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Ann Oakley, Jewish feminist. Four book reviews by Rae West from www.big-lies.org
Ann Oakley & Ann McPherson & Helen Roberts:
Miscarriage [1984]
-About 400,000 miscarriages supposedly in UK every year; much commoner than I'd realised. I wonder if this book sold well? Some emphasis on physical abnormalities e.g. of uterus, of chromosomes. Infertility has two pages only in the index ('sterility' is omitted). Lots of stuff on hormones - these seem acceptable as mass discourse topics, though how they're detected etc isn't made clear. Toxic exposure (lead, anaesthetics) gets a small mention. Section on Ectopic pregnancy. And on 'trying again'. Fertility pills seem not to be mentioned anywhere.
Miscarriage [1984]-About 400,000 miscarriages supposedly in UK every year; much commoner than I'd realised. I wonder if this book sold well? Some emphasis on physical abnormalities e.g. of uterus, of chromosomes. Infertility has two pages only in the index ('sterility' is omitted). Lots of stuff on hormones - these seem acceptable as mass discourse topics, though how they're detected etc isn't made clear. Toxic exposure (lead, anaesthetics) gets a small mention. Section on Ectopic pregnancy. And on 'trying again'. Fertility pills seem not to be mentioned anywhere.
Ann Oakley: Taking It Like A Woman [1984] LONG REVIEW!
Blurb says she's 'one of our foremost feminist writers.' This book is more or less autobiographical. She is an undeclared Jew. It's depressing to watch as the post-1945 Jewish war victory spreads. Libraries, Universities, Departments grow. Her intellectual contribution is negligible; she occupies a lightweight niche something like that of a Victorian vicar, preoccupied with nothing much, but receiving her stipend and no doubt complaining of its insufficiency. Her accounts seem accurate, and her blinkered views just as accurately captured. I made these notes in about 1990; now I'd identify the pushes against the family, the faked Cold War, the evasions of the US Empire, the fake of the Labour Party, the gullibility of nuclear campaigners, the secret Jew networks, and of course the ignorance of paper money, debt, official but evasive budgets, the extraction on money by Israel.
- Other titles: 'Sex, Gender and Society' [?1972], 'The Sociology of Housework', 'Housewife', Joint editor of 'The Rights and Wrongs of Women', 'From Here to Maternity', 'Women Confined' [1980], and 'Subject Women'. Notes at the back also have: 'Creative Women in Changing Societies' 1980 pp205, and 'Interviewing Women: a contradiction in terms?' 1981 pp 207, and 'Living in the Present: a confrontation with cancer' 1979. She was brought up in a 'late Edwardian monstrosity' in Acton, went to a poly in west London, and after Oxford seems to have lived part of the time in Ealing. [Of her educational establishments, she only names Somerville; oh. I found Chiswick Polytechnic gets an indirect reference]
- Unindexed, though the chapters have notes though without page numbers: Liv Ullman, Sheila Rowbotham, 'Rise and Fall of CND' (Observer 1964!), Account of the Ban-the-Bomb movement, Philip Slater's Pursuit of Loneliness stupidly dated 1975, titles on psychotherapy, women, depression, suicide (175-177: 'Against all the evidence - of their own creative power, of their sensitivity and genius - women feel they are worthless creatures.'), Marcus Aurelius, Mehta's Fly and the Fly-Bottle, David Cooper's Death of the Family, Laing oddly absent, Adrienne Rich, Erving Goffman's Asylum, Betty Friedan (pp70, 73), Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, Verena Stefan, Susan Sontag, Office of Population Censuses and Surveys on cancer figures, and others quoted.
- Blurb says: '.. 'breakdown' and analysis before she went up to Oxford, which amazed those who knew her' [pp 34-5 have some of her diary notes
- Father was 'eminent..' [and we can work out, though with some effort, he was Richard Titmuss; he wrote several books most or all I think with his wife: 6: Poverty and Population (1936), Our Food Problem (1939), Birth, Poverty and Wealth (1943). No indication that she even opened them.
- She I imagine 'read' English at Oxford (how she got there isn't revealed, I think, though there's some reference to difficult questions on entrance exams about which she says she wasn't happy with them (though incidentally she got the right answers): she quotes Aldous Huxley's Brave New World with approval: 4 'We must claim the right to pain and passion'/ Sylvia Plath gets a few lines/ so does T S Eliot's East Coker/ and Donna, sung by Joan Baez and others [Note: unconscious scientific ignorance:] about a calf bound for slaughter and how it's better to grow wings and fly away. I find on page 36 she went to Somerville, Oxford, to do Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. I haven't yet read this chapter: the question is, will she say anything at all about the work she did there, if any, or just write about women and men?
- in fact, she does, on pp 36-42, provide some sort of overview; she seems not to rate Oxford highly, though of course hasn't anything to suggest to improve it: philosophy was then in linguistic throes and she read Augustine & Aurelius (and I think was later influenced by existentialism, no doubt through Simone de Beauvoir); economics which she disliked and began to 'grapple uncomprehendingly' with; not much on politics except Marx, Weber, 'an appreciation of Ralf Dahrendorf's Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society.' 40: 'Why did no one incite us to read Marx? .. accepted body of doctrines.. In 'Theory and Working of Political Institutions' and 'British Political and Constitutional History since 1865', the two elements of the politics syllabus.. in our second and third years we were 'farmed out' to more exciting intellects.. these were always men.. though now I wonder why Somerville.. should have harboured such mediocrity.' She wrote two essays and attended two 1-hr tutorials a week for most of her 3 years (p 47). 45 she won the Somerville College PPE prize for a long essay 'The Family and Industrialization'. [There's an amusing point somewhere where a Somerville woman says in effect their graduates have changed the world, and listed second-rate novelists. And cp my notes on Rantzen] She 'first saw Robin at a seminar on Marxism.. 1964.. Beatles..' 47: married in Caxton Hall Registry Office..' 48: '.. card index of aides memoires.. 'Growth and the Trade Cycle', 'The Keynesian System', 'Liberty and Punishment', 'Good and Bad Acts', 'Pressure Groups', 'Social Stratification', 'Durkheim and Merton on Anomie'. ..'
- Note: I think her father gave her the idea of 'writing books' and suggested perhaps an underlying amateurism or pragmatism which equates publication, or being well-known in a small circle, with serious work. 7: 'His work was always difficult to classify... he had no professional academic training.. persisted in calling himself a student of society.' See under DEATH below for his supposed achievements. 1: '.. a world away from academic papers and investigations, house improvements and clean laundry.' Also somewhat hypocritical attitude to socialism and poverty: no indication that this is anything other than a sort of self-pity, with plenty of thoroughly class-conscious and class-rooted statements throughout, including remarks on 'The Third World'. [I wrote earlier: .. daughter of a Labour Party official or intellectual; did PPE at Oxford; despite the title, mainly self-congratulatory and 'feelingist' stuff. Similar type to people like the Tizards (he was a postman from New Zealand, I'm told) but with a different slant. Cp also Webbs, with 'lower class' male]
- She's keen on the idea of her own terrific individuality, though it's hard to see why. Blurb says: '.. Marriage at twenty.. first two children in the late 1960s
- a time when there were no social supports for combating depression.. made a case study.. in BBC's Television Doctor.. decided to go for her PhD. [This seems to involve Open University work] Along with forgoing her academic credibility, she gained recognition of domesticity as a legitimate area of study. .. joined a women's liberation group in Ealing and initiated feminist research. .. conceived three more children, only one of whom lived.. This is the merest outline of a life which has so far never embraced easy answers..' and 2: 'This book is about my life, but it is also about others
- for it would be arrogant to suppose I'm unique; I'm not. ..'
35: 'He [psychoanalyst] ventured the opinion that if life treated me gently.. I would have no further major problems. It did not, and I did.'
She says she was toilet trained early, like many of her generation, and that this must have had some effects. This shows the way thoughts can be influenced by theory. It occurred to me watching people in supermarkets and through introspection that of course peoples' decisions are often very silly: junk food, stuff which is eye-catching, thoughts of delicious sweet food/ and money
- the contradiction between wanting others to give it to you, but not wanting to spend yourself/ attitude to new people and unconscious weighing of them
- any of these things and many more examples of course: adventurousness? Aggressive competitiveness? Herd feeling?
- must surely be more important than the results of toilet training. But Freud didn't talk about money training or part of the herd training.
- She consistently ignores the economic dimension of life in this book, which gives it a strange lopsided quality. See for example pp 119-122 giving examples of three women having affairs. Another oddity is her refusal to face female conflicts; describing adulterous etc women she typically doesn't consider the rival wife; see e.g. 122; cp my notes on letters to Eve from Rhodesian friends, where exactly the same outlook appears: ".. his wreck of a wife.." (Though on 14 she mentions competition between women for high status men, I think she implies 'as Nancy Chodorow and others have shown' though in the sense of rivalry with her mother for her father's love. 193 says There is a law.. 'that mothers and daughters could not teach each other, could not inherit, could not relate. ..' [Marge Piercey])
- Joke: following from latter, it would be amusing to consider the reaction of e.g. young working class woman to lack of economic stuff in this book, or the idea that nearly all marriages are a mistake!
- She takes for granted that all men screw around, and implicitly therefore that women do; I recall a similar attitude in Mary Winchester and in Margaret.
- She has an odd attitude to the family, in view of her admission e.g. that she became pregnant mainly through curiosity: 'A historian friend of mine remarked.. as a foreigner.. it has taken him by surprise to see how deeply embedded were the values of the established church in the lives and minds of people.. no firmer proof.. than that the family has become the repository of religious values, a religion apart. Families.. are not sustained by love, by enjoyment, by relaxation, by passion. They are sustained by commitment and decision and loyalty hard-gathered from the once-good times; .. future welfare is placed above present happiness.. Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.'
- NHS: She footnotes someone's alternative theory that treating the plebs like shit is a result of patriarchal set-up, or something
- Somewhere she mentions that the very language of history excludes the poor etc.
