The contributions of wives: questions of class

In Episode 4 Ros and Val talk about their own research looking at the contributions of wives to some of the most important social studies of our time. They’re also joined by Selina Todd, Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford whose research focuses on the history of working-class life and women's lives. She is also the author of the Sunday Times bestseller The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910-2010, and is currently working on a history of social mobility in modern Britain.

Episode Credits

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

Episode Resources

• British Sociology: A History - John Scott
• Family and Kinship in East London - Michael Young and Peter Wilmott
• Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth - Selina Todd
• The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910-2010 - Selina Todd
• “#ThanksForTyping … and the fieldwork: the role of sociologists’ wives in classic British studies” - Ros Edwards and Val Gillies
• The Dennis Marsden Collection 
• The Papers of Peter and Phyllis Willmott
• Search the hashtag #ThanksforTyping on X (formerly twitter)

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

Transcript

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Ros Edwards: 0:01

Welcome to Thanks for Typing, a podcast that uncovers the largely invisible contribution of social researchers' wives to the 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: 0:18

And I'm Val Gillies, a Professor of Social Policy at the University of Westminster.

Ros Edwards: 0:22

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: 0:44

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: 0:58

In episode four, we're talking about our own research, looking at the contribution of wives to some of the most important social studies of our time. We're also delighted to be joined by Professor Selina Todd, Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, whose research focuses on the history of working-class life and women's lives. She's the author of The Sunday Times bestseller,

The People: 1:22

The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910 to 2010,

and of Snakes and Ladders: 1:27

The Great British Mobility Myth. Selina, thanks so much for joining us. Before we speak with you, Val and I wanted to use this episode of our podcast to explain to our listeners a bit about the research that we've been undertaking and to explain to you Selena too.

Val Gillies: 1:47

The reason we embarked on this podcast is In our research, we've looked at how wives were because over the past 15 years or so, we've been researching drawn into the disciplinary enterprise of Sociology, how the role of sociologists' wives in classic British studies, and we've been wondering whose shoulders contemporary they became pulled into knowledge generation. sociologists are standing on?

Ros Edwards: 1:59

They were certainly doing more than just typing up their husband's work. They were undertaking statistical tests, field work, writing up, editing, and so on.

Val Gillies: 2:37

Some wives moved with their children to live in the working-class communities their husbands were studying. As wives and mothers, they built a gendered bridge into those local areas supporting their husbands' scholarship, and contributing insights about working class women and children's lives that their husbands couldn't have accessed without them.

Ros Edwards: 2:55

We've been examining the acknowledgement pages of classical sociological books, checking out the thanks for typing mentions, and we discussed the thanks for typing hashtag on Twitter in episode one. We've also been digging into field notes from major studies where they're stored in university archives. So, it was great to hear stories about maintaining and using archives in episode three

Val Gillies: 3:17

We've also been delving into diaries kept by the sociologists’ wives, where we can track them down, as well as talking to academics who were around at the time about their memories of wives' contributions.

Ros Edwards: 3:28

I was just thinking about how we began on this Val; we were looking at the Dennis Marsden collection in the University of Essex archive for a project on parenting that we were researching. We saw references to his then wife, Pat's diary in his field notes for his ethnographic study of slum clearance and relocation in Salford.

Val Gillies: 3:47

Yes, we managed to contact Pat Marsden who still had the diaries that she kept while living on the new council estate with Dennis and her children and she let us copy them.

Ros Edwards: 3:56

We also heard about the journal that Phyllis Wilmott had kept in the mid 1950s while she and her husband and children lived in Bethnal Green, and Peter Willmott, was carrying out their renowned Family and Kinship in East London Study with Michael Young at the Institute of Community Studies. That's the journal that Sophie Bridges at the Churchill Archive talked about in episode three.

Val Gillies: 4:16

So originally, we were just planning to look at Pat and Phyllis' diaries. We were thinking about them as being mediators between the community and the husband's sociological insights. But then, after the thanks for typing hashtag took off, we realised that actually there was a lot more to their involvement than that.

Ros Edwards: 4:33

Yes, and we also realised there are a lot more wives of post-war sociologists who've been involved in their husband's work. Notably, there was a network of rising stars of Sociology and Social Policy that Dennis Marsden and Peter Willmott were part of.

Val Gillies: 4:49

And wives played crucial intellectual and enabling roles for these social researchers. There was Richard Titmuss' wife, Kay, and Peter Townsend's wife, Ruth, who we heard about from Chris Renwick in the last episode.

