Böcker av Ann Oakley

In a distinguished career lasting nearly sixty years, Ann Oakley has produced trail-blazing publications that span the fiction - non-fiction divide including The Men's Room, made into a BBC TV series with Bill Nighy.This novel is timely, set in the perplexing present of the constraints of the Covid pandemic. Locked down, Alice Henry is determined to decide what to do in her final years - an ongoing muddle of medical, domestic and romantic interruptions. When she stumbles on the unsolved case of social researcher, Maud Davies, found decapitated on a London railway line, she finds a new purpose. The blackly funny narrative weaves together the stories of the two women as Alice becomes obsessed with Maud's fate and determines to solve the mystery of her untimely death.

Ann Oakley interviewed 60 women to find out what it's really like to have a baby. She discusses whether and why women want to become pregnant, how they imagine motherhood to be, the experience of birth, post-natal depression, feeding and caring routines and the challenges for the domestic division of labour and to fathers.

Ann Oakley analysed the perceptions of 40 urban housewives around housework, their feelings of monotony and fragmentation, the length of their working week, the importance of standards and routines, and their attitudes to different household tasks. This classic book paved the way for the sociological study of many more aspects of women's lives.

This is a fascinating and highly readable biography of Barbara Wootton, one of the extraordinary public figures of the twentieth century. She was an outstanding social scientist, an architect of the welfare state, an iconoclast who challenged conventional wisdoms and the first woman to sit on the Woolsack in the House of Lords.