- I found the style of this tiresome: blurb says '.. chronicles the battle between love [seems to mean sex and 'finding herself'] and the family.. scenes of confrontation and intimacy.. interweaves the account .. haunting and disturbing love affair, blending fiction and memoir seamlessly..' She writes things like: 'Visions are not for solitary figures in supermarkets, lonely travellers, tired husbands and wives. They are not for public consumption. And they are not intended to make real hearts bleed.' and like 54: 'the other day I saw a man plugged into a tape recorder..' and like 1: 'It is the end of a summer that had no proper middle or beginning. .. a boat holds a man and a woman. They are almost middle-aged, but quite good-looking still: probably professional people, middle class, not suffering from any obvious kind of deprivation.
What is most striking about them is their vitality. Everything about them is alive..
.. There is little passion in professional urban circles in the 1970s. ..'
- 2: 'None of us can hope to solve our basic problems: why we are alive, how we should be born, behave, think..'
- 2: [Note: words: Oakley confuses 'discomforted' with 'discomfited']
- 3: 'The questions I had in mind .. included..:
1 What makes someone into a feminist?
2 What sort of person is a feminist?
3 How can a feminist be part of a society organized in terms of sexual difference and 'the family'?
4 What is the nature of the love between men and women?
5 How do we deal with the fact that we're not going to live for ever?'
- 6: 'No family is conventional when you take a hard look at it, ..'
- 7: '.. parents.. worked together.. on a poignant unpublished manuscript.. Crime and Tragedy.. dedicated to 'those who laid down their lives that others might uphold the Divine Right to use Bombing Planes'. It reminds one that the passionate idealism of youth is either new nor, depressingly, lasting. ..'
- 7: 'The late 1940s marked a period of retrenchment for women's position in the labour force. 'Good' mothers then and in the 1950s simply didn't work outside the home.'
- 8: 'I went to school at the age of four.. private establishment.. We said our prayers with our eyes oddly raised to the skies of Chiswick, ..'
- 8: 'A powerful memory is of an arithmetic test I did one day at the age of five. The sums were written on the blackboard.. I looked at them and thought I would do the most difficult ones first. But.. I got into a terrible muddle and cried.. When I returned after lunch I found I was the only child who had not only done all the sums but who had got them all right. .. The lesson .. was for me that following the conventional pattern may be safer, but it is unlikely to be the route to the highest achievement of all. .'
- 10: 'At six I went to.. a Girls' Public School.. It was always held against my father, who for most of his life was an ardent socialist (in 1950 he had become the first Professor of Social Administration in Britain at the London School of Economics (RW
- Surely nonsense? Webb was, for one?), a place with an erroneously radical reputation), that he never sent me to a state school. My strongest memories .. are.. of being a social outcast. .. Thin.. squint.. Titmouse.. no real friends..'
- 11: [description of Girls' Public School: classrooms, staff of the school, essays on Men of the Stone Age, motto .. 'serve and obey' which 'did seem to me deeply significant as a summary of its philosophy..'
- 16: [MENSTRUATION:] '.. One by one my classmates 'started' .. tell-tale bulge in their navy-blue knickers.. Sept 15, 1957. I was tremendously happy and excited.. But .. my mother.. confined me to bed and brought breakfast on a tray. I wanted to tell my father and she said I mustn't. .. I thought, if being a woman is a good thing, why isn't there a public celebration..?'
- 17: '.. privileged middle-class girl.. I knew no boys. .. I had actually never spoken to a boy my age. .. It does, I think, account for a certain difficulty in accepting men as fully human..'
- 17-18: [FIRST KISS and first love or 'love' going to cinema etc
- Date with Disaster and Carleton-Brown of the F.O./ Her kiss was more memorable than loss of virginity/ He was a Catholic; 24 she wrote to the Catholic Information Centre. She says he was 'an extremely bad Catholic'.]
- 19: [Labour Party, Richard Crossman, Peter Townsend later Prof, John Vaizey later Lord and R H Tawney there from time to time] 'I remember well how my father, Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, in their work demolishing the notion of Britain as a post-war haven of class equality, were known.. as the 'Holy Trinity'...'
- 21-22: [Socialism, National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, CND; she has nothing on the actual arms situation, but quotes the text of the song 'Don't you hear the H-bomb's thunder.. Ban the bomb for evermore' and newspapers on the supposed preponderance of teenagers in the movement.] '.. when I began to relax my limbs in Whitehall, they grew horrified instead. My mother told me that if I got arrested she had no intention of bailing me out of prison. I thought this cruel; ...'
- 22-23: [SEX: She quotes Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (qv) on losing virginity, and Schofield 'The Sexual Behaviour of Young People'; the latter apparently said 'for girls.. to become sexually experienced.. required a much greater repudiation of the family and striving for personal independence.' I simply don't know if this is true; consider e.g. Judith Robinson, who implied the opposite, 'tawdry' Audrey, and Margaret.]
- 31: [Aged 15 diary notes about being womanly]
- 33: [Description of her 'analysis']
- 35: '.. I found some of her [Karen Horney's] thought pre-dated Freud..'
- 36: [OXFORD in 1962; Blackwell's, Fresher's Fair, Gaitskell's daughter, Labour Club, etc etc]
- 42: [Description of Oxford by 'James Morris, later Jan']
- 43: '.. I did not want to leave Oxford without at least the prospect of getting married. .. Even today there are few girls who envisage an entirely marriageless future. .. in 1968 [i.e. aged c 24] I wrote in my diary: "Oh God, why am I not married and happy with two kids? .."
- 46: 'I felt that Robin was coming down in the world by marrying me, though according to the Registrar-General, chartered accountants and university professors' families both belong to social class 1.'
- 49: [Writes novels, gets rejection slips: both on women, mothers, babies]
- 54: '.. The problem is feeling too much. .. As a woman, in the first place, my emotions rule my life. .. There is nothing that I do or think which is not inspired by feelings. .. I want to know why I am like that. I ask a friend, a psychoanalyst, why women are like that; she doesn't know..'
- 55-56: [Quote saying 'there are few feminine wiles better documented than the willingness of young women to build up the male ego by underplaying their own talents..' [Jessie Bernard, 'Women and the Public Interest', 1971]'
- 58: [Pregnancy and birth aged c 23; lots of stuff about clinical hospitals, giggling medical students, being left alone, nurse taking bell away, needing stitches, panic that medical students had found defects, etc etc] 'Curiosity had been my main motive for wanting a baby; I had a tremendous desire to find out if I would conceive, how I would look..'
- 61: '.. pethidine.. After that a fog descended. .. Life was oceanic; I was tossed from one gigantic wave to another..'
- [DRUGS: Oakley seems to know a surprising number of them by name: pethidine; 68 & 120 stelazine and imipramine. 70 antidepressants, tranquilizers. 104 oblivon. Elsewhere e.g. 131, 140 valium]
- 63: [Son now 72 inches etc etc/ Oakley impressed by growth rate of foetuses and babies. Note absence of female input in child-rearing, e.g. 64: Dr Hugh Jolly, self-appointed British paediatric adviser to mothers, says that mothers have to fall in love with their babies or there is no mother-child bond. ..'
- 66: [HOUSING ETC] 'We had.. bought a small house in Chiswick with help from our families. .. curtains.. hoover.. mice.. nappies.. Robin earned £1,000 a year as Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Bedford College, University of London. ..'
- 67: [I noted this earlier, before buying this book; its apparent selfishness and self-indulgence irritated me:] 'About the same time, I wrote a list of all the things I wanted most in the world but didn't have. 'a Mini or eleven hundred (car)/ a Hotpoint automatic washing machine/ lots of cupboards/ two more babies/ three pints of cream/ two garden chairs/ a mincer/ a side on my bath/ a wig for the baby/ some gin/ a new bath hat/ some white boots for next winter/ a pushchair/ a cleaning lady/ a portable television/ some huge meals in posh places.'
- 68: [DEPRESSION:] '.. GP.. should have told me that around four-fifths of women in our society are depressed after birth, a third some of the time. .. March 3rd 1969.. BBC television..'
- 70: [New Statesman ad for work: phoning to advertise a publication 'which would presumably raise their profits' and 'market research' into paint and bras.]
- 73: '.. Hannah Gavron.. 'The Captive Wife'.. 1966.. worked at Bedford College... killed herself..'
- 74-75: [Department of Education; GETTING GRANTS: long correspondence for money for her research into housework]
- 75: [Article in New Society, 'Deprivation of Paternal care' called after John Bowlby; they called it 'The Myth of Motherhood']
- 76-80: [She visits a women's meeting in Ealing, with two American speakers, Debbie and Elyse; then a Chinese meal ten years later: one has a baby, one is an HGV driver, one's a vegetarian librarian, Elyse, an acupuncturist, a silversmith, dental receptionist who 'felt she had less education than the rest of us', and Oakley]
- 81ff: [Passages somewhat like Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves', but they combine descriptive flattening and coalescence with domestic detail] '.. We make tea and observe that it is raining. .. I am on the telephone yet again to a publisher.. a sick child, an Open University Unit to complete.. advertisements in the local paper.. You ask me if I have ever slept with anyone else since I married your father.. you of the unkempt room and melodramatic tempers, of the too-quick retort and hidden Mars bars.. Elastoplast and Oxo cubes.. The salt has been forgotten.. There is a knife missing and the dishwasher is still churning away like the Queen Mary ..' / 101 has more domestic stuff, which evidently Oakley believes to be a part of nature: '.. welcome background.. creak of the pipes, water running in the kitchen, the hiss of the central heating controls, cars outside in the streets. ..'
- 92-95: [Chapter 'The War between Love and the Family I', which turns out to be a woman's view of a 'relationship' with someone else's husband, written of course from a self-justifying point of view. Mensa mags have a couple of rather similar pieces] 'A man cannot love a woman the way a woman loves a man. That is one point. .. the 'package' of his wife and children. .. yes, she can see why one would not want to lose that. But, on the other hand, consider her own position in this love affair. She is an unequal partner in this relationship. His wife doesn't know.. However, her husband does know.. what her lover and she are able to share together must be determined not so much by what his wife can bear but by what he thinks she can. .. How can one compare love for a child and love for a man? .. On one hand they are a man and a woman enjoying a torrid international love affair
- really enjoying its dangerous deceit, the hours prized [note: word] away from anything else..'
