like so many people, both researchers and archivists, I became more and more aware that there were many women's papers here and they were hidden. And most commonly, they were subsumed in the archives of male partners, and they just weren't described in the catalogues. There was no or very limited access to them for researchers, and they quite often just hadn't received the care and attention of the male partner's archive. And it was so ironic to me, really, because then, if I looked in the collection files, which are the records we have here of our interactions with the depositors of papers, I could see that so often women had been the archival intermediaries for the afterlives of male partners and relatives that they had been the people who had transferred the papers to the archives here, and had, you know, been concerned about that, and taken the care to do that. And that role was so unacknowledged. And even now, I think we don't always ask when we're talking to people about their papers, 'Oh, does your partner have papers too?' even you know, when that could be very relevant when we're looking at these collaborative relationships like Peter and Phyllis Willmott, and Peter and Ruth Townsend. So yes, I think those things all sort of came together and coalesced for me. And I just became more and more interested in finding women in the archives here and more generally aware of the ways in which they're hidden across institutional archives.

Val Gillies:

Sophie, you mentioned Phyllis Willmott earlier, you did actually meet I think, Phyllis in person during that negotiation. Could you tell us a bit about what she was like?

Sophie Bridges:

Phyllis first got in touch with me when I started working here, and I was cataloguing Michael Young's papers. And she had some audio cassette recordings of interviews that she had done with Michael, about his early life. And so we talked about her donating those to the collection. Then I went down to Highgate, to meet her and to look at her papers. And I was aware from chatting to David Kynaston, the historian who was working in the reading rooms here that Phyllis was a long term diarist. And so that's how I met her. And we became friends and remained friends until her death in 2013. And yes, as a person, Phil was extremely aliveShe was a very alert, very observant, very empathetic, very warm person. Even in later life when she was, you know, somewhat debilitated by illness, she was still really engaged with the world and interested in other people.

Val Gillies:

That's that's the sense I think we got of her from reading her her diaries. Exactly that. Chris, turning to Ruth Townsend, how did you come to discover the contributions that she'd made to her husband, Peter's research and career?

Chris Renwick:

So Peter did a series of very long interviews with Paul Thompson. These are available online. They're part We were talking in the last episode about sort of the of the Life Stories project. Paul and Peter worked together for a long time at Essex, Paul was one of the first lecturers that Peter hired in the Department of Sociology when it was founded in the mid 1960s. And so perhaps, unsurprisingly, that interview with Peter turned into one of the longest, I think the longest by quite some distance of the Oral Histories that Paul did. I think it kind of amounts to something like nine hours in length in total. Now, in that Peter talks quite extensively about his his home life. And he talks quite extensively about Ruth. And so I had a, I had a sense of Ruth being an important actor in Peter's life and his career. But I had a very specific sense, one framed, I guess, by Peter's take on it, and in the process of talking to other people, and specifically talking to Hilary Land, who's a Professor at Bristol, who worked on the Poverty in the UK project for Peter as a research assistant in the late 1960s. I was talking to Hilary about Peter. And she said to me, oh, well, of course, Ruth incorporation of wives into their husband's work. And I was very important to Peter and to his work, and I said that I mean, I don't know if you've got a sense of this, Chris, but understood this from the interview and she she sort of sort of says, no, she was she was much more important than that, suggesting to me that Ruth had actually been a much more sort of present actor when it came to Peter's work than the impression that you would get from that interview that Peter did with Paul. Off the back and speaking to Hillary about that, I kind of went looking a bit more closely in the papers at Essex around the two early surveys that Peter had done of, of old people, the family life of old people, which was, which was one that he did working for Michael Young. In the Institute of Community Studies in Bethnal Green. What I found when I went looking was that Ruth was involved in the field work. And she was she was doing interviews, and she continued to do interviews for a number of other projects through to the mid 1960s. And when I started looking even more closely and looking at records of their home life, and you know, there were things like diaries in the Townsend papers that you can pick this up from, you get a much greater sense of not just Ruth being involved in the in the field work. So the what we might think of as the formal process of acquiring knowledge that goes into the production of the surveys, but the way in which the way in which sociology is a kind of a kind of way of life, for the Townsends, which seems to be true of a number of different couples during this period. So it's part of their home lives as well. And once you start looking into that, you start to see how the person that Peter becomes is a product of not just a kind of set of professional engagements out in the field and in the workplace. It's it's actually a much broader process in which the line between home life and professional life is, well, if it exists at all It's quite, it's quite fluid. those sort of diaries and that that availability of the traces of Ruth Townsend, in Peter Townsend's archives, do you think that's discernible in other people's papers? Or is it is it missing? It goes back to that issue that we've talked about a couple of times already about? The question that you're asking and thing that you're going looking for, typically, historians take a number of different approaches, when it comes to thinking about the relationship of, of wives to their husband's work, I mean, you know, it can sometimes be the other way around. But it invariably is about the relationship between the wife and the more famous husband's work. And sometimes historians will write about there being a home life and a professional life. And it's still it's the wife who runs the home life. And this kind of provides the platform as it were, for the for the husband to kind of go off and be brilliant and think brilliant things and do brilliant things. And we need to acknowledge the important gendered division of labour and things that the woman was doing, in order to enable the husbands to go off and do the things that they did, which is, I think, different to acknowledging and looking for the ways in which couples are the kind that we're talking about today, that there is an intellectual exchange, and that the wife plays a role in actually the production of knowledge. So rather than taking care of things in the domestic sphere, so that the husbands can go off and do things in the professional sphere, if you're if you are looking instead for the ways in which there is actually an important role that the wife plays in the production of sociological knowledge, you often see something quite different. And this, I think, is what I was getting at when talking a moment ago about how I came to see and first sort of notice Ruth's role in Peter's career in that the way that Peter presents it in those interviews is very much a case of well, what was important here was that there was a whole lot of domestic stuff that I didn't have to think about because Ruth took care of that, for me. Now that's true, but it doesn't actually acknowledge the extent to which Ruth was involved in, for want of a better expression, the intellectual side of things as well. Sometimes acknowledging that gender division of labour it's important that you don't sort of just stop at that. Acknowledging that is important, but it's important also to see the ways in which people like Ruth went, whilst doing that, went beyond it as well.

