Thirteen

I DON’T REMEMBER when I first discovered the copies of The Captive Wife on their high shelf in our house, but for a time in my teenage years, when I knew I would not be disturbed, I would climb on to the back of the sofa beneath and pull them out. There was the Pelican paperback, with its cover photograph of a woman and two young children who for some reason weren’t my mother, my brother, and me; the delicate Japanese edition, with its rice-paper dust sleeve and columns of hieroglyphics; and the official-looking Routledge & Kegan Paul hardback, with its chalk-blue cover and wad of newspaper cuttings tucked inside.

I never made any attempt to read the book, but I liked to read the acknowledgements at the front: to my grandfather, my father, and our nanny, ‘for her help in sharing the care of my children’. I didn’t read the cuttings properly, either, but looking through them for Hannah’s name, and the references to ‘an outstanding young talent’ or ‘a life tragically cut short’, gave me a strangely pleasurable knot in my stomach.

When I was at university, a new edition of The Captive Wife was published, with an introduction by the sociologist and novelist Ann Oakley. I didn’t know it was being reissued until Susie gave me a copy. It was the first copy of my mother’s book I had owned; the first I had held in my hand that I hadn’t taken surreptitiously from a high shelf.

I still didn’t read it, but I looked at the introduction. I had met Ann Oakley once at Susie’s house — she and Susie were friends from university — and Susie had said something then about Ann being fascinated by Hannah, which made me suspicious of her. But I was still shocked to find her revealing in her opening sentence that Hannah had killed herself.

I know now that this was widely known, that some of my own boyhood friends even knew, but at the time I still believed it was a close family secret. I had spoken about it only once myself since my father had told me, blurting it out in an argument with a girlfriend, and afterwards feeling ashamed of myself, and I saw Ann Oakley’s act as a betrayal of my family.

I didn’t like, either, the familiarity she claimed with Hannah, writing that her life had ‘touched’ Hannah’s because she was friends with Susie and had followed Hannah to the Bedford sociology department, writing a doctorate, which also became a book, on housework.

I didn’t like the way she tried to appropriate Hannah’s book, as I saw it, for her own feminist cause: ‘the problematic of women’s own needs’.

And I especially didn’t like her writing that Hannah’s death ‘could hardly have been unrelated to the dilemmas and contradictions of women’s situation’. I was twenty-one, still working out what it meant to be a man, and I felt she was insinuating something here about men, about the men in my family, perhaps even about me — though exactly what, I don’t think I could have said.

I TOOK THE BOOK with me on my travels, put it on my shelves in each new place I lived, but I still didn’t read it. I didn’t read it either when I came back to England and found Hannah’s suicide note and the report of her inquest. Even after Simon died, and all those feelings welled up in me, I didn’t read it. When I wrote my article about Hannah in the Guardian, I still hadn’t read it.

It was partly, I think, that I was afraid I wouldn’t find it interesting. It was the only significant piece of my mother I had, and I didn’t want to ask too many questions of it and find out it was just another old book. Though I was also perhaps wary, even before I read Ann Oakley’s introduction, of the accusation I saw myself in the title — the suggestion that this was a book critical of men. I had already been rejected once by my mother. Did I want to read the only piece of her she had left and find myself, as a man, rejected again?

EARLY IN THE SUMMER after my newspaper article came out, I went round to my old house to claim the copies of her book and the cuttings inside the hardback. I suppose I must have noticed before that there were other books on sociological and connected matters on the shelves, but it was only now that I properly took in that these must have been Hannah’s. Standing again on the back of the sofa — a newer sofa, but in the same position — I looked through them.

Most had probably not been opened since Hannah last did so. Inside one, held in place by a rusty paper clip, I found a letter from the books editor of the Economist, from 31 May 1965, asking for a review of 500–600 words. In another, I found the handwritten draft of a book review.

Many of the books had Hannah’s signature in the front, the writing growing less loopy with age. In the front of one was a different signature, in a spiky hand — J. F. Hayes. I hadn’t yet spoken to my stepmother’s friend who knew John Hayes, and Susie had told me she thought his name was Haynes, but I knew who this was. I stared at the signature, wondering that the book had moved house with us, had sat here all through my childhood, through the years my father had lived here. I am not sure until that moment that I properly understood that this man, the homosexual lover in my father’s story, was a real person.