- 98: '.. It's like Doris Lessing's Four-Gated City in which the [sic] nuclear holocaust is prefaced by the breakdown of all domestic appliances. .'/ 179: '.. consider this: that the nuclear catastrophe when it comes will not come upon us out of the blue.. It will be a consequence of a million other disasters, trivial mistakes we all, in our time, have made. ..'
- 104-112: [DEATHS: Mainly her father; also 109 grandmother; and near death 108 of young girl allergic to 'iodine dye'. He died of cancer which was described as 'treatable' which Oakley didn't realise wasn't the same as 'curable'. I think it was lung cancer, in his NHS 'tiny mean hospital room', though there's a puzzling reference to 'dry rot at the top of your ribs' and students being allowed four-letter words if "cancer" was uttered
- R M Titmuss, in 'Social Policy', 1974. 111-112: service in St Martin-in-the-Fields with Crossman and Wilbur Cohen, ex-Secretary of the U S Dept of Health, Education and Welfare, and Trevor Huddleston, Bishop of Stepney. Apparently he was compared to 'Lloyd George, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Churchill, Queen Elizabeth I, and Seebohm Rowntree', and was 'pensions advisor to the Labour party, Deputy Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, creator of health and social services for Mauritius, influential friend of Julius Nyerere, critic of income tax dodges, charismatic teacher.'
- 116: [Note on China taken from M H Kingston. 'The Woman Warrior' 1981, generally suggesting horridness etc of Chinese]
- 116: [Example of what I take to be 'existentialist' influence:] '.. The question is: can love exist without oppression? And, if it can't, who is being oppressed? The question is: why, if my utopia doesn't contain men, are you my utopia?'
- 117: '.. Our lives are organized around men. .. men belong to the world, they own it, they run it, its representation is in and comes from their heads. Women have difficulty owning even their own wombs, which is important, because within these organs lies their only countervailing kind of power. ..'
- 118: 'Adolescent boys are a distraction to adolescent girls.. [Note: unconscious ignorance:] Marriage for women is almost always a mistake. Married women without paid work are the unhappiest people in the world. But the mental health of men is improved by marriage. [Source for this is Jessie Bernard, 'The Future of Marriage' 1973, New York
- Note: American attitude to measurable mental health] Why is this? It is easy to see why. If you're a woman, marriage promises everything and guarantees nothing. .. men go out in the storm and the rain [this is in reference to a supposed Arapesh saying] to see what's around. What they end up with is both kinds.. the little unselfish domestic ones and the selfish dry-breasted ones. That way they get the best of both worlds.
But women don't. Women, of both kinds, suffer. .. As mistresses.. I speak as a wife and as a mistress, for that is what all women are. ..
Three women I know are wrapped up in the consequences of men's bifurcated mystique of women: the feminine and the feminist. All three women are married and all three are mothers. All are in love with another woman's husband.
[SEX RELATIONSHIPS: 119 ff gives account of man fucking two women, from their point of view; then a woman 'married to a gentle, professional man' fucking another (married) man ['.. they found that they couldn't live without one another (to use the well-worn phrase, which.. hides the fact that it's scarcely ever true)'] who however goes off with another woman, not his wife ['No, he didn't want to talk about talk about it. He didn't want to face facts or feelings of any kind with anyone']; the third 'analyses the distress.. All three women are equally upset.. All three men involved have double vision. All seek the conveniences of marriage and the freedom of the sexual chase. All three women want sexual joy and security to be combined in the same person: their image of men is an integrated one. Therefore the desires of men and women are incompatible. .. 'bitchiness' of teenage girls together: .. This is how they have seen their mothers behave. It is clever to make pointed and salacious remarks about other women. ..
Feminists know that we women should put each other first. .. But it isn't easy, because women can be their own worst enemies. ..'
[182 has another long sex relationship, this time supposedly fictional involving the authoress and chap who flies a lot; seems to me indistinguishable from Mills and Boon: '.. You pretend to be overendowed with the ability to act while cowering passively in the shadow of your dilemma: your family or love? .. I threw away your ring.. "I'll lie again," you said. "Anything to keep this relationship going. I can't get you out of my mind or my life." But you didn't try, did you? ... Yes, I know you love me. I know this isn't just any relationship. But I am not just anybody....']
- 124: 'If my aspirations had been for a husband, a house and two babies by.. twenty-five, by the time I was thirty they were rather different. .. I might have echoed Dora Russell's words.. that two babies and three books by my thirtieth birthday enabled me to feel I had done rather well. ..' [125: first book was 'Sex, Gender, and Society' written in six weeks]
- 126: [APPLYING FOR MONEY: Cp EU] '.. I designed a simple study of first-time motherhood and applied to the Social Science Research Council for money to do it. The application was initially deferred, and then accepted.. I had to gain entry into the medical world.. I spent about a year in that hospital, and I learnt a lot.. took me some time to recognize.. my own ambition to be a doctor.. Why had medicine never been suggested to me as a career? .. profound miseducation of obstetricians and gynaecologists. [Diane Scully 'Men Who Control Women's Health' 1980] .. male doctoring is ultimately about control over women.. nowhere more true than in the domain of reproduction. .. doctors are human beings too.. jargon.. '.. attempt to integrate oneself in the field is not without negative consequences. ..' .. In other words after two hours of a busy ante-natal clinic I too would sigh.. 128: The first woman I saw having a 'normal' delivery .. gave me quite a shock. .. epidural.. machine.. wires.. just lying there.. 130ff: [Pages on her own pregnancies and abortions (in the medical sense) which make her complaints at other women's excessive discussion of their babies seem insincere. Long tale of misdiagnosis, though I'm not quite sure of what: 'He found a ruptured tubal [sic] pregnancy. .. haemorrhaging internally.. Two pints of blood were extracted from my abdomen..' 134: '..twins were diagnosed.. contractions.. went to the lavatory and passed the fetus.. It hung there.. I looked at it in horror. It was an alien object. ..'
- 137-146: [CANCER OF THE TONGUE; apparently the source of an article; 'I had many letters in response to my BMJ piece'. She was treated with radioactive wires made of 'a substance called iridium' she says; 141 says she got radiation burns, ulcers all round her mouth: 'I would have liked to have been told about them in advance.' 'Illness is either a visitation from the Divine for personal wrongdoing, or it is a condition of human beings with a specific physical cause. Or it is a process set in train by an unquiet mixture of forces in the head as well as the body... Why had all these things happened to me? ..'
- 143, 177: [Susan Sontag 'Illness as a Metaphor' 1977. See note under Sontag]
- 149: '.. Lines from Lamartine's 'Le Lac' .. 1817 perorations to the tubercular Julie..'
- 152: [HOUSEWORK and classic obsessional tendencies.. 'I am now (I think) able to regard housework as just another task to be done. ..'
- 158: A Things that annoy you about me... (One is 'That I'm always right when we have a disagreement..; another is 'That I'm so bloody efficient and good at everything..') B Things that annoy me about you
- 161-165: [MORE ABOUT HOSPITALS; Resigned old patients, three conspiracies against patients, arrogance of doctors, waiting. Her tongue cancer hasn't recurred]
- 172: '.. France.. suggestive of much older peasant habits. Medieval shepherds' families in Montaillou, a village not far from here, never washed: a strong odour was a good sign, a sign of humanity. De-lousing was a companionable act; .. children often died but not without being first treasured and later mourned. [Cp. Book on Papua New Guinea, where new-borns aren't specially greeted; they mayn't live] Time was marked visually, aurally, or simply physiologically: .. sunset.. sleep. cock.. etc'
- 178: 'In a patriarchal and patrilineal society, children only belong to men because women tell men they provided the sperm to start them off, but who actually did so must remain, to all men, a matter of conjecture. ..'
- 181: [More existential:] 'Actually, there were four possible solutions.. viz: death
- physical, of one or both/ death
- of the relationship/ life
- living together/ life
- living apart'
- 186ff: '.. I still bore the burden of three misconceptions: that domesticity and the public world are for women opposed fields of labour, that illness is a punishment for misdeeds.., and that the greatest misdeed of all women is infidelity to marriage and motherhood [sic]. I therefore resigned from every committee I was on.. .. It was logical now for me to seek.. an academic position with more administrative responsibility, more duties to do with overseeing the work of other people rather than doing my own.. 188: National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit.. among the six core staff positions was one for a social scientist.. I have achieved all of what I dreamed about.. Successful work
- even a degree of international repute; love, friendship, marriage, motherhood. And yet, and still, I am not satisfied. .. Yes, I know I am Ann Oakley.. the author of six books, Wellcome Research Fellow at the NPEU, Honorary Research officer in the Department of Sociology, Bedford College etc.. mother of three children and friend to various adults in my social network.. [Existential:] Is writing easy? If it's easy, then it's hardly an achievement. If it's difficult, then I'm a masochist. This is what Thomas Mann said about writing in Tonio Kröger: the urge to write is a curse born early in one's life 'by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; ..'
- 189: [Error: she thinks Darwin wrote 'The Origin of the Species'. And 'Expression of Emotion.'
- 192-4: [Dreams, typically of having children; described in semi-real-life way]
- 196: 'In my own life I can see the significance of some factors, viz: being born to parents who did not in their own personalities conform to conventional gender role stereotypes.. ; [14: '.. my father's 'feminine' gentleness and my mother's 'masculine' anger; my father's lack of education and my mother's middle class origins..'] perceiving the difficult reality, for my mother, of a traditional marriage; having a close intellectual and emotional relationship with my father; imbibing in childhood the.. sentiments of socialism, i.e. a moral condemnation of social and economic inequality; receiving conflicting expectations from both my parents and my formal education.. marrying and bearing children and caring for them myself.. but.. also.. a brilliantly successful career..'
- 197: '.. To see groups of dark-suited, busy, pugnacious and self-important men at conferences, in the street, in hotel lounges, sitting lined up an aircraft being served drinks by lipsticked stewardesses, is to be made more sharply aware that it is men who rule the world... If any one of them makes any kind of sexual overture to me, my anger can't be borne: it makes an impotent, inarticulate wreck of me. ..'
