Book description
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.
An engrossing and vivid account of a remarkable woman, undeservedly
forgotten, who is rightly 'recovered' for us in this fine biography,
which is richly detailed, elegantly written and meticulously researched.
Baroness Patricia Hollis This immensely readable biography combines the
personal story of an outstanding public person with the intellectual
story of social research in the past century. It rescues from oblivion a
woman social scientist who, like so many of her generation, unstintingly
devoted her life to improving social knowledge, only to be forgotten by
new waves of political and intellectual fashions. Unputdownable! E.
Stina Lyon, professor emeritus of sociology, London South Bank
University Barbara Wootton's life of public engagement was remarkable
... Ann Oakley describes how [her] conviction that the economic and the
social must be integrated led Wootton towards sociology ... Oakley shows
too how Wootton pierced through received views of propriety with a
resolute sense of personal justice. Sheila Rowbotham, Times Higher
Education Ann Oakley is a leading British sociologist and writer. She
is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the Institute of
Education, University of London, where she set up the Social Science
Research Unit and the EPPI-Centre, an enterprise devoted to making
social research useful to policy-makers. She is the author of many
books. Her non-fiction includes The Sociology of Housework (1974),
Becoming A Mother (1979), Experiments in Knowing (2000) and Gender on
Planet Earth (2002). Among her novels are A Proper Holiday (1996),
Overheads (1999), and The Men's Room (1988), which was made into a BBC
TV series.