Ros Edwards: 5:01

Also, there was Brian Jackson's wife Sheila, who later remarried another major sociological figure, Philip Abrams, and was a significant influence and field worker in both these men's research.

Val Gillies: 5:13

Phyllis Wilmott and Pat Marsden are the only wives we have diaries for. When we started reading them through it was very clear that the diaries were kept with the expectation that they would help inform their husband's analysis. Phyllis records that her Bethnal Green journal was to quote her"just a job for the Institute and I did it". Similarly, Pat reflected that "the diary was part of the research. So, every day I just jotted things down".

Ros Edwards: 5:38

We can see vignettes of Bethnal Green Life that Phyllis wrote about eventually appearing in the Young and Wilmott book, and some of Pat's notes about the hazards of the built environment are replicated in Dennis Marsden's reports to Salford housing department.

Val Gillies: 5:53

The diary entries also show us that both wives were grappling with their insider outsider status in the working-class communities. Phyllis made some acute observations about the way that chatting with local mothers elicits more information than interviewing them does. And Pat reflected that while she really got involved with local families, she was very aware of their differences because the families were living in such extreme poverty.

Ros Edwards: 6:16

There are some knotty social class issues

Selina Todd: 6:41

It's a depressingly familiar history, not just in there. So, let's turn to you Selina Todd now to give us some terms of the post Second World War period that you're interested in, and sociologists' wives, but women generally. You know, back in the 1970s, a number of feminists coined the phrase 'hidden from history', to describe the task that those of us who want to respect and record women's contributions to society have to undertake. And I'm still amazed how much work broader insights into working class women, social class and there is to do there. There's a real sense in which women's contributions are consistently underrated, because in the end, they're still but certainly, historically, were very much seen as most importantly, wives and mothers. And even today, you'll see obituaries of women that primarily describe them as such, whatever their other achievements in life, so I think social mobility. Selina, you're a historian. So, from that

Val Gillies: 7:58

That's such a good point. I think, as well, part of it's, it's, to some extent, sexism. And in terms of the post war period, I think there's something else going on there, which is that many of the male social scientists that you're the challenge of our research today, relates to the way that talking about, were themselves engaged in carving out a new discipline, sociology, within some very establishment institutions, i.e. British universities. And that was housewives from this period actually tend to be quite perspective, why do you think the quite major contributions of something that meant that they had to come up with reasons why they should be employed in these very prestigious institutions, disparaged. You know, it's often assumed that they didn't and why their subjects mattered to them. And one of the ways that groups can go about doing that is by presenting their interests and their findings, and particularly, their actually achieve very much and that they were just passive expertise as very particular to them. And it's something that wives to sociological knowledge has stayed so hidden and under explored? other groups can't replicate. And for all kinds of reasons,