- 199: '.. Mary Ingham commented that 'Intellectually we demanded to be equals; deep down, emotionally and sexually, we were still looking for the awe-inspiring Mr Right.' .. Alexandra Kollontai.. in 'A Great Love'.. became involved with [sic] a married Russian economist called Maslov in 1909; .. French-born Bolshevik woman called Inessa Armand, who was having an affair with Lenin..' [Cp PC notes somewhere on Trotsky who was I think fancied by Isaac Deutscher's wife]
- 201: 'Male-dominated culture has designated as female all labours of emotional connectedness. .. the greater sensitivity of women means that they possess an enhanced capacity to relate to others and find themselves very often in the position of being the only ones able to carry out this life-saving task. ..'
- 204: [FINAL PARAGRAPH:] 'Life is worth living. Not because there is nothing else, but because of what we may give one another; pain, joy, anguish, peace. It's not an easy journey. You may even call it an adventure. It doesn't matter about the problems, the contradictions. In our hearts we understand everything. We understand it's the struggle that counts.'
Blurb says she's 'one of our foremost feminist writers.' This book is more or less autobiographical. She is an undeclared Jew. It's depressing to watch as the post-1945 Jewish war victory spreads. Libraries, Universities, Departments grow. Her intellectual contribution is negligible; she occupies a lightweight niche something like that of a Victorian vicar, preoccupied with nothing much, but receiving her stipend and no doubt complaining of its insufficiency. Her accounts seem accurate, and her blinkered views just as accurately captured. I made these notes in about 1990; now I'd identify the pushes against the family, the faked Cold War, the evasions of the US Empire, the fake of the Labour Party, the gullibility of nuclear campaigners, the secret Jew networks, and of course the ignorance of paper money, debt, official but evasive budgets, the extraction on money by Israel.
- Other titles: 'Sex, Gender and Society' [?1972], 'The Sociology of Housework', 'Housewife', Joint editor of 'The Rights and Wrongs of Women', 'From Here to Maternity', 'Women Confined' [1980], and 'Subject Women'. Notes at the back also have: 'Creative Women in Changing Societies' 1980 pp205, and 'Interviewing Women: a contradiction in terms?' 1981 pp 207, and 'Living in the Present: a confrontation with cancer' 1979. She was brought up in a 'late Edwardian monstrosity' in Acton, went to a poly in west London, and after Oxford seems to have lived part of the time in Ealing. [Of her educational establishments, she only names Somerville; oh. I found Chiswick Polytechnic gets an indirect reference]
- Unindexed, though the chapters have notes though without page numbers: Liv Ullman, Sheila Rowbotham, 'Rise and Fall of CND' (Observer 1964!), Account of the Ban-the-Bomb movement, Philip Slater's Pursuit of Loneliness stupidly dated 1975, titles on psychotherapy, women, depression, suicide (175-177: 'Against all the evidence - of their own creative power, of their sensitivity and genius - women feel they are worthless creatures.'), Marcus Aurelius, Mehta's Fly and the Fly-Bottle, David Cooper's Death of the Family, Laing oddly absent, Adrienne Rich, Erving Goffman's Asylum, Betty Friedan (pp70, 73), Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, Verena Stefan, Susan Sontag, Office of Population Censuses and Surveys on cancer figures, and others quoted.
- Blurb says: '.. 'breakdown' and analysis before she went up to Oxford, which amazed those who knew her' [pp 34-5 have some of her diary notes
- Father was 'eminent..' [and we can work out, though with some effort, he was Richard Titmuss; he wrote several books most or all I think with his wife: 6: Poverty and Population (1936), Our Food Problem (1939), Birth, Poverty and Wealth (1943). No indication that she even opened them.
- She I imagine 'read' English at Oxford (how she got there isn't revealed, I think, though there's some reference to difficult questions on entrance exams about which she says she wasn't happy with them (though incidentally she got the right answers): she quotes Aldous Huxley's Brave New World with approval: 4 'We must claim the right to pain and passion'/ Sylvia Plath gets a few lines/ so does T S Eliot's East Coker/ and Donna, sung by Joan Baez and others [Note: unconscious scientific ignorance:] about a calf bound for slaughter and how it's better to grow wings and fly away. I find on page 36 she went to Somerville, Oxford, to do Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. I haven't yet read this chapter: the question is, will she say anything at all about the work she did there, if any, or just write about women and men?
- in fact, she does, on pp 36-42, provide some sort of overview; she seems not to rate Oxford highly, though of course hasn't anything to suggest to improve it: philosophy was then in linguistic throes and she read Augustine & Aurelius (and I think was later influenced by existentialism, no doubt through Simone de Beauvoir); economics which she disliked and began to 'grapple uncomprehendingly' with; not much on politics except Marx, Weber, 'an appreciation of Ralf Dahrendorf's Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society.' 40: 'Why did no one incite us to read Marx? .. accepted body of doctrines.. In 'Theory and Working of Political Institutions' and 'British Political and Constitutional History since 1865', the two elements of the politics syllabus.. in our second and third years we were 'farmed out' to more exciting intellects.. these were always men.. though now I wonder why Somerville.. should have harboured such mediocrity.' She wrote two essays and attended two 1-hr tutorials a week for most of her 3 years (p 47). 45 she won the Somerville College PPE prize for a long essay 'The Family and Industrialization'. [There's an amusing point somewhere where a Somerville woman says in effect their graduates have changed the world, and listed second-rate novelists. And cp my notes on Rantzen] She 'first saw Robin at a seminar on Marxism.. 1964.. Beatles..' 47: married in Caxton Hall Registry Office..' 48: '.. card index of aides memoires.. 'Growth and the Trade Cycle', 'The Keynesian System', 'Liberty and Punishment', 'Good and Bad Acts', 'Pressure Groups', 'Social Stratification', 'Durkheim and Merton on Anomie'. ..'
- Note: I think her father gave her the idea of 'writing books' and suggested perhaps an underlying amateurism or pragmatism which equates publication, or being well-known in a small circle, with serious work. 7: 'His work was always difficult to classify... he had no professional academic training.. persisted in calling himself a student of society.' See under DEATH below for his supposed achievements. 1: '.. a world away from academic papers and investigations, house improvements and clean laundry.' Also somewhat hypocritical attitude to socialism and poverty: no indication that this is anything other than a sort of self-pity, with plenty of thoroughly class-conscious and class-rooted statements throughout, including remarks on 'The Third World'. [I wrote earlier: .. daughter of a Labour Party official or intellectual; did PPE at Oxford; despite the title, mainly self-congratulatory and 'feelingist' stuff. Similar type to people like the Tizards (he was a postman from New Zealand, I'm told) but with a different slant. Cp also Webbs, with 'lower class' male]
- She's keen on the idea of her own terrific individuality, though it's hard to see why. Blurb says: '.. Marriage at twenty.. first two children in the late 1960s
- a time when there were no social supports for combating depression.. made a case study.. in BBC's Television Doctor.. decided to go for her PhD. [This seems to involve Open University work] Along with forgoing her academic credibility, she gained recognition of domesticity as a legitimate area of study. .. joined a women's liberation group in Ealing and initiated feminist research. .. conceived three more children, only one of whom lived.. This is the merest outline of a life which has so far never embraced easy answers..' and 2: 'This book is about my life, but it is also about others
- for it would be arrogant to suppose I'm unique; I'm not. ..'
35: 'He [psychoanalyst] ventured the opinion that if life treated me gently.. I would have no further major problems. It did not, and I did.'
She says she was toilet trained early, like many of her generation, and that this must have had some effects. This shows the way thoughts can be influenced by theory. It occurred to me watching people in supermarkets and through introspection that of course peoples' decisions are often very silly: junk food, stuff which is eye-catching, thoughts of delicious sweet food/ and money
- the contradiction between wanting others to give it to you, but not wanting to spend yourself/ attitude to new people and unconscious weighing of them
- any of these things and many more examples of course: adventurousness? Aggressive competitiveness? Herd feeling?
- must surely be more important than the results of toilet training. But Freud didn't talk about money training or part of the herd training.
- She consistently ignores the economic dimension of life in this book, which gives it a strange lopsided quality. See for example pp 119-122 giving examples of three women having affairs. Another oddity is her refusal to face female conflicts; describing adulterous etc women she typically doesn't consider the rival wife; see e.g. 122; cp my notes on letters to Eve from Rhodesian friends, where exactly the same outlook appears: ".. his wreck of a wife.." (Though on 14 she mentions competition between women for high status men, I think she implies 'as Nancy Chodorow and others have shown' though in the sense of rivalry with her mother for her father's love. 193 says There is a law.. 'that mothers and daughters could not teach each other, could not inherit, could not relate. ..' [Marge Piercey])
- Joke: following from latter, it would be amusing to consider the reaction of e.g. young working class woman to lack of economic stuff in this book, or the idea that nearly all marriages are a mistake!
- She takes for granted that all men screw around, and implicitly therefore that women do; I recall a similar attitude in Mary Winchester and in Margaret.
- She has an odd attitude to the family, in view of her admission e.g. that she became pregnant mainly through curiosity: 'A historian friend of mine remarked.. as a foreigner.. it has taken him by surprise to see how deeply embedded were the values of the established church in the lives and minds of people.. no firmer proof.. than that the family has become the repository of religious values, a religion apart. Families.. are not sustained by love, by enjoyment, by relaxation, by passion. They are sustained by commitment and decision and loyalty hard-gathered from the once-good times; .. future welfare is placed above present happiness.. Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.'
- NHS: She footnotes someone's alternative theory that treating the plebs like shit is a result of patriarchal set-up, or something
- Somewhere she mentions that the very language of history excludes the poor etc.
- I found the style of this tiresome: blurb says '.. chronicles the battle between love [seems to mean sex and 'finding herself'] and the family.. scenes of confrontation and intimacy.. interweaves the account .. haunting and disturbing love affair, blending fiction and memoir seamlessly..' She writes things like: 'Visions are not for solitary figures in supermarkets, lonely travellers, tired husbands and wives. They are not for public consumption. And they are not intended to make real hearts bleed.' and like 54: 'the other day I saw a man plugged into a tape recorder..' and like 1: 'It is the end of a summer that had no proper middle or beginning. .. a boat holds a man and a woman. They are almost middle-aged, but quite good-looking still: probably professional people, middle class, not suffering from any obvious kind of deprivation.
