Man & Wife

Ann Oakley is the only child of Kay Miller, an ex-social worker, and Richard Titmuss, one of the founders of Britain's welfare state. A mixture of biography, autobiography, feminist analysis and family and social history, Man & Wife draws on the private papers of Ann's parents and on her own memory of them, and explores the dynamics. of their marriage. Arguing that people's social theories cannot be divorced from the politics of personal relationships, she describes the difficulties experienced by her mother - who gave up her career to support her husband's - and of the conflict between the world within the home and the world outside it. Finally, she explores the life and work of her father, who saw in the social inequalities of Britain in the 1930s and 1940s the need for that radical vision which gave birth to the welfare state.
Man & Wife perceptively reveals relationships between men and women, parents and children, grand theory and personal practice, and between ourselves and our own memories. Detailing a real sense of people battling to make sense of their lives, this is a unique, fascinating and moving memoir.