Man and Wife: Richard and Kay Titmuss - My Parents' Early Years - Hardcover

Following on from her classic autobiography Taking it like a Woman, Oakley examines the relationship of her parents (her father helped to found the Welfare State), revealing the conflicts between public themes and personal lives.

Ann Oakley is the only child of Kay Miller, an ex-social worker, and Richard Titmuss, one of the founders of Britain's welfare state. A ground-breaking mixture of biography, autobiography, feminist analysis and family and social history, this book draws on the private papers of Ann's parents and on her own memory of them, and examines their lives and the conflict between the world of the home and the world outside, arguing that people's social theories cannot be divorced from the politics of personal relationships. Richard Titmuss's influential work as a social policy analyst reflects a general failure of postwar societies to resolve fundamental questions about the position of women and the family.

In her earlier autobiography, 'Taking It Like a Woman', Ann Oakley described the difficulties of being a woman in a traditional role who is suddenly confronted by choice. Here she delves into the world of her mother – who gave up her career for her husband's and whose role in the home was regarded by both of them as sacred – and explores the life and work of her father, who saw in the social inequalities of Britain in the 1930's and 1940's the need for that radical vision which gave birth to the welfare state.

'Man and Wife' perceptively and honestly reveals relationships between men and women, parents and children, grand theory and personal practice, and between ourselves and our own memories. Combining a real sense of people battling to make sense of their lives with a deft isolation of the issues affecting family and women over the last two generations, it is a unique, fascinating and moving memoir.