What is most striking about them is their vitality. Everything about them is alive..
.. There is little passion in professional urban circles in the 1970s. ..'
- 2: 'None of us can hope to solve our basic problems: why we are alive, how we should be born, behave, think..'
- 2: [Note: words: Oakley confuses 'discomforted' with 'discomfited']
- 3: 'The questions I had in mind .. included..:
1 What makes someone into a feminist?
2 What sort of person is a feminist?
3 How can a feminist be part of a society organized in terms of sexual difference and 'the family'?
4 What is the nature of the love between men and women?
5 How do we deal with the fact that we're not going to live for ever?'
- 6: 'No family is conventional when you take a hard look at it, ..'
- 7: '.. parents.. worked together.. on a poignant unpublished manuscript.. Crime and Tragedy.. dedicated to 'those who laid down their lives that others might uphold the Divine Right to use Bombing Planes'. It reminds one that the passionate idealism of youth is either new nor, depressingly, lasting. ..'
- 7: 'The late 1940s marked a period of retrenchment for women's position in the labour force. 'Good' mothers then and in the 1950s simply didn't work outside the home.'
- 8: 'I went to school at the age of four.. private establishment.. We said our prayers with our eyes oddly raised to the skies of Chiswick, ..'
- 8: 'A powerful memory is of an arithmetic test I did one day at the age of five. The sums were written on the blackboard.. I looked at them and thought I would do the most difficult ones first. But.. I got into a terrible muddle and cried.. When I returned after lunch I found I was the only child who had not only done all the sums but who had got them all right. .. The lesson .. was for me that following the conventional pattern may be safer, but it is unlikely to be the route to the highest achievement of all. .'
- 10: 'At six I went to.. a Girls' Public School.. It was always held against my father, who for most of his life was an ardent socialist (in 1950 he had become the first Professor of Social Administration in Britain at the London School of Economics (RW
- Surely nonsense? Webb was, for one?), a place with an erroneously radical reputation), that he never sent me to a state school. My strongest memories .. are.. of being a social outcast. .. Thin.. squint.. Titmouse.. no real friends..'
- 11: [description of Girls' Public School: classrooms, staff of the school, essays on Men of the Stone Age, motto .. 'serve and obey' which 'did seem to me deeply significant as a summary of its philosophy..'
- 16: [MENSTRUATION:] '.. One by one my classmates 'started' .. tell-tale bulge in their navy-blue knickers.. Sept 15, 1957. I was tremendously happy and excited.. But .. my mother.. confined me to bed and brought breakfast on a tray. I wanted to tell my father and she said I mustn't. .. I thought, if being a woman is a good thing, why isn't there a public celebration..?'
- 17: '.. privileged middle-class girl.. I knew no boys. .. I had actually never spoken to a boy my age. .. It does, I think, account for a certain difficulty in accepting men as fully human..'
- 17-18: [FIRST KISS and first love or 'love' going to cinema etc
- Date with Disaster and Carleton-Brown of the F.O./ Her kiss was more memorable than loss of virginity/ He was a Catholic; 24 she wrote to the Catholic Information Centre. She says he was 'an extremely bad Catholic'.]
- 19: [Labour Party, Richard Crossman, Peter Townsend later Prof, John Vaizey later Lord and R H Tawney there from time to time] 'I remember well how my father, Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, in their work demolishing the notion of Britain as a post-war haven of class equality, were known.. as the 'Holy Trinity'...'
- 21-22: [Socialism, National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, CND; she has nothing on the actual arms situation, but quotes the text of the song 'Don't you hear the H-bomb's thunder.. Ban the bomb for evermore' and newspapers on the supposed preponderance of teenagers in the movement.] '.. when I began to relax my limbs in Whitehall, they grew horrified instead. My mother told me that if I got arrested she had no intention of bailing me out of prison. I thought this cruel; ...'
- 22-23: [SEX: She quotes Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (qv) on losing virginity, and Schofield 'The Sexual Behaviour of Young People'; the latter apparently said 'for girls.. to become sexually experienced.. required a much greater repudiation of the family and striving for personal independence.' I simply don't know if this is true; consider e.g. Judith Robinson, who implied the opposite, 'tawdry' Audrey, and Margaret.]
- 31: [Aged 15 diary notes about being womanly]
- 33: [Description of her 'analysis']
- 35: '.. I found some of her [Karen Horney's] thought pre-dated Freud..'
- 36: [OXFORD in 1962; Blackwell's, Fresher's Fair, Gaitskell's daughter, Labour Club, etc etc]
- 42: [Description of Oxford by 'James Morris, later Jan']
- 43: '.. I did not want to leave Oxford without at least the prospect of getting married. .. Even today there are few girls who envisage an entirely marriageless future. .. in 1968 [i.e. aged c 24] I wrote in my diary: "Oh God, why am I not married and happy with two kids? .."
- 46: 'I felt that Robin was coming down in the world by marrying me, though according to the Registrar-General, chartered accountants and university professors' families both belong to social class 1.'
- 49: [Writes novels, gets rejection slips: both on women, mothers, babies]
- 54: '.. The problem is feeling too much. .. As a woman, in the first place, my emotions rule my life. .. There is nothing that I do or think which is not inspired by feelings. .. I want to know why I am like that. I ask a friend, a psychoanalyst, why women are like that; she doesn't know..'
- 55-56: [Quote saying 'there are few feminine wiles better documented than the willingness of young women to build up the male ego by underplaying their own talents..' [Jessie Bernard, 'Women and the Public Interest', 1971]'
- 58: [Pregnancy and birth aged c 23; lots of stuff about clinical hospitals, giggling medical students, being left alone, nurse taking bell away, needing stitches, panic that medical students had found defects, etc etc] 'Curiosity had been my main motive for wanting a baby; I had a tremendous desire to find out if I would conceive, how I would look..'
- 61: '.. pethidine.. After that a fog descended. .. Life was oceanic; I was tossed from one gigantic wave to another..'
- [DRUGS: Oakley seems to know a surprising number of them by name: pethidine; 68 & 120 stelazine and imipramine. 70 antidepressants, tranquilizers. 104 oblivon. Elsewhere e.g. 131, 140 valium]
- 63: [Son now 72 inches etc etc/ Oakley impressed by growth rate of foetuses and babies. Note absence of female input in child-rearing, e.g. 64: Dr Hugh Jolly, self-appointed British paediatric adviser to mothers, says that mothers have to fall in love with their babies or there is no mother-child bond. ..'
- 66: [HOUSING ETC] 'We had.. bought a small house in Chiswick with help from our families. .. curtains.. hoover.. mice.. nappies.. Robin earned £1,000 a year as Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Bedford College, University of London. ..'
- 67: [I noted this earlier, before buying this book; its apparent selfishness and self-indulgence irritated me:] 'About the same time, I wrote a list of all the things I wanted most in the world but didn't have. 'a Mini or eleven hundred (car)/ a Hotpoint automatic washing machine/ lots of cupboards/ two more babies/ three pints of cream/ two garden chairs/ a mincer/ a side on my bath/ a wig for the baby/ some gin/ a new bath hat/ some white boots for next winter/ a pushchair/ a cleaning lady/ a portable television/ some huge meals in posh places.'
- 68: [DEPRESSION:] '.. GP.. should have told me that around four-fifths of women in our society are depressed after birth, a third some of the time. .. March 3rd 1969.. BBC television..'
- 70: [New Statesman ad for work: phoning to advertise a publication 'which would presumably raise their profits' and 'market research' into paint and bras.]
- 73: '.. Hannah Gavron.. 'The Captive Wife'.. 1966.. worked at Bedford College... killed herself..'
- 74-75: [Department of Education; GETTING GRANTS: long correspondence for money for her research into housework]
- 75: [Article in New Society, 'Deprivation of Paternal care' called after John Bowlby; they called it 'The Myth of Motherhood']
- 76-80: [She visits a women's meeting in Ealing, with two American speakers, Debbie and Elyse; then a Chinese meal ten years later: one has a baby, one is an HGV driver, one's a vegetarian librarian, Elyse, an acupuncturist, a silversmith, dental receptionist who 'felt she had less education than the rest of us', and Oakley]
- 81ff: [Passages somewhat like Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves', but they combine descriptive flattening and coalescence with domestic detail] '.. We make tea and observe that it is raining. .. I am on the telephone yet again to a publisher.. a sick child, an Open University Unit to complete.. advertisements in the local paper.. You ask me if I have ever slept with anyone else since I married your father.. you of the unkempt room and melodramatic tempers, of the too-quick retort and hidden Mars bars.. Elastoplast and Oxo cubes.. The salt has been forgotten.. There is a knife missing and the dishwasher is still churning away like the Queen Mary ..' / 101 has more domestic stuff, which evidently Oakley believes to be a part of nature: '.. welcome background.. creak of the pipes, water running in the kitchen, the hiss of the central heating controls, cars outside in the streets. ..'
- 92-95: [Chapter 'The War between Love and the Family I', which turns out to be a woman's view of a 'relationship' with someone else's husband, written of course from a self-justifying point of view. Mensa mags have a couple of rather similar pieces] 'A man cannot love a woman the way a woman loves a man. That is one point. .. the 'package' of his wife and children. .. yes, she can see why one would not want to lose that. But, on the other hand, consider her own position in this love affair. She is an unequal partner in this relationship. His wife doesn't know.. However, her husband does know.. what her lover and she are able to share together must be determined not so much by what his wife can bear but by what he thinks she can. .. How can one compare love for a child and love for a man? .. On one hand they are a man and a woman enjoying a torrid international love affair
- really enjoying its dangerous deceit, the hours prized [note: word] away from anything else..'
- 98: '.. It's like Doris Lessing's Four-Gated City in which the [sic] nuclear holocaust is prefaced by the breakdown of all domestic appliances. .'/ 179: '.. consider this: that the nuclear catastrophe when it comes will not come upon us out of the blue.. It will be a consequence of a million other disasters, trivial mistakes we all, in our time, have made. ..'
