Bøger af 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.

Throughout history, records of women's lives and work have been lost through the pervasive assumption of male dominance. Wives, especially, 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, Mary Booth, Jeannette Tawney and Janet Beveridge. Asking critical questions about the mechanisms that 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 20th century.

Ann Oakley develops a sociology of the research process, telling how a research project on caring and social support is undertaken. It has much resonance for social science researchers and others interested in the experiences of mothers, and the relations between social research, academic knowledge and public policy.

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.

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.

Between 1880 and 1920 many women researched the conditions of social and economic life in Western countries, driven by a vision of a society based on welfare and altruism. Ann Oakley uses the women's stories to bring together the histories of social reform, social science, welfare and pacifism.

A provocative analysis of gender inequalitya s destructive effects on our society and our planet.

Edited and selected by the author, this reader starts with work first published in the early 1970s. Ann Oakley's research and writing on sex and gender, housework, motherhood, women's health, and social science have influenced many inside and beyond social science, helping to shape the academic study of women and gender up to the present day.

The starting point of Ann Oakley's fascinating book is the fracture of her right arm in the grounds of a hotel in the USA. What begins as an accident becomes a journey into some critical themes of modern Western culture: the crisis of embodiment and the perfect self; the confusion between body and identity; the commodification of bodies and body parts; the intrusive surveillance and profiteering of medicine and the law; the problem of ageing; and the identification of women, particularly, with bodies - from the intensely ambiguous two-in-one state of pregnancy to women's later transformation into unproductive, brittle skeletons. Fracture mixes personal experience (the author's and other people's) with 'facts' derived from other literatures, including the history of medicine, neurology, the sociology of health and illness, philosophy, and legal discourses on the right to life and people as victims of a greedy litigation system. The book's genre spans fiction/non-fiction, autobiography and social theory.

What is it like to be teenager today? How do parents and teenagers experience their roles and responsibilities? And how does the promotion of health - a major cultural goal of the twentieth century - figure in the perspectives and priorities of young people and their parents? This book answers these questions.

In this collection of essays, Ann Oakley, one of the most influential social scientists of the last twenty years, brings together the best of her work on the sociology of women's health.

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.