Val Gillies:

Part of the challenge I think of researching wives' contributions is deciphering the significance of some of the materials you know, and often you need to read between the lines you know, there's so much scope there to either under or over interpret you know, things like words or you know, what, what happened or that kind of thing you how have you managed the uncertainties and the nuances of the documents that you've worked with.

Chris Renwick:

Yeah that's interesting. One of the things that's interesting about Ruth actually, and this was something that Matthew, her and Peter's eldest son said to me, when I spoke to them about their parents, this is one of the things that you have to realise is that my my dad has a reputation for for being incredibly left wing and incredibly outspoken and a passionate campaigner and all these kinds of things. But the thing that you wouldn't know, if you hadn't known my parents together is that is that my mum was she was much more left wing, much more outspoken, much more political in many kinds of ways than my dad was. Actually, that piece of information turned out to be quite important, because when I was looking at the Townsend papers and looking at things connected with the family life of old people, because it suddenly struck me that there were these entries that were contained within a broader collection of entries that I hadn't really thought about initially, because they were simply simply recorded as a diary of Mrs. T. And when I first looked at these things, I hadn't kind of not quite that I hadn't clocked that this, this was Ruth Townsend, but I hadn't thought all that much about it. And when I went back to them, I actually realised that these entries were incredibly sort of strident, in their opinions, they were incredibly detailed as well. And they were all things that I'd sort of missed on the first reading. And in going back to them, I then started to get a sense of the character of Ruth Townsend and actually realising where it was that she was present in this archive. So actually, there's kind of a story there about how your assumptions, I guess, initially guided by that first interview that I'd read with Peter, it led me not to see that there were actually these quite heavy traces of Ruth in the archive. They are there. My initial assumption had been so shaped by what Peter had to say about their early relationship, that I wasn't actually seeing what was right there in front of me.

Ros Edwards:

Val and I are nodding away here, because we've had a look at those diaries - it's the Time diary isn't it that you are referring to?

Chris Renwick:

Yes

Ros Edwards:

Goodness what a woman!?

Sophie Bridges:

That's very interesting, just to jump in on that as well about the interaction between looking at the archive, researching the archive, and interviewing or talking to contemporaries. I mean Chris talking there about getting that insight from Ruth and Peter's eldest son, and that then illuminating something in the archive.

Ros Edwards:

This has all been really fascinating for us, I just wondered if there are any final thoughts, Chris, or, and Sophie that you would like to sort of leave us with? So I turn to Chris first.

Chris Renwick:

One of the things that has struck me in working on Peter Townsend and on Ruth Townsend, is the extent to which, when it comes to thinking about Sociology and social research during during the period, and thinking here, specifically about the 1950s 1960s through to the, the early 1970s is the extent to which I mean we can use a range of different words to describe this, whether it's lifestyle or way of life, or, or way of being, that there is with Sociology during this period, an attempt to live in a particular way. And that's the thing that struck me about the production of knowledge in this period that the the these are not just individuals who, you know, the the ideas are contained on our on a page and that you have kind of, you know, writing in articles for newspapers or you know, New Statesman or whatever it might be in their in their published books, these people genuinely live the things that they or try at least to live the things that they have on the page and try to construct home lives that that reflect that. But it's the discrepancies and the differences between what it is that they not just what they write, but what they try to do and what they end up actually doing. Ann Oakley, who is the daughter of Richard Titmuss, put it quite nicely to me when I talked to her about about this because because she knew Peter. She said that that yes Peter was a good example of how lots of these these sociologists they were, they were very keen on the family without necessarily being all that enthusiastic about families.

Ros Edwards:

Any thoughts on that Sophie?

Sophie Bridges:

Thinking about Peter and Phyllis Willmott I would say that the archives and of course Phyllis' diary, have been well have very much kind of subverted my view of the public image of I mean Phyllis is hardly known at all now, even though she had a very successful independent freelance career as an expert on welfare rights and the social services, and collaborated with Peter on many of his projects inside the Institute of Community Studies on family and kinship, and trying to tease out there, the relationship between the published Family and Kinship and Phyllis' research project, the Bethnal Green Journal, is definitely some work to be done by historians, I think, and other researchers. That public image is so different from what's reflected in the archive of their long term, collaborative intellectual partnership, and the way that they saw it, and the equality in that relationship, which really is hardly reflected at all in the public sphere. And I guess it just speaks to the ways in which looking at archives and interpreting archives can really subvert that image, public image and bring others to light who've been overlooked, and emphasise again, the collaborative nature of so much intellectual production and move us on I guess from persistent, great man narratives, towards the sort of fuller understanding of everybody who's been involved.

Ros Edwards:

Thank you to our guests, Sophie produce and Chris Rennick and thank you to you for listening. Thanks also to Chris Garrington and Krissie Brighty-Glover, our production team at Research Podcasts. In our next episode, Val and I will be telling you a bit more about our own research, looking at the contributions that the wives of some of our most eminent sociologists have made to their work. We'll also be joined by historian, Professor Selina Todd from the University of Oxford, whose research focuses on the history of working class life and women's lives.

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 about all of the Foundation's podcasts at thesociologicalreview.org

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Roz Edwards

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Val Gillies

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