- 104-112: [DEATHS: Mainly her father; also 109 grandmother; and near death 108 of young girl allergic to 'iodine dye'. He died of cancer which was described as 'treatable' which Oakley didn't realise wasn't the same as 'curable'. I think it was lung cancer, in his NHS 'tiny mean hospital room', though there's a puzzling reference to 'dry rot at the top of your ribs' and students being allowed four-letter words if "cancer" was uttered
- R M Titmuss, in 'Social Policy', 1974. 111-112: service in St Martin-in-the-Fields with Crossman and Wilbur Cohen, ex-Secretary of the U S Dept of Health, Education and Welfare, and Trevor Huddleston, Bishop of Stepney. Apparently he was compared to 'Lloyd George, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Churchill, Queen Elizabeth I, and Seebohm Rowntree', and was 'pensions advisor to the Labour party, Deputy Chairman of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, creator of health and social services for Mauritius, influential friend of Julius Nyerere, critic of income tax dodges, charismatic teacher.'
- 116: [Note on China taken from M H Kingston. 'The Woman Warrior' 1981, generally suggesting horridness etc of Chinese]
- 116: [Example of what I take to be 'existentialist' influence:] '.. The question is: can love exist without oppression? And, if it can't, who is being oppressed? The question is: why, if my utopia doesn't contain men, are you my utopia?'
- 117: '.. Our lives are organized around men. .. men belong to the world, they own it, they run it, its representation is in and comes from their heads. Women have difficulty owning even their own wombs, which is important, because within these organs lies their only countervailing kind of power. ..'
- 118: 'Adolescent boys are a distraction to adolescent girls.. [Note: unconscious ignorance:] Marriage for women is almost always a mistake. Married women without paid work are the unhappiest people in the world. But the mental health of men is improved by marriage. [Source for this is Jessie Bernard, 'The Future of Marriage' 1973, New York
- Note: American attitude to measurable mental health] Why is this? It is easy to see why. If you're a woman, marriage promises everything and guarantees nothing. .. men go out in the storm and the rain [this is in reference to a supposed Arapesh saying] to see what's around. What they end up with is both kinds.. the little unselfish domestic ones and the selfish dry-breasted ones. That way they get the best of both worlds.
But women don't. Women, of both kinds, suffer. .. As mistresses.. I speak as a wife and as a mistress, for that is what all women are. ..
Three women I know are wrapped up in the consequences of men's bifurcated mystique of women: the feminine and the feminist. All three women are married and all three are mothers. All are in love with another woman's husband.
[SEX RELATIONSHIPS: 119 ff gives account of man fucking two women, from their point of view; then a woman 'married to a gentle, professional man' fucking another (married) man ['.. they found that they couldn't live without one another (to use the well-worn phrase, which.. hides the fact that it's scarcely ever true)'] who however goes off with another woman, not his wife ['No, he didn't want to talk about talk about it. He didn't want to face facts or feelings of any kind with anyone']; the third 'analyses the distress.. All three women are equally upset.. All three men involved have double vision. All seek the conveniences of marriage and the freedom of the sexual chase. All three women want sexual joy and security to be combined in the same person: their image of men is an integrated one. Therefore the desires of men and women are incompatible. .. 'bitchiness' of teenage girls together: .. This is how they have seen their mothers behave. It is clever to make pointed and salacious remarks about other women. ..
Feminists know that we women should put each other first. .. But it isn't easy, because women can be their own worst enemies. ..'
[182 has another long sex relationship, this time supposedly fictional involving the authoress and chap who flies a lot; seems to me indistinguishable from Mills and Boon: '.. You pretend to be overendowed with the ability to act while cowering passively in the shadow of your dilemma: your family or love? .. I threw away your ring.. "I'll lie again," you said. "Anything to keep this relationship going. I can't get you out of my mind or my life." But you didn't try, did you? ... Yes, I know you love me. I know this isn't just any relationship. But I am not just anybody....']
- 124: 'If my aspirations had been for a husband, a house and two babies by.. twenty-five, by the time I was thirty they were rather different. .. I might have echoed Dora Russell's words.. that two babies and three books by my thirtieth birthday enabled me to feel I had done rather well. ..' [125: first book was 'Sex, Gender, and Society' written in six weeks]
- 126: [APPLYING FOR MONEY: Cp EU] '.. I designed a simple study of first-time motherhood and applied to the Social Science Research Council for money to do it. The application was initially deferred, and then accepted.. I had to gain entry into the medical world.. I spent about a year in that hospital, and I learnt a lot.. took me some time to recognize.. my own ambition to be a doctor.. Why had medicine never been suggested to me as a career? .. profound miseducation of obstetricians and gynaecologists. [Diane Scully 'Men Who Control Women's Health' 1980] .. male doctoring is ultimately about control over women.. nowhere more true than in the domain of reproduction. .. doctors are human beings too.. jargon.. '.. attempt to integrate oneself in the field is not without negative consequences. ..' .. In other words after two hours of a busy ante-natal clinic I too would sigh.. 128: The first woman I saw having a 'normal' delivery .. gave me quite a shock. .. epidural.. machine.. wires.. just lying there.. 130ff: [Pages on her own pregnancies and abortions (in the medical sense) which make her complaints at other women's excessive discussion of their babies seem insincere. Long tale of misdiagnosis, though I'm not quite sure of what: 'He found a ruptured tubal [sic] pregnancy. .. haemorrhaging internally.. Two pints of blood were extracted from my abdomen..' 134: '..twins were diagnosed.. contractions.. went to the lavatory and passed the fetus.. It hung there.. I looked at it in horror. It was an alien object. ..'
- 137-146: [CANCER OF THE TONGUE; apparently the source of an article; 'I had many letters in response to my BMJ piece'. She was treated with radioactive wires made of 'a substance called iridium' she says; 141 says she got radiation burns, ulcers all round her mouth: 'I would have liked to have been told about them in advance.' 'Illness is either a visitation from the Divine for personal wrongdoing, or it is a condition of human beings with a specific physical cause. Or it is a process set in train by an unquiet mixture of forces in the head as well as the body... Why had all these things happened to me? ..'
- 143, 177: [Susan Sontag 'Illness as a Metaphor' 1977. See note under Sontag]
- 149: '.. Lines from Lamartine's 'Le Lac' .. 1817 perorations to the tubercular Julie..'
- 152: [HOUSEWORK and classic obsessional tendencies.. 'I am now (I think) able to regard housework as just another task to be done. ..'
- 158: A Things that annoy you about me... (One is 'That I'm always right when we have a disagreement..; another is 'That I'm so bloody efficient and good at everything..') B Things that annoy me about you
- 161-165: [MORE ABOUT HOSPITALS; Resigned old patients, three conspiracies against patients, arrogance of doctors, waiting. Her tongue cancer hasn't recurred]
- 172: '.. France.. suggestive of much older peasant habits. Medieval shepherds' families in Montaillou, a village not far from here, never washed: a strong odour was a good sign, a sign of humanity. De-lousing was a companionable act; .. children often died but not without being first treasured and later mourned. [Cp. Book on Papua New Guinea, where new-borns aren't specially greeted; they mayn't live] Time was marked visually, aurally, or simply physiologically: .. sunset.. sleep. cock.. etc'
- 178: 'In a patriarchal and patrilineal society, children only belong to men because women tell men they provided the sperm to start them off, but who actually did so must remain, to all men, a matter of conjecture. ..'
- 181: [More existential:] 'Actually, there were four possible solutions.. viz: death
- physical, of one or both/ death
- of the relationship/ life
- living together/ life
- living apart'
- 186ff: '.. I still bore the burden of three misconceptions: that domesticity and the public world are for women opposed fields of labour, that illness is a punishment for misdeeds.., and that the greatest misdeed of all women is infidelity to marriage and motherhood [sic]. I therefore resigned from every committee I was on.. .. It was logical now for me to seek.. an academic position with more administrative responsibility, more duties to do with overseeing the work of other people rather than doing my own.. 188: National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit.. among the six core staff positions was one for a social scientist.. I have achieved all of what I dreamed about.. Successful work
- even a degree of international repute; love, friendship, marriage, motherhood. And yet, and still, I am not satisfied. .. Yes, I know I am Ann Oakley.. the author of six books, Wellcome Research Fellow at the NPEU, Honorary Research officer in the Department of Sociology, Bedford College etc.. mother of three children and friend to various adults in my social network.. [Existential:] Is writing easy? If it's easy, then it's hardly an achievement. If it's difficult, then I'm a masochist. This is what Thomas Mann said about writing in Tonio Kröger: the urge to write is a curse born early in one's life 'by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; ..'
- 189: [Error: she thinks Darwin wrote 'The Origin of the Species'. And 'Expression of Emotion.'
- 192-4: [Dreams, typically of having children; described in semi-real-life way]
- 196: 'In my own life I can see the significance of some factors, viz: being born to parents who did not in their own personalities conform to conventional gender role stereotypes.. ; [14: '.. my father's 'feminine' gentleness and my mother's 'masculine' anger; my father's lack of education and my mother's middle class origins..'] perceiving the difficult reality, for my mother, of a traditional marriage; having a close intellectual and emotional relationship with my father; imbibing in childhood the.. sentiments of socialism, i.e. a moral condemnation of social and economic inequality; receiving conflicting expectations from both my parents and my formal education.. marrying and bearing children and caring for them myself.. but.. also.. a brilliantly successful career..'
- 197: '.. To see groups of dark-suited, busy, pugnacious and self-important men at conferences, in the street, in hotel lounges, sitting lined up an aircraft being served drinks by lipsticked stewardesses, is to be made more sharply aware that it is men who rule the world... If any one of them makes any kind of sexual overture to me, my anger can't be borne: it makes an impotent, inarticulate wreck of me. ..'
