In this ground-breaking book, acclaimed sociologist Ann Oakley undertook one of the first serious sociological studies to examine women’s work in the home. She interviewed 40 urban housewives and analysed their perceptions of housework, their feelings of monotony and fragmentation, the length of their working week, the importance of standards and routines, and their attitudes to different household tasks. Most women, irrespective of social class, were dissatisfied with housework – an important finding which contrasted with prevailing views. Importantly, too, she showed how the neglect of research on domestic work was linked to the inbuilt sexism of sociology. This classic book challenged the hitherto neglect of housework as a topic worthy of study and paved the way for the sociological study of many more aspects of women’s lives.
The starting point of Ann Oakley's fascinating book is the fracture of her right arm in the grounds of a hotel in the USA. What begins as an accident becomes a journey into some critical themes of modern Western culture: the crisis of embodiment and the perfect self; the confusion between body and identity; the commodification of bodies and body parts; the intrusive surveillance and profiteering of medicine and the law; the problem of ageing; and the identification of women, particularly, with bodies - from the intensely ambiguous two-in-one state of pregnancy to women's later transformation into unproductive, brittle skeletons. Fracture mixes personal experience (the author's and other people's) with 'facts' derived from other literatures, including the history of medicine, neurology, the sociology of health and illness, philosophy, and legal discourses on the right to life and people as victims of a greedy litigation system. The book's genre spans fiction/non-fiction, autobiography and social theory.
Father and daughter provides an unique Ôinsider perspectiveÕ on two key figures in twentieth-century British social science. Ann Oakley, a highly respected sociologist and best-selling writer, draws on her own life and that of her father, Richard Titmuss, a well-known policy analyst and defender of the welfare state, to offer an absorbing view of the connections between private lives and public work. Using an innovative mix of biography, autobiography, intellectual history, archives, and personal interviews, some of which have not been previously available to the public, she provides a compelling narrative about gender, patriarchy, methodology, and the politics of memory and identity. This fascinating analysis defies the usual social science publications to offer a truly distinctive account which will be of wide interest.
Drawing on her long experience as an academic researcher and writer, Ann Oakley develops a sociology of the research process itself, telling the story of how a research project is undertaken and what happens during it, to both researchers and those who are researched. This remarkable book focuses on a topic of great importance in the provision of health services – caring and social support. Setting neglect of this topic in the wider context of an ongoing crisis in gendering knowledge, Social support and motherhood is now reissued for a contemporary audience. It has much resonance for social science researchers and others interested in the experiences of mothers, and in the relations between social research, academic knowledge and public policy.
A provocative analysis of gender inequality's destructive effects on our society and our planet. In this wide-ranging and powerful new book, the influential author and social scientist Ann Oakley mounts a devastating argument about the state of our humanity. Drawing on examples such as the simple experience of riding a bicycle through London, the way we've become 'sick to death of women', and the environmental abuse of our planet, she shows how every aspect of our lives is dominated by male/female power structures, and forces us to take a step back and see how and why gender inequality has thrown our society out of balance. In Gender on Planet Earth, Oakley argues that the persistence of traditional gender values prevents us from leading more ethical and humane lives. Governed by "delusional systems" such as psychoanalysis and sociobiology, we assume that the imbalance of the sexes is the inevitable consequence of our genes, psyches and unchangeable economic motives. Drawing from a broad array of literature, Oakley combines personal narrative with social commentary and eye-opening statistics to provide a provocative account of the state we're really in.
Ann Oakley is a pioneer in the field of sociological research. In this classic re-issue, she interviewed 60 women to find out what it’s really like to have a baby. Covering pregnancy, birth and child care, she relies on the stories mothers tell to discuss whether and why women want to become pregnant, how they imagine motherhood to be, the experience of birth, post-natal depression, feeding and caring routines and the challenges for the domestic division of labour and to fathers. She shows that most women are unprepared for the birth or the work of caring for a baby, but also for the joys that a baby can bring. As topical today as the day it was written, this important book was the first to examine first-time motherhood in the words of those experiencing it, and it continues to influence generations of researchers today.
The feminist philosopher and social scientist shows how "gendering" has affected the social and natural sciences as she reconciles the long-standing dichotomy between the quantitative and qualitative methods and demonstrates the tandem use of both experimental and intuitive approaches.
Forgotten Wives examines how marriage has contributed to the active ‘disremembering’ of women’s achievements. Ann Oakley uses case studies of four women married to well-known men to ask questions about gender inequality and contributes a fresh vision of how the welfare state developed in the early 20th century.
In this collection of essays, Ann Oakley, one of the most influential social scientists of the last twenty years, brings together the best of her work on the sociology of women's health. She focuses on four main themes - divisions of labour, motherhood, technology and methodology - and in her own inimitable style, combines serious academic discourse from a feminist sociological perspective with a practical understanding of what it is to be women facing the often impersonal world of twentieth-century medicine. Updating and substantially expanding on her earlier work, Telling the Truth About Jerusalem, this new collection bridges the medical/social divide in an accessible and personable way.