In some, Hannah had underlined passages or made marks in the margins, as I do when I am reading — as my father, who was a printer, is a bibliophile, would never do. In one, there was even a squiggle where her pen must have run dry and she had pressed the nib into the paper to make the ink flow again.

Each time I came across one of these marked passages, I would read it for clues to her mind. Was there something significant in her interest in puberty rites among the Apache? In the feelings of isolation of prison officers? In the lost comfort and security of Bruno Bettelheim’s Viennese youth?

Halfway along a shelf, I came to a book with the same chalk-blue cover as the hardback of her book — Emile Durkheim’s classic of 1897 Suicide: a study in sociology, published in the same Routledge & Kegan Paul series as The Captive Wife would be a few years later.

Turning the pages, I saw pen marks, and I sat down on the sofa to read:

No living being can be happy or even exist unless his needs are sufficiently proportioned to his means.

A man of low morality will kill another rather than himself.

Every individual has what we may call a suicide-potential, a tendency to self-murder.

Even if it were proved that the average man never kills himself and that only those do so who show certain anomalies, this would still not justify considering insanity a necessary condition of suicide.

What was Hannah thinking when she read these passages? The edition was published in 1963, and she might have read it any time between then and her death. Was she already having suicidal thoughts when she did so? Or did reading this book help to put the idea into her mind?

Between the final pages of the text, I found something else: the desiccated remains of a tiny flower. It is still there in the book. The sap has long been absorbed by the paper, leaving ghostly brown impressions on either page, making the flower hard to identify. But it looks to me as if it was once a daisy, picked, I guess, from our garden and put here — though by whom, and why, I do not know.

LATER THAT SUMMER, as my Hannah researches progressed, I finally made myself, or perhaps allowed myself to, read The Captive Wife. I was pleasantly surprised by how fluently it was written, with the commas in all the right places. The opening section, a survey of women’s position in society and the family since Victorian times, was impressively informative, interesting. But the main part, in which the results of her interviews were laid out, I found harder work.

I read, as Hannah would have, with a pen in my mind, though I didn’t find much to mark. I put a line beside a section on teenage brides, and underlined the comments of a ‘company director’s wife’, as Hannah had been, who had married at eighteen and regretted that she hadn’t gone to university. ‘I sometimes feel as if my brain is disintegrating,’ Hannah quoted her as saying. Though, beside this, I wrote ‘Hannah?’ Her brain hadn’t been disintegrating — she had gone to university, got a degree, a doctorate, written this book.

I was even disappointed, for all my worries that it would be anti-man, at how mild it was. The newspapers, with their ‘So lonely in the real Coronation Street’ headlines, had focused on its most dramatic findings. But most of the text was taken up with more workmanlike sections on childhood, marriage, housework, friendship, leisure, work. The grist of the book was as much about class as gender, that things were harder for working-class women, who didn’t have gardens, couldn’t afford childcare, were less qualified to return to work later.

In its conclusion, it didn’t even argue for equality with men — only for better childcare facilities, more part-time employment, education that would better prepare women for their ‘multiplicity’ of roles.

Most disappointing was how little of Hannah there seemed to be in these pages. The book was a work of academic sociology, containing nothing, it seemed to me, of her own voice, of her own feelings, thoughts, personality.

IT WAS PARTLY, I can see now, that I knew so little about Hannah and her world, partly the fears and prejudices I still held to, my reluctance to accept that Hannah might have been a captive wife in any way. It is a measure, then, of what I have learned in the intervening years, both about Hannah and her world, and about myself, that when I read the book now I find more of her in it, more of her own conflicts.

When I read it now, for example, I think that it wasn’t a coincidence that the average age of her mothers was twenty-six, as she was when she began interviewing them, and that the average number of children they had was two.

When I read now about the ‘relentless boredom of scrubbing floors and ironing shirts’, I think about the early months of her marriage when she was learning to be a housewife; how Jeanie told me Hannah always had supper on the table for my father; always used one cloth for wiping surfaces and another for dishes.

When I read that the ‘major psychological turning point’ for young women was not marriage but the first child, I think of Hannah’s own psyche as a young mother, her trouble bonding with Simon when she had him at twenty-one. When she writes that every one of her interviewees felt ‘compelled to stay at home with their children’, whatever ‘their own personal desires’, I think of her breezy statement to an Evening Standard journalist that she didn’t mind ‘Simon thinking he has two mothers’, and wonder whether this was what she really felt. Whether the story of the baby with two heads was a truer window into her own thoughts and feelings.

