Oakley, Ann: A Critical Woman

Barbara Wootton was 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 wisdom and the first woman to sit as Speaker in the House of Lords in Parliament. Ann Oakley has written a fascinating and highly readable account of the life and work of this singular woman, but the book goes much further. It is an engaged account of the making of British social policy at a critical period seen through the lens of the life and work of a pivotal figure. Oakley tells a story about the intersections of the public and the private and about the way her subject's life unfolded within, was shaped by, and helped to shape a particular social and intellectual context.

What makes this biography an important contribution to sociology is not only the impressive detail of its scholarly as well as humanistic and ethical approach to personal evidence, but also its careful attention to methodological issues inherent in 'doing a life' with its many 'fateful moments' shaped by a combination of personal drive and social and political constellations. The critical attention it pays to Wootton's many publications and research reports makes this biography a contribution to the history of ideas as well as to a history of the development of social research in political practice . . . engrossingly written and highly moving.