- 199: '.. Mary Ingham commented that 'Intellectually we demanded to be equals; deep down, emotionally and sexually, we were still looking for the awe-inspiring Mr Right.' .. Alexandra Kollontai.. in 'A Great Love'.. became involved with [sic] a married Russian economist called Maslov in 1909; .. French-born Bolshevik woman called Inessa Armand, who was having an affair with Lenin..' [Cp PC notes somewhere on Trotsky who was I think fancied by Isaac Deutscher's wife]
- 201: 'Male-dominated culture has designated as female all labours of emotional connectedness. .. the greater sensitivity of women means that they possess an enhanced capacity to relate to others and find themselves very often in the position of being the only ones able to carry out this life-saving task. ..'
- 204: [FINAL PARAGRAPH:] 'Life is worth living. Not because there is nothing else, but because of what we may give one another; pain, joy, anguish, peace. It's not an easy journey. You may even call it an adventure. It doesn't matter about the problems, the contradictions. In our hearts we understand everything. We understand it's the struggle that counts.'
RW review written c 1990
Ann Oakley: The Men's Room [1988]
Novel by the same Ann Oakley as above; presumably written to try to make money. The title must be based on 'The Women's Room', an American book the author of which I forget, since the title has nothing prima facie to do with the contents. (Though the phrase does occur once).
The 'imprint' is Flamingo, of Fontana, itself part of Collins (and presumably now of HarperCollins).
[NB: I found in 1996 this was made into a film; I'm sure if I noted its date anywhere]
-About academic sociologists in north London and their kids (and the importance of A-levels, travel expenses, library book stealing etc). Interesting to try to work out how the hierarchy maintains itself; e.g. there's a male, a 'computer programmer', and a female 'junior researcher' who are evidently considered inferior.
Each chapter has a motto from de Beauvoir's Second Sex.
Very women's view comments; clothes are noticed (with conditioned gasp! horror! stuff); certain amount of trade name stuff though not in the same world as Irma Bombeck; familiarity with trade names of tranquillisers; some familiarity with disease as expected since women spend more time on this; e.g. endometrium problem, sort of over-heavy period.
Changes due to progress of women: some fields of knowledge opened up - e.g. it was discovered that the cervix [+ Lat. of the womb] doesn't look like a nose.
Quite a lot of sex writing, but it doesn't sound properly convincing to me; perhaps it was vetted or added by a man friend?
-SOCIOLOGY: Some random remarks:
-6: '. Regent's College.. As [sic] the college had grown, its premises had not, and the sociology department had been moved round the corner.. the other departments.. tended to discount it and could do so more easily if it wasn't there.. But the effect on the sociologists.. was to give them a quite audacious sense of their own grandeur. They might have become like a gentleman's [sic] club, swanning time away in armchairs under tomes of Durkheim's ..'
-15: '.. and most of them you've never read. They're just a symbol. A cultural symbol. A product' 'Who sounds like a Marxist now? Such materialism, from the lips of a liberal economist!..'
-20: '.. Denby's review article on 'Political Marriages: Conflict and Collusion' came back.. dimly from the unread recesses of the Sociological Review. ..'
-59: 'Mark assumed the junior researcher would be female.. she was. The post, when advertised, drew fifty-six replies.. because there weren't many jobs around. Delia Cook wore black dungarees.. Her father was a bricklayer. She had a first-class degree from Sussex. ..'
-126: '.. fourth floor of the Social Science library in WC1. ..'
-128: '.. talk to the Whiteman Foundation about the funding of his project on the sociology of everyday life. ..'
-129: 'Want to apply for a readership,' .. 'Do you?' .. The request struck him as absurd, given the shoplifting misdemeanour and [his] general lack of qualification for such an elevated and expensive position. ..'I'm fifty. .. Can't wait for ever.'
-131-2: '.. he launched into a soliloquy on the UGC and its underlying and overlying agendas, outlining the points of possible conflict, where the department needed especially to impress. .. getting together a batch of documents about the external relations and internal workings of the department
- its essential democracy and accountability, its worthy research record, the great teaching it did, its amazing esprit de corps. '.. our postgraduate degree record.. work out our completion rates.. new option we're doing on the social economics of the household
- no one else is doing that.. we're not doing badly with the overseas students, either. They'll want to know we're raking in the money.' ..'
-133: '.. Roger ay, the Foundation's Research Director..' [always capitalised]
-136-7: ' ...'Everyday life is non-philosophical in relation to philosophy and represents reality in relation to reality,' read Mark. 'The study of everyday life... exposes the possibilities of conflict between the rational and the irrational in our society and our time...' He paused, with his finger on the page, in order to think about the point. He was sitting in the New York Public Library reading Lefebvre's Everyday Life in the Modern World. Strangeway had told him his project lacked a theoretical rationale. 'Now that doesn't worry me.. But.. We're talking here about something that's going to cost at least three million dollars. I think you need to tighten up on your theory.' ..'
-140: 'Margaret Lacey was waiting to see him, anxious to tell him how well the UGC visit had gone. .'
-149: '.. The rest of July and August were occupied with costing the everyday life project. How much did notebooks cost in Alma-Ata? Sixteen plane trips to Trieste. Should Italian fieldworkers be paid the same as Swedish ones? What about the unions? ... How many interpreters were required to cope with the minority dialects of South China, supposing it proved possible to include South China? ..'
-151: 'Rose's first task was to unravel the shoplifting project. Swinhoe had years of unanalysed data on the social background and self-professed motives of several thousand shoplifters in towns across the country, including Glasgow, so Scotland wouldn't get left out. Since McKinnon hadn't managed to run off even the simplest tabulations..' [Chap who left sabotaged the figures in some unspecified way which Oakley wouldn't grasp.]
-172: '.. she got a job in a medical research unit in a London hospital. The job.. was to serve as the unit's sociologist: to give their research a sociological perspective, and do research of her own; also to teach medical students. ..'
-301: '.. 52.. She holds a senior university position in social science research, a personal chair: not the one she had had her eyes on in the beginning.. She has published six or seven books, she heads the editorial board of a left-wing academic journal and has acquired a solid reputation as a theorist in the health and illness field. ..' [300, same woman: '.. brought along.. a new book.. Being and Doing: Feminist Existentialism and.. [Her] mood is not, however, up to the onslaughts of feminist theory. ..'
-Joke: Russia: 219 '.. Mark ['exuberant' Professor of sociology] read the bundle of material.. He learnt that Russia was twice the size of China and spanned eleven time zones; however, only 53 per cent of Russians were really Russians. The rest were ethnic minorities. These included the Khazars of Central Asia, who'd been having conflicts.. with their Russian hosts since the sixteenth century. Kazakhstan had its own customs and its own culture.. it had been created an autonomous republic by the Central Executive Council of the USSR in 1924. Together with Siberia, it formed about 70 per cent of the total area of the Soviet Union [this seems misleading; Siberia must be about 5/6 of RSFSR] much bigger than K for this to be true], although it contained at the moment only 16 per cent of its people.'
[Note: reference books: Amusing to check this; Whitaker of 1987 doesn't list Russia as a geographical entity, but seems to conflate RSFSR with Russia. Siberia is not listed as an entity at all! though mentioned as a source of raw materials etc. There isn't even a map showing the regions!]
-241: [Note: meme:] '.. I suppose you think voting should be compulsory? It is in Australia and Belgium, you know. I wouldn't mind having proportional representation
- the Nazis only got 37 per cent of the vote and it enabled them to get power. What a wonderful system! ..' [NB this is the heroine supposedly ruthlessly attacking a male architect]
-304: '.. early 1980s. Margaret Thatcher was systematically eroding the quality of life in Britain, schools were shut much of the time, hospitals were closing, the universities had become bastions of relative poverty. Feminism, real feminism, was nearly underground. ...'
-306: [Rather sad perfunctoriness about author's conditioned attitude to 'culture'; e.g. heroine occasionally puts on Mozart, 43 someone goes to a prom, but actually notices and comments on Dire Straits, but:] '.. Celia Johnson and - who was it? - in Brief Encounter had had Rachmaninov; the music in Casablanca [this film also mentioned 150] hadn't been bad either, and that old film [sic] about the Danish writer Karen Blixen she and Mark had seen.. had had a similar emotional musical strength. [Then dialogue between Robert Redford and Meryl Streep as recorded by Oakley follows]. [302 has another film - Peter Sellers trying to piss, with his leg in plaster] [29 has dialogue on not mentioning contraception, or peeing, in films] [15 someone says all the great writers were poor. Madame Bovary gets quite a long mention. So does Roald Dahl. 283 lists Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy Sayers, the radical feminist science fiction writer Olanda Hughes, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Donne, W H Auden, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson & Proust [though only Swann in Love seems to get read]
Novel by the same Ann Oakley as above; presumably written to try to make money. The title must be based on 'The Women's Room', an American book the author of which I forget, since the title has nothing prima facie to do with the contents. (Though the phrase does occur once).The 'imprint' is Flamingo, of Fontana, itself part of Collins (and presumably now of HarperCollins).
[NB: I found in 1996 this was made into a film; I'm sure if I noted its date anywhere]
-About academic sociologists in north London and their kids (and the importance of A-levels, travel expenses, library book stealing etc). Interesting to try to work out how the hierarchy maintains itself; e.g. there's a male, a 'computer programmer', and a female 'junior researcher' who are evidently considered inferior.
Each chapter has a motto from de Beauvoir's Second Sex.
Very women's view comments; clothes are noticed (with conditioned gasp! horror! stuff); certain amount of trade name stuff though not in the same world as Irma Bombeck; familiarity with trade names of tranquillisers; some familiarity with disease as expected since women spend more time on this; e.g. endometrium problem, sort of over-heavy period.
Changes due to progress of women: some fields of knowledge opened up - e.g. it was discovered that the cervix [+ Lat. of the womb] doesn't look like a nose.
Quite a lot of sex writing, but it doesn't sound properly convincing to me; perhaps it was vetted or added by a man friend?
-SOCIOLOGY: Some random remarks:
-6: '. Regent's College.. As [sic] the college had grown, its premises had not, and the sociology department had been moved round the corner.. the other departments.. tended to discount it and could do so more easily if it wasn't there.. But the effect on the sociologists.. was to give them a quite audacious sense of their own grandeur. They might have become like a gentleman's [sic] club, swanning time away in armchairs under tomes of Durkheim's ..'
