Wives, like everybody else, are individuals with lives of their own. But history and ideology can conspire to strip them of this identity. In the process something essential about the social condition of being a woman is revealed. Of course it isn't a conspiracy; if it were, the story would be simple, with none of the devious tricks and turns that beset the real narratives. It's the complexity of the story – the layers of stories – that gives the story-teller such a headache, and puts the reader in such a position of agnosticism about where the truth lies, or may be hiding, or may actively have been hidden. Was Janet Beveridge a shrew with no academic intelligence of her own, and William Beveridge simply too besotted with her? Did Jeannette Tawney really obstruct Harry Tawney's scholarship with her frivolous and untidy ways? What was Mary Booth really doing in that damp mansion apart from having babies and minding the servants while her husband journeyed abroad? Are we allowed any truthful glimpse of Charlotte Shaw behind the thick veil of her labours helping two men write their own mixtures of fact and fiction?

Digging around in the archives of these four lives was for me a kind of revelatory archaeology. The remains produced didn't always match the catalogue description. I was surprised, for example, to learn about the immense networks Mary Booth orchestrated to facilitate her husband's work, and without which it undoubtedly wouldn't have been what it was. I was amazed to find Charlotte Shaw playing such a key role in the establishment of LSE – whose origins I thought I already knew – and to discover her roles as a translator of radical French literature and as Lawrence of Arabia's muse, editor and friend. Jeannette Tawney's independent life as a writer and pioneering factory inspector was another exposed secret. The architecture of Janet Beveridge's contribution to the budding LSE, to the development of social science, and to William's report on social insurance was much more substantial than I had suspected. In all four cases the stereotypes dominating biographical accounts turned out to hide interesting and authentic stories of wifely life and labour.

This chapter distils some of the central themes from these four narratives of wifehood. It looks at aspects of what the women had in common, and what is communal about the ways in which their lives have been represented by others.

Annette Jeanie Beveridge, known as Jeannette, spent 49 of her 78 years married to the socialist historian Richard Henry Tawney. It's this marital persona that is remembered in the history and biography of the period; indeed, as the Labour MP Lena Jeger observed, Jeannette suffered from being taken as either Tawney's wife or William Beveridge's sister, or both. One historian even confuses the two, making her Tawney's sister and Beveridge's wife. Such a mistake is perhaps to be expected in an oeuvre that pays so little attention to women's individual identity and agency.

Of the four women in this book, Jeannette Tawney is the one with whom I have had the closest personal connection. Although she died when I was 14, and I don't remember meeting her, her husband was a regular visitor to my childhood home. He and my father, Richard Titmuss, belonged to the same tradition of ethical socialism, and they shared the same post-mortem insignia of being seen as ‘saints’ who contributed much to Labour Party policy. Harry Tawney, as he was known, was old when I knew him, and immensely shabby – a more or less permanent characteristic, for which his wife never forgave him – and surrounded by a cloud of coltsfoot tobacco, another cause of marital disharmony. On the occasion of Tawney's 80th birthday, my father was enlisted to help write a celebratory pamphlet: ‘We have said nothing about his wife. I do not think we should,’ he noted in the correspondence with the editor. Richard Titmuss transmitted his dismissive opinion of Jeannette Tawney to the more uniformly negative of the two existing full-length R.H. Tawney biographies: Ross Terrill's R.H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship (1974). Titmuss gave Terrill information about the Tawneys, and he read the manuscript of the biography and enthusiastically promoted its publication. He also sent some of the chapters with a strong recommendation to José Harris, William Beveridge's biographer, who repeats Terrill's negative evaluation of Jeannette in her own text. These surreptitious pathways by which one person's evaluation colours others can have a major influence.

My mother, Kay Titmuss, was also dismissive about Jeannette as a poor housekeeper and a general hindrance to Tawney. These opinions echoed what I discovered, when doing the research for this book, to be the dominant characterisation of Jeannette Tawney in the biography and hagiography describing her husband's life and works.