Selina Todd: 9:13

I think, hugely important, in one of the big Well, for one thing, most of them weren't housewives. So there's a myth that after the Second World War, women left the factories and the offices and went back to their strands of social research that becomes increasingly important those one of the claims to expertise that those men made stooges of patriarchy. What does your research tell us about what homes and became full time wives and mothers. There was certainly was their very masculinity. So partly, I think they were quite a lot of political rhetoric about why that was a good thing as the 20th century progresses, is the understanding that we and also some quite pervasive psychological rhetoric about the blind to the kind of work that their wives were doing, and how need for mothers to be at home, particularly with very young need to analyse the position of the researcher, not in a navel children. And it was also the case that the State after the valuable it was for their own research. But I think also there life was really like for married women during this period? war closed a lot of wartime nurseries believing rightly or gazing way, although I have to think a lot of social wrongly that mothers would want to go back to the home and look was a conscious desire to make the figure of the sociologist, a after their children. So there was a great deal of social and researchers do go down that rabbit hole, but just in terms cultural pressure on women to conform to that. But at the same young thrusting often upwardly mobile, man. time, and you see this over and over again in history, there was of being cognizant of what you as a researcher are bringing to a reality which was quite different to the kind of gendered stereotype that was being put out there of the full an interview to a set of ethnographic observations and so time housewife and mother. And the reality is that actually the State needed women in employment and employers needed needed on, that your life experience will affect how you go about women, as the manufacturing industries grew. And as the State grew with the welfare state, there were more office jobs, and they needed women to do them. So married women's work analysing a community, what you might see your own ideas of what increased, and married women's work, increased particularly at of what's significant. And I think when we've got to is a part time levels from the 1950s and 60s onwards, not so much the mothers of very young children, many of them did want to be at kind of sense that the wider and more diverse the constituency of home. And even if they didn't, there were very few nursery places for, for them to find childcare for their kids, but but on the whole, the mothers of children who were going to researchers we can have, the better because the more insight school were going into work in ever increasing numbers, the kinds of work that they did, and their feelings about it and the more debate the more discussion, the richer our their experiences were very often neglected and overlooked conclusions are likely to be. What's incredible about women precisely because there was this kind of sense that really, what the State was aiming to do was to create a situation where a like Phyllis Willmott is that they were able to bring a whole quote unquote traditional family could be restored i.e. with with the woman in the home. So it's that really that's been raft of observations to those projects and insight that the incredibly overlooked is married women's paid work. And also, and this is something that historians are becoming increasingly interested in now their voluntary work, which is men could never have had. That was partly because they were the something that the historian Pat Thane has done a lot of work on. We know that before the Second World War, lots of middle class primary carers of children. And as Phyllis Willmott herself, women went into voluntary work, and indeed, were fundamental in carving out the profession that became social work. I think one noted, in her memoir, what that meant was that they did a lot of of the very interesting conflicts in the post war period is between male sociologists who believe that universities are about studying social theory, and women who in some cases had hanging around the school gates. And we know even today that found a niche in universities just before or during the Second World War, studying and training social workers. So you have this that's a great way in which community networks and links are this absolute division really between the practical and material experience of life, and then social theory, which made, and also a way that you begin to develop friendships and quickly in the post war period became seen as more prestigious than the real thing that higher education should be doing. Even intimacies within the community that you live. That also meant within universities, even within social social theory and sociology. You see women's voluntary work, as social that they had huge amount of insight into children's lives workers being denigrated being downgraded. It's not something that we need to study or know very much about. They were also involved in all kinds of other voluntary projects. One of the and children were becoming an increasing object of study in reasons why nursery places finally began to increase in the 1970s. It's precisely because of the kind of local child care the post war period, partly because the work of the earlier initiatives that women began to put together collectively. So they're involved in all kinds of voluntary activities too that generation of women who had been social workers had shown that then actually have a huge impact not only on women's lives, but on on the various societies and communities that these men were studying. child welfare was something that the state really needed to take

Ros Edwards: 12:38

I mean, one of the one of the wives that we've been looking at Phyllis Wilmott, she actually did train as a former social worker, an almoner for a hospital. But then she gave that care of, but it wasn't good enough to expect two parents to up. And, you know, in her case, and in several in the cases of do that if they were struggling on a low income. Phyllis herself several other sociologists and their wives, they they moved into the communities as we explained and lived there. And I was sort of thinking about your own work, in what ways do you came from a working class, inner-city background. And that think the wives' position and insights might have been important to the those research accounts of class and community? wasn't something that all of the men had. But it was something that some of the women had. I don't think that you have to have the same background as your research subjects in order to be a brilliant researcher, I don't think that's true at all. Actually, a degree of distance and detachment and an awareness of that difference, can lead you to see communities in a new way. But nevertheless, it does provide a richness if you have some researchers who have that kind of first hand experience of community. And Phyllis Willmott not only had that experience, but had already begun to analyse it, because she'd moved away from that community in the Second World War. And she'd moved into, as you say, training as an almoner. So so she had this huge amount of life experience to bring as a woman who had grown up in a community like the one that she then went to live in, and also as someone who had then moved away from that community, and therefore knew the costs and the and the benefits as well of moving on, and so was able to go back with that life experience, but also that fresh eye. That was absolutely huge, I think. And also, I think the other thing that we have to remember is lots of women of that generation, and earlier and later generations, grow up being observers, actually, in a way that men don't, because little girls on the whole were not encouraged to play outside, to leave their mothers as early as little boys were. So they grew up observing, observing women in kitchens and so on. And if you read Phyllis Willmott's memoirs, you absolutely have that impression,

Val Gillies: 16:15

I don't think we'd quite thought of that. Selina, you know, that they're listening to conversations that they're I've got a question that really intrigues me. And you might have watching, they're learning what it is to be a woman, answered it in your previous answer about male sociologists. essentially. So that power of observation, of quiet watching, But, Young and Willmott, of course received quite a lot of listening, learning, was something that she and other criticism about the rigour of their study in Bethnal Green, women also brought to those projects. you know, as in accused of being impressionistic. And they did push back on it. But why do you think they didn't highlight how embedded Phyllis actually was in the community?