When she writes of Victorian ideas of ‘female inferiority’, and how in ‘the work situation’ in her own time ‘many of the attitudes to women are based firmly on past ideologies’, I think of her experiences in the academic world, her struggle to get the subject of her thesis approved, the delay in the awarding of her doctorate, her rejection by the LSE as a ‘lightweight’.

BUT IF I can now see that there is more of Hannah in The Captive Wife than I had found before, the book is still, as Ann Oakley wrote in the introduction, ‘tantalising in what it does not say, in what it is not able to tell us about its own conception, gestation and birth, and about the regard in which its author held it and herself’.

At twenty-one, I resented Ann’s claims of familiarity with Hannah, but now I go to see her in search of her impressions of Hannah and the times they lived in.

She is only a few years younger than Hannah would have been, but she seems ageless, the fire still in her. When she agreed to write the introduction, she tells me, she decided she needed to find out more about Hannah’s death, so she went to see my grandparents and my father. They were ‘welcoming, not hostile or difficult’, but she felt that she could go only ‘so far and no further’ — that even seventeen years after Hannah’s death, there were questions they weren’t willing to answer.

My grandfather did show her Hannah’s suicide note. She was ‘shocked’ that he hadn’t shown it to my brother or me, and tried to persuade him to do so, though it remained among his papers, where I found it.

In her introduction, she wrote that the timing of The Captive Wife, several years before the second wave of the women’s movement, made it ‘more remarkable’ but also ‘more limited’. It was a ‘wonderful title’, she says now, ‘but a more pedestrian study’. She has always wondered how much Hannah was held back by her supervisors, by what they said, or what she worried they might say. She was pushing the boundaries with her choice of subject, and perhaps she felt she had to demonstrate more than the usual academic objectivity.

I have to remember, Ann says, how difficult it was for a woman academic in the 1960s, and particularly for a woman academic writing about the situation of women. When Ann registered to start her own PhD at Bedford in 1969, ‘the senior academics were all men, and none were sympathetic to the idea of housework as a valid subject for study’. (‘The man I finally ended up with as my supervisor tended to think at first that what I was talking about was the harmony or disharmony of the marital bed,’ she has written, ‘or, at the very least, the marvellous things that could be done with the handles of vacuum cleaners.’)

Ann was fortunate that the first women’s groups were starting. There was one at Bedford, where she was able to air her frustrations and receive moral support, but even so her supervisor often had her in tears. For Hannah, starting her thesis a decade earlier, it must have been ‘much more difficult’. She would have been ‘very alone academically — there simply weren’t other women to talk to doing similar subjects, and the male academics could make life very difficult’.

THERE ARE TWO particular male academics I want to ask Anne about, but I am nervous about the first one — Richard Titmuss, the LSE professor who supposedly made the comment about Hannah wearing too much eye make-up — as he was Ann’s father. But when I tell her the story, she says, ‘Oh, yes, that sounds like my father.’ She has even heard the story before, though about a different young woman — and I wonder aloud whether perhaps the story wasn’t about Hannah. As far as I know, and as photographs suggest, too, Hannah hardly ever wore make-up.

‘If it wasn’t eye make-up, it would have been something else,’ Ann says with a shrug. Her father was in theory a great advocate of social justice, she says, but he ‘didn’t like women, and he especially didn’t like working women’ — he could be ‘vitriolic’ to them, and didn’t like having them around the LSE. She can easily imagine that he would have found an excuse not to hire Hannah.

The other man I ask about is O. R. McGregor, Hannah’s lecturer and later professor at Bedford — the ‘enemy’, as my grandfather called him in his diary when Hannah was rejected by the LSE. After Hannah’s death, my grandfather wrote of seeing an article McGregor had written about equality for women, and wanting to ‘write and accuse him’.

I asked my father, but all he could remember was that McGregor in some way delayed her thesis and blocked her academic path. McGregor ‘must have felt guilty’, he said, because after Hannah’s death my father got into a train carriage with McGregor, who ‘scuttled away’ when they saw each other.

Ann got on well with McGregor herself, she says. When she had her problems with her supervisor, McGregor was supportive to her. He wasn’t specifically anti-women like her father, but ‘if he didn’t like you, he could give you a very hard time’. He was a ‘difficult man, a great manipulator’.