On 26 June 1878, 30-year-old Mary Booth composed one of her regular letters to her husband, Charles, who was on one of his frequent forays to look after the family shipping and leather business in New York. She was at home in their London house, 6 Grenville Place, South Kensington, a generous stuccoed mansion, though sunless and prone to draughts. Mary's cousin Beatrice Potter, the future Beatrice Webb, dubbed it ‘dark, dull and stuffy and somewhat smelly’ – the Victorians had a lot of problems with drains. In the summer of 1878 Mary Booth was in Grenville Place, with her five-year-old daughter Antonia, and two sons, Thomas, aged four, and baby George, who was nine months old. Her husband Charles had been worried about her. She had been having palpitations and complaining of stress, some clearly caused by the death two years earlier of their little girl, Polly, whose birth and death from croup had occurred between the births of the two boys. So there was Mary, in her comfortable house, with a considerable number of servants, in constant communication with her liberal intellectual parents and a wide circle of relatives, friends and acquaintances who together made up ‘the intellectual aristocracy of London’, a husband much occupied with business affairs, and a great deal of house- and child- and servant-management work to do. There were gnawing subterranean questions about the singular purpose of her own life, but in her letter to Charles she reflected on what the two of them had already achieved together, and what might await them in the future: ‘At present there are only beginnings,’ she wrote, ‘a fair and promising opening of such a serious life of effort as we may hope to carry on to some perhaps not wholly satisfying; but still worthy and intelligent conclusion.’ They needed, she estimated, another ten or twelve years in which adequately to impress themselves on their children and their surroundings. This was an effort in which, ‘We need each other absolutely. We can't stir a step without each other.’

It was during the ensuing twelve years that Charles Booth's most publicly lauded achievement, the 17-volume Life and Labour of the People in London, was conceived, gestated and born. This was an endeavour that changed political thinking in Britain about poverty and the role of the state.

In 1897, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an unmarried 40-year-old Irish heiress with radical ideas, wrote to an American friend she had met in Rome. Charlotte's financial wealth was matched by a rich resource of ideas about what she might do with her life, but she couldn't see any clear direction through these. She told her friend about her dilemma, which was typical of many middle-class women possessed of a social conscience at the time: ‘Now it has occurred to me,’ she wrote, ‘that those who try to remedy the terrible evils we see round us by healing individual wounds and patching individual sores, by philanthropy in fact, are like the doctor who tries to cure his patients by rule of thumb … the social evil has gone too deep for mere surface palliation. We must have something else … Is what is wanted a new science? Something like the science of medicine applied collectively, and which will consist of the study of these social horrors we are talking of from the point of view of recent discovery; the study, in fact, of sociology … It is a study which has barely been attempted yet … and what I hope to do is this: with all my power, physical, financial and intellectual to study sociology as I describe it and to help and encourage others cleverer than myself to study it.’

In Charlotte's diagnosis of what was wrong, and what mere philanthropy couldn't cure, was the whole social system: vast inequalities in the ownership of property; the dehumanising commercial system; the struggle between capital and labour; marriage and the impoverished status of women. She felt particularly strongly about the latter; indeed, her feelings on this, she wrote to her friend, went as far and were as extreme as it was possible for them to go and be. She described herself as an independent woman with no family ties, she was perfectly free to do as she chose and perfectly aware that an accident of birth and social position had given her advantages that many people lacked. She’d come to the conclusion that a life that didn't try to remedy this in some modest way would be degrading. But what exactly should she do? She had made two ‘small beginnings’ she told her friend.

‘Why be a wife?’ was the byline of a vigorous 1975 women's liberation campaign in Britain against the institution of marriage. Pamphlets were produced, and we wore YBAW badges. Some of us took the message to heart and undid our own marriages. The argument was that neither the Equal Pay Act of 1970 nor the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 improved the situation of women that much, because they failed to tackle the root of the problem: women's ‘wedlocked’ position in marriage. Tax and social security systems still treated wives as dependants. Public services, as well as husbands, counted on women's unpaid labour at home. Therefore, ‘The question “why be a wife?” needs to be asked by us all.’

This focus on the condition of wifehood is a dimension that is mostly missing from accounts of the first 20th-century feminist movement, which have concentrated overwhelmingly on media-worthy images of angry women in picture hats throwing bricks in their pursuit of the vote. Yet the legal, economic, social and political treatment of wives has historically occupied far more of feminist activists’ attention than the missing right to vote. Wives were traditionally the property of men and allowed no property of their own, and property ownership was for a long time a necessary criterion for voting. The oppressions of married women have generally been worse and more extensive than those of single women (which is not to say that single women, especially unmarried mothers, haven't been subject to awful oppressions of their own).

Forgotten Wives is about marriage as a primary political experience and an institution that defines the work and identity of women. It's about both what actually happens to women in marriage and what is assumed to happen, and the dissonance between these two. It uses four case studies of wives who lived and worked in the late 19th and the first part of the 20th centuries to illustrate the argument that history and biography can be distorted by prior assumptions about who wives are and what they do. This first chapter outlines the themes of the book and introduces the women who feature in it. It considers the history and sociology of marriage as the background against which a focus on wifehood is an intelligent and necessary way of understanding the social representation of women, even today.

