Appendix 2: Sources and Further Reading

This appendix gives the principal original sources for each chapter, using the cross-references listed in appendix 1. Other material is included as the basis for further reading.

Chapter 1 Oakley's reflections on how her life has been shaped by its social and historical context can be found in O19 (published when she was 40) and O71 (published three decades later). Chapter 11 of Dale Spender's For the Record (London: The Women's Press, 1985) locates Oakley as a key developer of feminist ideas inspired by Betty Friedan, while Margaret Walters' Feminism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) traces feminist ideas across several centuries down to second wave feminists including Oakley. (Oakley herself prefers not to apply the imagery of waves to feminism's history.) Olive Banks' Faces of Feminism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) covers similar ground but starts in the 1840s, as does Sara Delamont's Feminist Sociology (London: SAGE, 2003) (although she calls the period from the 1960s feminism's third wave). Miriam David's Reclaiming Feminism (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016) covers more recent developments down to fifth wave feminism, drawing on her own career as a contemporary of Oakley's. Julia Brannen's Social Research Matters (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2019) is a more straightforwardly autobiographical account by another academic contemporary and Institute of Education colleague. Sheila Rowbotham's A Century of Women (London: Penguin, 1999) devotes a chapter to each decade of the 20th century, focusing on Britain and the USA, describing the 1960s as a decade of ferment.

Chapter 2 Beyond Oakley's main autobiographical/semi-autobiographical books O19 and O71 she provides insights into her life and career in further places including articles on particular topics such as O51, O73 and O75, her contextualisation of the material selected for O21, O36 and O62 and her career reflections in O61 and O72. Gabriela Loureiro's 2021 interview, ‘Feminist histories, feminist futures’, discusses Oakley's involvement in the Women's Liberation Movement in Ealing https://autonomy.work/portfolio/ffp-ann-oakley-int/ Chapter 9 of Graham Crow's The Art of Sociological Argument (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005) treats Oakley as successor to various sociological predecessors, notably Charles Wright Mills, while his ‘Hedgehogs, foxes and other embodiments of academics’ career trajectories' in Contemporary Social Science 2020 vol. 15 (5) pp. 577–594 considers her career trajectory and his contribution on Oakley in Atkinson P, Delamont S, Cernat A, Sakshaug JW, Williams RA (eds) The Sage Encyclopaedia of Research Methods (London: SAGE, 2021) focuses on her research methods, as does Lucinda Platt's contribution to 50 Key Sociologists (edited by John Scott, Routledge, Abingdon, 2007).

Chapter 3 Oakley's first article O1 and her book on gender O2, her books on housework O3 and O4 and her books and chapters on her first two research projects on motherhood O5, O6, O8, O10, O13 and O18 are the principal sources used in this chapter. The literature on gender has grown to vast proportions, as Oakley notes in the introduction to the 2015 edition of O2. Pamela Abbott's chapter in Geoff Payne and Eric Harrison's edited collection Social Divisions (4th edition Bristol: Policy Press, 2020) considers the range of gender inequalities. Kath Woodward's The short guide to gender (Bristol: Policy Press, 2011) provides a useful overview of how debates about gender developed. Momin Rahman and Stevi Jackson's Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010) is a similarly useful introduction to this topic. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott's edited collection Gender: A sociological reader (London: Routledge, 2002) contains 50 chapters that reveal how broadly the concept was being applied by the turn of the century, including in the field of paid and unpaid work which Oakley's research on housework had also stimulated. In her introduction to the 2019 edition of O4 she suggests that this is her most influential book and reflects on the course of the debates that followed its publication in 1974, including the point that some contributions were more methodologically sophisticated without being more illuminating as a result. The book's success came despite the hostility of some reviewers such as Dorothy Smith who was among the contributors to a review symposium in Sociology 1975 vol. 9 (3), pp. 515–524, and others mentioned in Oakley's new preface to the 1985 edition. Oakley's introduction to the 2019 edition of O6, her first book on motherhood, includes a discussion of the mixed reviews that it received, including in popular as well as academic publications. Researchers since the 1970s (when Oakley conducted her original study of motherhood) have highlighted the growing diversity of family forms and household types in which mothers are found; Oakley herself does this in her re-study O69, as do Deborah Chambers and Pablo Gracia in Sociology of Family Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2021).