Selina Todd: 17:19

In the whole debate about how impressionistic their

Ros Edwards: 17:19

Yeah, I’ve got echoes of that for Philip research was, my sympathies are actually with them. This was a very, this was a pioneering stage for social research and, what Michael Young and Peter Willmott did, with others, including women who, as you say, were neglected, was to suggest that working-class people were worth serious consideration and study. And that the State, apart from sociologists and so on, they were, primarily writing to try to influence policy, that the State at a local and national level should listen to people and think about how their actions were impacting on ordinary communities. And that was hugely radical, actually, for the time. And they used all kinds of different research methods to get there. I don't necessarily think there's a one size fits all in terms of in terms of research. Yes, we can criticise them now for things that they didn't do or things that they did. But nevertheless, I think it was a really groundbreaking study. And I think we owe them a huge amount actually. What the women tended to do around the Institute that Young and Willmott set up in Bethnal Green was to go out and do a lot of the legwork to find the family to do the observations, in some cases to do the interviews. And that kind of practical work is seen certainly in British sociology, as absolutely divorced from analysis. Now, that wasn't true a generation earlier. The women who were going into social work and carving out spaces for themselves in places like the London School of Economics were saying, hang on social workers should be trained, they were absolutely of the view that the work of a social worker involves observing and analysing. As we know, it does, it does today like the work of a doctor, but then there became this kind of division in the 1950s and 1960s between the practical doing and the analysing and the theory. There was a kind of sense that the latter was what men did. Women do. They look after children, they go out they do the work of the community, but the analysing, that requires a degree of masculine detachment and masculine analysis. And that's a real problem for social theory and sociology actually, because if you have a stage where theory becomes quite divorced from material reality, the reality of where people live the reality of people's bodies, the realities of their homes, you really lose something, I think. Abram's work in my head. You touched on this a bit earlier Selina, but could you say a little bit more about how class differences would have been lived and understood in the 50s and 60s?

Selina Todd: 19:54

Class was changing in some ways in the in the 50s and 60s, but it was still very prevalent. Britain became a more socially and economically equal society during the Second World War. And to some degree, that narrowing of the gap between the richest and the poorest was preserved both by the welfare state that the Labour government introduced in 1945, which was then strengthened in the 1960s by Harold Wilson's Labour government in 1964, but also by full employment, and that was the crucial other pillar. You had a situation, therefore, where manual workers had a great deal more collective bargaining power than they had done before the Second World War when unemployment was higher, and it was easier for employers to get rid of them. Employers had to listen to trade unions in new ways in the post war period. And while I wouldn't want to present too rosy a picture, there was definitely a sense that after the war, it was widely believed that the state's responsibility encompassed giving people at least a basic standard of living and that standard of living now included things like secondary education, you know, that the generation of children who Willmott and Young or the Willmotts and Young, were studying were the first to get free, universal secondary education in Britain, ever. So life for working class people in particular, was changing a great deal, which was one of the motivations behind much of the social research that was done in the 1950s. Researchers like the Willmotts, like Michael Young really wanted to find out what those kinds of changes, what the welfare state, what full employment, what the growth of new council estates, outside city centres, what these things were meaning, to people who were who were affected by them of all ages, and of both sexes. The other thing that was happening was the middle class was still very much there. And, in fact, the middle class expanded during the post war period, partly as a result of the creation of the welfare state, because universal secondary education meant a demand for more teachers, a National Health Service meant a demand for more nurses and technicians as well as doctors. There was more room not at the very top of society, but certainly on some of the higher rungs for people who could get qualifications. So, what that meant was that for a couple of generations, the generation who'd grown up and come of age in the 1930s, early 1940s, and then the generation who were educated directly after the second world war, they were growing up into a world where, if you could get an education, there were more opportunities. And as the 1960s went on, those opportunities began to grow in universities as well, because, as a result of the Robbins report in the early 1960s, the decision was made that as more and more children were being educated at school, and as demand for jobs like technicians and nurses and doctors and teachers was growing, more people needed places at universities. So, there was a huge expansion not only in university places, but also in the number of universities available. And what you find, generally in history is that people who move up the social ladder, are able to do so most successfully in new spheres that haven't yet been colonised by the same old suspects. And so, what began to happen was that the new universities provided very fertile ground for upwardly mobile men and fewer women, to carve out positions for themselves, as for example, sociologists, or in technical education, for example. So, that kind of social mobility was going on as well. And that indeed became a subject of sociology research.