Janet Beveridge's career as a wife is the most complex of the four that form the focus of this book. It raises particular questions about the function of gender stereotyping in the description of wifely careers, and confronts any biographical historian with a jungle of plots and conspiracies that are hard to untangle. She was married twice: first to a taciturn civil servant and mathematician called David Beveridge Mair; and, second, to his cousin and Jeannette Tawney's brother, William Henry Beveridge, the man who is credited with founding the British welfare state. In the first capacity she was known as Mrs Jessy Mair; in the second as Lady Beveridge, with an accompanying change of forename to Janet. (William Beveridge in his writings about his wife solved the problem about which forename to use by simply calling her ‘J.’)

These changes in nomenclature signal a life divided into very different stages. As Mrs Jessy Mair, Janet Beveridge lived the life of a housewife in a small village in Surrey in the early 1900s. Her and David Mair's four children were born there, but raising them and cooking a threecourse meal every night failed to absorb her abundant energy. Her engagement with the local Women's Institute was not a success; she railed against the role of ‘professional hausfrau’; and she hated Banstead, which was still a village rather than the suburban conurbation it is now, although ‘suburban’ as a negative epithet probably did describe it. In her book about William Beveridge – unlike Mary Booth’s, Janet's was written when her husband was still alive – she describes the moment she first met the man who would eventually become her second husband: ‘One Sunday morning in the spring of 1904 he came down to Banstead, where we were living and raising our family. The first two of them were still at the perambulator stage. As I wheeled them home from their morning outing, I caught sight of a young man loping along the path towards me. He was loosely built and badly dressed, but he had an air which put him in the interesting class at first sight.’

In 1904, too, Janet attended a gathering at LSE that marked a lifelong interest of hers and presaged many efforts she would make, along with both her husbands, to alter the future course of British social science.

Out of the conceptualization of housework as work which is a major theme of this study arises the need to spell out the different components in what is broadly termed women's ‘domesticity’. One of the most important of these is the concept of overall satisfaction with housework. Other components relate to attitudes to housework and the perceived status of housewifery. The discussion in this chapter has a twofold purpose. On the one hand the aim is to describe patterns of domesticity in the present sample of housewives. But these findings are also tied in with assertions about social class differences in domesticity which abound in much of the literature dealing with women's place in the family.

Various authors have suggested or claimed that working-class women are satisfied with housework while middle-class women are not. For example, the psychological dilemmas of women's two roles discussed in the late 1950s by Myrdal and Klein are said by them to affect only the minority of educated middle-class women. Discontent with the traditional role of housewife is seen as a middle-class prerogative. In The Family and Social Change, an account of kinship in a South Wales town, Rosser and Harris make a similar assertion, that ‘for a variety of reasons’ the ‘domesticity’ of working-class wives is higher than that of their middle-class counterparts. Strangely, they do not examine these reasons, although the level of feminine domesticity is a crucial link in their argument about the existence of close-knit kinship networks in working-class communities. Mirra Komarovsky, in her study of American Blue Collar Marriage, finds that higher education is correlated with a ‘less favourable’ attitude to housewifery, and a number of other studies back up this contention as applied to the American scene.

None of these writers looks at housework satisfaction; the notion of feminine domesticity is undefined and usually rather vague. The categorization of social class used in these studies is the conventional one based on husband's occupation. For the present sample the relationship between housework satisfaction and social class assessed in this way is shown in Table 4.1.

The concept of ‘satisfaction with housework’ follows the concept of ‘work’ or ‘job’ satisfaction as used in the sociology of industry and paid work; it represents an overall assessment of the degree to which housewives are positively or negatively oriented to their work.

This book has three aims. One is to provide an account of a research project concerning the health and wellbeing of women and their babies that began in 1983 and continues today. The second aim is to contextualize this account within ‘a sociology of the research process’ (Platt 1976) that centres on the telling of a story about how and why the research came into being, and what happened when it did. Both the descriptive and the analytic aims of the book are grounded in its third major focus, which is an epistemological one, concerning the status and gendering of knowledge in the contemporary capitalist world.

The story unfolded in the book, and the details of the narrative it encloses, link a wide variety of different concerns about knowledge, policy and practice in the contemporary industrialized world. Some of the major issues addressed in the book are:

• 1. What ‘is’ health? How far do variations in the social environment, including people's social relationships and networks, ‘explain’ differences in health status between individuals and groups?

• 2. What are the possibilities and limits of professionalized medical care as a strategy for promoting health?