This book recaptures the buried history of the household science movement, including domestic science teaching, public health, higher education for women and the scientific content and aims of domestic science courses.
Between 1880 and 1920 many women researched the conditions of social and economic life in Western countries. They were driven by a vision of a society based on welfare and altruism, rather than warfare and competition. Ann Oakley, a leading sociologist, undertook extensive research to uncover this previously hidden cast of forgotten characters. She uses the women’s stories to bring together the histories of social reform, social science, welfare and pacifism. Her fascinating account reveals how their efforts, connected through thriving transnational networks, lie behind many features of modern welfare states and reminds us of their powerful vision of a more humane way of living – a vision that remains relevant today.
Barbara Wootton was one of the extraordinary public figures of the twentieth century. She was an outstanding social scientist, an architect of the welfare state, an iconoclast who challenged conventional wisdoms and the first woman to sit on the Woolsack in the House of Lords. Ann Oakley has written a fascinating and highly readable account of the life and work of this singular woman, but the book goes much further. It is an engaged account of the making of British social policy at a critical period seen through the lens of the life and work of a pivotal figure. Oakley tells a story about the intersections of the public and the private and about the way her subject's life unfolded within, was shaped by, and helped to shape a particular social and intellectual context.
First published in 1998. This book attempts to contribute a new framework for social research in the welfare field. As such, it engages with new theories, new approaches and new methods, alongside a constructive critique of both the old and the new. It attempts to illustrate approaches to conceptualization and operationalization within policy-relevant research, to reflect and explore both “new” thinking in social theory and in welfare policy, as well as to maintain a connection with “old” concerns. Our concern is with welfare research—both theory and method— broadly defined as the wider landscape of policy and provision captured, in the past at least, by the notion of the “welfare state”. The “new” thinking with which the book is primarily concerned involves a shift away from seeing people as the passive beneficiaries of “welfare” provided through state interventions and professional expertise and from seeing them as fixed single social categories of “poor”, “old”, “single parent” or as one dimensional, objective socio-economic classifications.
In a distinguished career lasting nearly sixty years, Ann Oakley has produced trail-blazing publications that span the fiction - non-fiction divide including The Men's Room, made into a BBC TV series with Bill Nighy. This novel is timely, set in the perplexing present of the constraints of the Covid pandemic. Locked down, Alice Henry is determined to decide what to do in her final years - an ongoing muddle of medical, domestic and romantic interruptions. When she stumbles on the unsolved case of social researcher, Maud Davies, found decapitated on a London railway line, she finds a new purpose. The blackly funny narrative weaves together the stories of the two women as Alice becomes obsessed with Maud's fate and determines to solve the mystery of her untimely death.
Livy's History of Rome is our main source for the study of the history of the early centuries of the Roman Republic. In Book IX Livy narrates the course of the Second Samnite War, one of the most important that Rome fought during its conquest of Italy: the book begins with Livy's celebrated account of the Roman defeat in the Caudine Forks and ends with Roman victory over the Samnites. This commentary discusses all problems posed by Livy's matchless narrative.
A consideration of the role of the midwife in childbirth, which currently stands at the point of divergence between two differing philosophies of childbearing. In one, pregnancy and birth belong to the medical profession, in the other it is a part of the experience of ordinary life.
Fracture' mixes personal experience with 'facts' derived from other literatures, including the history of medicine, neurology, the sociology of health and illness, philosophy, and legal discourses on the right to life and people as victims of a greedy litigation system.
In this collection of essays, Ann Oakley, one of the most influential social scientists of the last twenty years, brings together the best of her work on the sociology of women's health. She focuses on four main themes - divisions of labour, motherhood, technology and methodology - and in her own inimitable style, combines serious academic discourse from a feminist sociological perspective with a practical understanding of what it is to be women facing the often impersonal world of twentieth-century medicine. Updating and substantially expanding on her earlier work, Telling the Truth About Jerusalem, this new collection bridges the medical/social divide in an accessible and personable way.
Between 1880 and 1920 many women researched the conditions of social and economic life in Western countries, driven by a vision of a society based on welfare and altruism. Ann Oakley uses the women’s stories to bring together the histories of social reform, social science, welfare and pacifism.
In an era of pandemic infection, the importance of hygiene at home and in public spaces has never been greater. This book recaptures the buried history of the household science movement, including domestic science teaching, public health, higher education for women and the scientific content and aims of domestic science courses. It explores how it was viewed in the context of new public health concerns and as a driver to opening higher education to women, raising questions about the legacy and modern relevance of the household science movement.
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