“An important paradigm in considering what being a wife means, and her four case studies illustrate it brilliantly.” Times Higher Education

“Oakley’s deft scholarship and lucid prose reveal so much about the systematic phenomenon of forgetting/marginalising wives, and the notion of collaborative knowing and writing– a fascinating read.” Jane Elliott, University of Exeter

★A new work by Ann Oakley, the pioneering British sociologist, and the British Sociological Association Lifetime achievement Awards winner!
★Classic work of general gender studies and feminist Theory.
★Sold for Chinese simplified rights.

Throughout history, records of high-achieving women have been lost through the pervasive assumption of male dominance. Independently-performing women disappear as supporters of their husbands’ work, as unpaid and often unacknowledged secretaries and research assistants, and as managers of men’s domestic domains; even intellectual collaboration tends to be portrayed as normative wifely behaviour rather than as joint work. Forgotten Wives examines the ways in which the institution and status of marriage has contributed to the active ‘disremembering’ of women’s achievements. Drawing on archives, biographies, autobiographies and historical accounts, best-selling author and academic Ann Oakley interrogates conventions of history and biography writing using the case-studies of four women married to well-known men:
Charlotte Shaw (née Payne-Townshend) ,
Mary Booth (née Macaulay),
Jeannette Tawney (née Beveridge) ,
Janet Beveridge (known previously as Jessy Mair).

Asking critical questions about the mechanisms which maintain gender inequality, despite thriving feminist and other equal rights movements, she contributes a fresh vision of how the welfare state developed in the early twentieth century.

Ann Oakley is a writer of many academic publications and a social researcher for more than 50 years. She has written both novels and many non-fiction books. Most of her life has been spent working in university research. She is best known for her work on sex and gender, housework, childbirth and feminist social science. Her more recent interests have focused on evidence-based public policy and methodologies of research and evaluation, on the sociology of the body and on biography and autobiography as forms of life-writing.
She is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the UCL Institute of Education, and until January 2005 was Director of the Social Science Research Unit (SSRU) at the Institute, where she also headed the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating Centre (EPPI-Centre). She holds an honorary appointment as a Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford.
Her books include The Sociology of Housework, From Here to Maternity and The Men's Room which was serialised by the BBC in 1991, Wives Women, Peace and Welfare, and most recently Forgotten and so on.
In 2011 the British Sociological Association gave her one of their first Lifetime achievement Awards for her extraordinary contribution to the history of the development of sociology in Britain.
Oakley is the only daughter of Professor Richard Titmuss, who's a pioneering British social researcher and teacher. He founded the academic discipline of social administration (now largely known in universities as social policy).