• 3. When women have children, what is the role of professionalized health care on the one hand, and of the social environment on the other, in helping them to do so?

• 4. To what extent do professional definitions of the ‘normal’ distort people's experiences of their bodies and their social identities, and what has the concept of ‘risk’ to do with this?

• 5. What is the epistemological basis of the methods used by social scientists to advance knowledge? What ‘is’ knowledge, anyway?

• 6. Why are methods of contributing to advances in knowledge commonly divided into quantitative and qualitative? How does this division work in practice?

• 7. What is the relationship between social science research, academic knowledge and public policy?

‘The real problem’

When I say this book will address these issues, I do not mean it will provide any easy answers. Like Martin Hammersley (1989: 6) in his account of the origins and dilemmas of the qualitative method in social science, I warn the reader now that there is no point in turning to the end of this book to find solutions to the problems posed - the reader will be disappointed.

In 1974 I began an academic research project called, rather grandly, ‘Transition to Motherhood: Social and Medical Aspects of First Childbirth’. It was planned as a three-year study of a sample of women having their first babies, and the idea was that it would expose and clarify some of the problems involved in becoming a mother in modern society.

I became interested in this subject I suppose directly through my previous work on housewives’ attitudes to housework. I began to see that however much one separated housework off from women's other work, becoming a housewife was synonymous with becoming a mother. Whereas fifty or even twenty years ago women gave up their jobs on marriage, now they do so during their first pregnancies, and it is the moment when she becomes a mother that a woman first confronts the full reality of what it means to be a woman in our society. Motherhood entails a great deal of domestic work – servicing the child, keeping its clothes and its body clean, preparing food. The demarcation lines between this and house- or husband-work blur. It is a crisis in the life of a woman, a point of no return. Evidence accumulated since the 1950s about how the principle of sex equality works in practice shows conclusively that the options available for women outside the home are severely affected by motherhood, and remain so even where ‘officially’ the commitment is to equal chances for all.

I therefore chose to look at this moment in a woman's history, to catch it and describe it and explore it through the eyes of some of those who experience it. I was interested in every dimension of becoming a mother: changes in life-style – giving up work, staying at home, becoming isolated or making new friends – the impact of, and effect on, marriage, the relationship between mother and child, the medical management of childbirth. I wanted to show that the advent of motherhood is not only an event of importance to the individual woman, but a moment in the history of all women.

I am a feminist, an academic sociologist, and a woman with children. I was not a feminist until I had children, and I became a sociologist as an escape from the problems of having children.

A Background data

• 1. Name, address and age of respondent

• 2. Number, sex and ages of children

• 3. Children at playgroup/childminder/nursery school/primary school? Which child and for how many hours each day?

• 4. Occupation of husband

• 5. Hours of husband’s work-absence from home

• 6. Present occupation of wife, if any (any paid work whether done at home or outside home)

• 7. Hours of wife’s paid work-absence from home

• 8. Who looks after the children while wife is out at work?

• 9. Wife’s education

• (a) Education to 15

• (b) Education to 15 + 1-2 years training/further education

• (c) Education to 16, O Level + 1-2 years training/further education or school till 17-18

• (d) School till 18 + 1-2 years training/further education

• (e) School till 18 + university

• (f) School till 18 + university + extra training/further education

B Domestic work conditions

• 1. Number in household (for whom housewife cooks)

• 2. Type of home

• (a) House

• (b) Flat

• (c) Rooms

• (d) Furnished

• (e) Unfurnished

• (f) Rented, council

• (g) Rented, other

• (h) Owned

• 3 Amenities

• (a) Separate kitchen

• (b) Inside lavatory

• (c) Bath

• (d) Running hot and cold water

• (e) Garden/play area

• (f) Within five minutes’ walk of shops

• (g) Within five minutes’ walk of launderette

• (h) Within ten minutes’ walk of school/playgroup/nursery

• (i) Separate bedrooms for parents and children

• (j) Television

• (k) Telephone

• 4 Household aids

• (a) Washing machine (type?)

• (b) Mechanical drier (type?)

• (c) Vacuum cleaner

• (d) Refrigerator

• (e) Separate freezer

• (f) Dishwasher

• (g) Central heating

• (h) Car/use of car

• (i) Other

• (j) Paid domestic help

• (k) Use of commercial services (e.g. laundry)

C Domestic work routine

Now, can I ask you about what you do on an ordinary day? What about yesterday? Was yesterday out of the ordinary in any way? Could you please tell me everything you did, beginning with when you woke up?