-15: '.. and most of them you've never read. They're just a symbol. A cultural symbol. A product' 'Who sounds like a Marxist now? Such materialism, from the lips of a liberal economist!..'
-20: '.. Denby's review article on 'Political Marriages: Conflict and Collusion' came back.. dimly from the unread recesses of the Sociological Review. ..'
-59: 'Mark assumed the junior researcher would be female.. she was. The post, when advertised, drew fifty-six replies.. because there weren't many jobs around. Delia Cook wore black dungarees.. Her father was a bricklayer. She had a first-class degree from Sussex. ..'
-126: '.. fourth floor of the Social Science library in WC1. ..'
-128: '.. talk to the Whiteman Foundation about the funding of his project on the sociology of everyday life. ..'
-129: 'Want to apply for a readership,' .. 'Do you?' .. The request struck him as absurd, given the shoplifting misdemeanour and [his] general lack of qualification for such an elevated and expensive position. ..'I'm fifty. .. Can't wait for ever.'
-131-2: '.. he launched into a soliloquy on the UGC and its underlying and overlying agendas, outlining the points of possible conflict, where the department needed especially to impress. .. getting together a batch of documents about the external relations and internal workings of the department
- its essential democracy and accountability, its worthy research record, the great teaching it did, its amazing esprit de corps. '.. our postgraduate degree record.. work out our completion rates.. new option we're doing on the social economics of the household
- no one else is doing that.. we're not doing badly with the overseas students, either. They'll want to know we're raking in the money.' ..'
-133: '.. Roger ay, the Foundation's Research Director..' [always capitalised]
-136-7: ' ...'Everyday life is non-philosophical in relation to philosophy and represents reality in relation to reality,' read Mark. 'The study of everyday life... exposes the possibilities of conflict between the rational and the irrational in our society and our time...' He paused, with his finger on the page, in order to think about the point. He was sitting in the New York Public Library reading Lefebvre's Everyday Life in the Modern World. Strangeway had told him his project lacked a theoretical rationale. 'Now that doesn't worry me.. But.. We're talking here about something that's going to cost at least three million dollars. I think you need to tighten up on your theory.' ..'
-140: 'Margaret Lacey was waiting to see him, anxious to tell him how well the UGC visit had gone. .'
-149: '.. The rest of July and August were occupied with costing the everyday life project. How much did notebooks cost in Alma-Ata? Sixteen plane trips to Trieste. Should Italian fieldworkers be paid the same as Swedish ones? What about the unions? ... How many interpreters were required to cope with the minority dialects of South China, supposing it proved possible to include South China? ..'
-151: 'Rose's first task was to unravel the shoplifting project. Swinhoe had years of unanalysed data on the social background and self-professed motives of several thousand shoplifters in towns across the country, including Glasgow, so Scotland wouldn't get left out. Since McKinnon hadn't managed to run off even the simplest tabulations..' [Chap who left sabotaged the figures in some unspecified way which Oakley wouldn't grasp.]
-172: '.. she got a job in a medical research unit in a London hospital. The job.. was to serve as the unit's sociologist: to give their research a sociological perspective, and do research of her own; also to teach medical students. ..'
-301: '.. 52.. She holds a senior university position in social science research, a personal chair: not the one she had had her eyes on in the beginning.. She has published six or seven books, she heads the editorial board of a left-wing academic journal and has acquired a solid reputation as a theorist in the health and illness field. ..' [300, same woman: '.. brought along.. a new book.. Being and Doing: Feminist Existentialism and.. [Her] mood is not, however, up to the onslaughts of feminist theory. ..'
-Joke: Russia: 219 '.. Mark ['exuberant' Professor of sociology] read the bundle of material.. He learnt that Russia was twice the size of China and spanned eleven time zones; however, only 53 per cent of Russians were really Russians. The rest were ethnic minorities. These included the Khazars of Central Asia, who'd been having conflicts.. with their Russian hosts since the sixteenth century. Kazakhstan had its own customs and its own culture.. it had been created an autonomous republic by the Central Executive Council of the USSR in 1924. Together with Siberia, it formed about 70 per cent of the total area of the Soviet Union [this seems misleading; Siberia must be about 5/6 of RSFSR] much bigger than K for this to be true], although it contained at the moment only 16 per cent of its people.'
[Note: reference books: Amusing to check this; Whitaker of 1987 doesn't list Russia as a geographical entity, but seems to conflate RSFSR with Russia. Siberia is not listed as an entity at all! though mentioned as a source of raw materials etc. There isn't even a map showing the regions!]
-241: [Note: meme:] '.. I suppose you think voting should be compulsory? It is in Australia and Belgium, you know. I wouldn't mind having proportional representation
- the Nazis only got 37 per cent of the vote and it enabled them to get power. What a wonderful system! ..' [NB this is the heroine supposedly ruthlessly attacking a male architect]
-304: '.. early 1980s. Margaret Thatcher was systematically eroding the quality of life in Britain, schools were shut much of the time, hospitals were closing, the universities had become bastions of relative poverty. Feminism, real feminism, was nearly underground. ...'
-306: [Rather sad perfunctoriness about author's conditioned attitude to 'culture'; e.g. heroine occasionally puts on Mozart, 43 someone goes to a prom, but actually notices and comments on Dire Straits, but:] '.. Celia Johnson and - who was it? - in Brief Encounter had had Rachmaninov; the music in Casablanca [this film also mentioned 150] hadn't been bad either, and that old film [sic] about the Danish writer Karen Blixen she and Mark had seen.. had had a similar emotional musical strength. [Then dialogue between Robert Redford and Meryl Streep as recorded by Oakley follows]. [302 has another film - Peter Sellers trying to piss, with his leg in plaster] [29 has dialogue on not mentioning contraception, or peeing, in films] [15 someone says all the great writers were poor. Madame Bovary gets quite a long mention. So does Roald Dahl. 283 lists Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy Sayers, the radical feminist science fiction writer Olanda Hughes, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Donne, W H Auden, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson & Proust [though only Swann in Love seems to get read]
RW review written c 1990
Rerevisionist's Review of Ann Oakley Scenes Originating in the Garden of Eden
Review 22 May 2016Published by Harper-Collins in 1993, and presumably paperback in 1994, under the 'Flamingo' imprint. The inside front cover of the paperback has a monochrome photo of the author. Following the detective tracks—mother's name and family background suppressed, surnames, influences such as Marx and Freud, it's obvious enough she is some sort of Jew. These days she appears to resemble Melanie Phillips: another 'Jew' with short grey hair, stern expression, and a body of work which on examination is unimportant.
Internal evidence suggests this novel was written in separate chapters. It is overweighted with description in possibly a typical female way - flowers, clothes, superficialities: Lincoln Cathedral described as '... triple towers .. like decorated lemon lollies against a peacock-blue sky' illustrates the type of thing. There's no suggestion of grasp of (say) geology, history, technology or biology, though there is a sex scene containing the word 'cunt' about midway for people deciding whether to buy.
The heroine had a few lovers, including her about-to-be discarded good looking and impecunious actor. Her favourite was a Scandinavian married man supplying waterside shags. I suppose these days it would be blacks on sex holidays combined with the new Jewish lie that they would 'pay our pensions' ('Only two percent of ... nonwhite invaders who have entered Germany over the past few months stands any hope of getting work, ... according to one of Germany’s leading economic think tanks.' - 2015).
Ann Rosamund Oakley (née Titmuss; born 17 January 1944), is a distinguished British sociologist, feminist, and writer. She is Professor and Founder-Director of the Social Science Research Unit at the Institute of Education, University of London and in 2005 partially retired from full-time academic work to concentrate on her writing and especially new novels. - thus Wikipedia. Which adds information on her Ph.D., which resulted in The Sociology of Housework (1974).
Anyway: her 39-year-old heroine decides to sell her flat (10% to the actor, I think) and moves to a mythical county with (she finds later) a submerged valley reservoir. There's a subplot involving infertility: I simply couldn't make the effort to discover the implications (if any); water pollution? As with Gee's novel (next review) there are Jewish media stories: in this case 'AIDS' risks. There's acknowledgment of the start of Jewish wars over Iraq, though not in those words.
The heroine shows her masterfulness in dealing with estate agents, and arithmetic of house prices, though the implications of inflation are outside her range: the future can pay. She has a pension. Anyway, she finds a cottage and settles in, becoming a centre of attention - perhaps this is a female attitude. They all talk about her. She finds an attractive man, or more accurately waits till he finds her. He reads Marxism Today, which lost some lawsuit (I think) on misrepresenting victims of war in Europe - they must have been surprised, since this is a favourite occupation of Jews in publishing. He was a farmer, who liked wine, was not 'organic', and supplied free dead animals who hadn't managed to live.
Another favoured Jewish theme of course is sinister and antagonistic whites in their village hovels, and the novel appears to veer off into menacing byways which I could not fathom (or perhaps 'thread'). There's an odd lack of realism: does any family really refer to other family members as 'Mother' and 'Father'? A Lord of the Manor type appears. There are boxes of papers from her deceased dad, probably a reflection of Titmuss in real life. There's a subplot involving a housing scheme (27 houses) and a marina. The novel ends with a birth: it seem all she wanted was a good shag and a child.
The real-life Oakley went on in triumph to avoid all serious issues. Here's a website presumably controlled by her: 'In 1990 [First Iraq War about to start, part of the Jewish policy for the entire Middle East:] she set up a new research unit at the Institute [of Education, London University], with a brief to conduct policy-relevant research across the health, education and welfare sectors (SSRU). Her own research interests since 1990 have increasingly been in the area of social science methodology and the contribution the social sciences can and should make to public policy. ...' 'Research'—by someone with little or no or negative grasp of medical science, education, and finance and races?
An exquisite irony of the Jewish expansion is the continued sex differential: Jewish males take their traditional roles of lying and swindling goyim, and fomenting the most vicious wars through the control of media and puppet politicians and generals. The females screech and complain, and waste time, while attacking whites and their families. As long as Jews control money, this is likely to continue.
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