Ros Edwards: 23:41

From what you're saying, it seems that there is this social mobility. But is it the case that perhaps that marriage could leave women in a precarious position, particularly in our setting of academia, because I'm thinking about Sheila Abrams, who, by all accounts, was a talented social researcher. But when her husband died, she had little in the way of credentials, she had a limited ability to prove her academic skills. So, I wondered if downward social mobility might be a particular sort of problem for women?

Selina Todd: 24:11

Yes, it certainly could be. And one of the issues that researchers like for example, Pearl Jephcott, brought out in their studies of families, and later in studies of lone parents, was that, despite the welfare state, one of the largest groups who remained in poverty was single mothers. And those were often women who'd either been deserted

Val Gillies: 24:29

Obviously, women's lives have changed quite a lot by their husbands or were widows. So absolutely, you know, it was a real problem. And the State hadn't really got its head around how to even provide women with basic subsistence in that situation, let alone anything else like, like a university education. And yes, one of the big issues with academic accreditation was that it really narrowed the path that you could take to get into universities and those kinds of positions to do with social research that you're talking about. The older generation of women who had helped to establish social work within universities, many of them hadn't had a university education. They were growing up in the early part of the 20th century, when lots of universities still barred women from attending. And even if they had had a university education, it was often quite rudimentary. And they often didn't progress past a bachelor's degree, because they got married and had children and became the caregiver. And even those who didn't get married, would often just do one degree and then would go into either voluntary or some kind of paid work as an almoner or a social worker. So, they went back into universities as a result of their practical experience and as a result of campaigning, lobbying, working with sympathetic men who understood their point of view, to create new spaces in universities. Now, what happens after the Second World War is really revolutionary. And I think very, very welcome that you know, these men on the whole, but also some women, Margaret Stacey, who becomes a sociologist is one of them, come out of the Second World War and say, we really need better studies of society, this is something that should be taken seriously. And they go into universities, and they manage to carve out spaces there. But one of the ways that they carve out spaces is by denigrating the work and the credentials of that older generation of social workers by saying, no, this is the real social research that needs to be done. And you need these kinds of academic credentials to do it. And so, you're quite right, that when you have situations where women don't necessarily have those academic credentials, they haven't been able to get a PhD, for example, it's very, very difficult for them to find a foothold. Of course one of the things about social mobility is it often relies on you being able to be geographically mobile. And if you're in a situation where you're both earners, and it was very, very rare for one of these women to find themselves in a position where, where her husband would or could put his occupation on the backfoot, because there was no sex discrimination legislation at this point. So, men tend to be paid more than women. So, he's the highest, he's the highest earner in your family, do you follow him where his job is, and then it's very, very difficult for these women to find or to try to sustain an academic career. And that only really changes in the late 1970s, when a younger generation of feminists, many of them taught by women like Margaret Stacey actually, begin to establish women's studies in universities and along the way, also begin to campaign for more opportunities for mature students and for part time study, and for part time work for academic women. today, but the work that wives actually did still needs to be done, of course. To what extent do you think the hidden contributions of wives or partners is still an issue in today's academia?

Selina Todd: 28:05

I think that it's less of an issue, because I think that although we have a situation where lots of younger academics and so-called early career academics, although often they're in middle age now, are in precarious jobs. That is something that affects men as well as women. That said, women in academia are still far more likely than men to be in short term jobs, insecure employment. And so, when you have a situation, as you often do, now, as then, where both halves of the couple are in academic work, it's very often the case that he is going to be the one who's got a permanent job. And she is going to be the one who's going to be following around and trying to do work at the edges and so on. The kinds of spousal partnerships that you're talking about in the post-war period are, I think, less common, though, I'm not sure that I would necessarily put it like that. And so many women in academia are in very precarious employment and are often being employed as research assistants on other people's projects. And with the best will in the world, they are never going to get the kind of the credit that the principal investigator on that project. They're a research assistant. And it's an it when we still don't really have a kind of a clear trajectory from how you get from that into a permanent job, particularly for women, who are still I think, less than a quarter of the professors in the UK.

Ros Edwards: 29:36

Thank you so much, Selina, actually, there's so much of what you said that is genuinely really insightful for our project. Thank you. Thanks to our guest, Selina Todd, and 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 in conversation with Professor John Goodwin from the University of Leicester and Dr Lebogang Mokwena of the University of Cape Town. We'll be talking about the relevance of sociology’s past and the role of wives especially for sociology’s present.

Val Gillies: 30:15

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 sociologicalreview.org