Chapter 4 Oakley's concerns with women's well-being, with policy initiatives to promote it and with the methodological challenges of researching these issues feature prominently in the publications on which this chapter draws, notably O7, O9, O11, O12, O14, O15, O17, O24, O25, O26, O27, O28, O29, O32, O34, O38, O48 and O51. The distinctiveness of the field of women's studies was debated in two edited collections, Dale Spender's Men's Studies Modified (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981) and Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli Klein's Theories of Women's Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). Two edited collections, Mary Evans' The Woman Question (London: SAGE, 1994) and Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires' Feminisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), took stock of things a decade on. Gayle Letherby's Feminist Research in Theory and Practice (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003) included discussion of the quantitative/qualitative divide in research methods. Alan Bryman's ‘The end of the paradigm wars?’ in Pertti Alasuutari, Leonard Bickman and Julia Brannen (eds) The Sage Handbook of Social Research Methods (London: SAGE, 2008, pp. 13–25) provides a useful review of the issues over which these methodological disputes raged, written from a non-partisan position. Vicki Plano Clark and John Cresswell's co-edited The Mixed Methods Reader (Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE, 2008) considers the paradigm wars among many other topics.

Chapter 5 This chapter draws on Oakley's writings about evaluation in the broad sense including discussions of the conduct of robust social science (O53, O54, O55, O56, O58, O59, O63, O64 and O65) and of implications for policy (O39, O40, O45 and O46) together with reflections about the legacy of Titmuss's work (O31, O44, O52 and O60) and the cumulative nature of knowledge more generally (O20, O43, O47, O50, O62, O69 and 073). The web pages of the Social Science Research Unit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/departments-and-centres/centres/social-science-research-unit-ssru and of the EPPI Centre https://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/ provide details of the extensive work undertaken there in the last three decades. Sandy Oliver's ‘Ann Oakley: new learning and global influence from working across conventional boundaries’ London Review of Education 2023, 21 (1) is a review of Oakley's work in evaluation by a key colleague. David Byrne's Applying Social Science (Bristol: Policy Press, 2011) has a useful chapter on evaluation research which includes discussion of the experiments seeking to break the cycle of deprivation with which Halsey had been involved. John Stewart's Richard Titmuss: A Commitment to Welfare (Bristol: Policy Press, 2020) is an authoritative biography on which Oakley collaborated.

Chapter 6 Oakley's in-depth historical biographical research is exemplified in book-length studies O41, O68, O71, O76, O79 and O81 and in shorter chapters and articles O16, O23, O67, O70, O73, O75, O77 and O78. Barbara Wootton's In a World I Never Made (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967) is (like all autobiographies) a selective account, published more than two decades before her death. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Home: Its Work and Influence (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2002) has an introduction to this 1903 classic that treats it as a forerunner of Betty Friedan's work. Because the LSE figured frequently in the lives of the women on whom Oakley's historical research has focused, Christopher Husbands' Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science 1904–2015 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) provides much useful contextual information, as does John Scott's broader British Sociology: A History (Cham: Palgrave Pivot, 2020). Lynn McDonald's The Women Founders of the Social Sciences (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994) covers an earlier period.

Chapter 7 Oakley's autobiographical reflections along with more general observations can be found in O19, O57, O66, O71, O72 and O75 and in interviews conducted by Bob Mullan in Mullan B (ed.) Sociologists on Sociology, London: Croom Helm, 1987 and by Liz Spencer for the UK Data Service Pioneers of Qualitative Research project which is available at http://ukdataservice.ac.uk/teaching-resources/pioneers and which is drawn upon in Paul Thompson, Ken Plummer and Neli Demireva's Pioneering Social Research: Life Stories of a Generation, Bristol: Policy Press, 2021. O71 has a review symposium devoted to it in Sociology 51(2) 2017, pp. 483–490 and a response from Oakley. ‘Writing fiction as a sociologist: an interview with Ann Oakley’ The Sociological Review Magazine March 29 2019 https://thesociologicalreview.org/collections/sociology-and-literature/writing-fiction-as-a-sociologist-an-interview-with-ann-oakley/ focuses on novel writing. Oakley's novels are O22, O30, O33, O35, O37, O42, O49 and O80; they are discussed in Alla Marchyshyna and Anatolii Skrypnyk, ‘Feminine identities in Ann Oakley's novels' Journal of European Studies 2021, 51 (2), pp. 129–138. ‘In conversation with Ann Oakley’ is a discussion of methodological issues https://www.ncrm.ac.uk/resources/video/RMF2010/pages/Wednesday.php from 2010.

Chapter 8 Barbara Littlewood's Feminist Perspectives on Sociology (London: Routledge, 2004) gives a sense of how much the discipline changed during Oakley's career, providing one way of thinking about her legacy. Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thorne's edited collection Feminist Sociology: Life Histories of a Movement (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997) provides an interesting comparison with American autobiographical reflections. A. Javier Trevino's The Emerald Guide to C. Wright Mills (Bingley: Emerald, 2021) facilitates reflection on Oakley's acknowledged debt to Mills's ideas and how she built on them.