SHE SUGGESTS I get in touch with another former LSE professor of sociology, Terrence Morris, who was the same generation as Hannah. I send him an email, and he writes back immediately: ‘I may be able to help you with my recollections of the LSE of nearly fifty years ago, not least since Oliver McGregor and Richard Titmuss were people whom I knew well. Each was different but equally puissant. No-one with any sense of self-preservation would have wished to cross them.’

He never met Hannah, but he knew about her and he recalled ‘the suspicion that she had not been fairly treated in respect of her applications to the LSE. Times were not easy for young academics, not least since many professors approached human relations in their departments in a fashion that owed something to the culture of patronage in the Middle Ages. It was specially tough for women.’

Things were beginning to change in the early 1960s, he tells me, when I go to see him. But the elite was still an ‘old guard of academics, many of whom had been civil servants in the war, and imported into academia a patrician civil-service attitude’. McGregor produced ‘a lot of misery’, he says. ‘He was a schemer. I can say from personal experience that he would tell you one thing and do another, depending on what suited him.’ He could be ‘very spiteful’.

He doesn’t know any specific details about Hannah. There was ‘lots of smoke, but he doesn’t have the gun’, though the pattern was repeated with other women. He talks of Eileen Younghusband, a distinguished expert on social work, who was ‘pushed out of the LSE by Titmuss’, and Nancy Seear, who was ‘also treated badly’. The joke was ‘what’s that scrabbling noise — it’s [a particular woman] trying to get promoted’.

HE SUGGESTS A WOMAN SOCIOLOGIST, Bernice Martin, who might be able to tell me more. He offers to email her on my behalf, and later forwards her reply. Bernice, it turns out, was at Bedford with Hannah, considered her a friend, and also taught there later with McGregor. She knew, she writes, that there were ‘issues’ between ‘Mac’ and Hannah:

Mac called me into his office on the day he heard about her death to ask me for reassurance that his lukewarm references, which he knew had stopped her getting a job at the LSE, couldn’t have been the cause of her suicide. I couldn’t reassure him because I had no idea what had happened in her life. He excused himself by saying she was more a clever journalist than a real scholar, and that Hornsey was the right place for her, but I sensed that this was an excuse to save his conscience rather than a real conviction.

‘I have only good memories of Hannah,’ she concludes:

She was everything I was not — cosmopolitan, cultured, effortlessly charming while I was a single-minded working-class scholarship girl painfully learning about the big world. But we admired and liked each other though our worlds barely touched. Jeremy ought to know what a very lovely young woman his mother was and what a tragedy and waste so many people thought her death.

I write back, and we meet at Clapham Junction station and head out onto the street to find a café. Walking beside her, I feel happy. It is partly that she wrote so enthusiastically about Hannah, talks now about her with such warmth, though I have felt this happiness meeting others of Hannah’s female friends. Am I, in my search for my mother, taking any motherliness I can get along the way?

Bernice didn’t see Hannah much after she left Bedford, she says, but a year or so before Hannah died — around the time she was rejected by the LSE — she bumped into her in Baker Street, and Hannah said to her then, ‘You don’t think that Mac would give me a bad reference on purpose?’ She can’t remember what she told Hannah then, but she says now that she can ‘absolutely believe’ that McGregor would have sabotaged Hannah’s application to the LSE.

I ask if it might have been a clash of wills — two strong characters. But she says it was more complicated, more insidious, than that. ‘Academia was an elite, an empire.’ McGregor ‘liked controlling the job market in sociology in London, and he was a man who preferred people who were beholden to him’, and Hannah’s work and character undermined and challenged his position.

It was partly Hannah’s qualitative approach, which older sociologists like McGregor were suspicious of. It was partly, too, that while he was publicly pro women, he was ‘uncomfortable with the first stirrings of feminist assertiveness that Hannah represented, which otherwise politically leftist men of his generation were inclined to sneer at as the whingeing of privileged young women’.

Most importantly perhaps, McGregor wanted to influence public ideas and government legislation, ‘to be like Sidney and Beatrice Webb’. Although his magnum opus was a work on divorce, his position on the contemporary family was that it was ‘healthy and happy for the most part’, whereas Hannah’s work revealed a more constricting pattern of family life for women.

Hannah’s work was ‘perhaps only a minor political embarrassment’ for McGregor, but that would have been enough for him to want to deny her ‘the sort of prominence that could undermine his optimistic predictions about the stable family just at the point when his influence was rising’.

Of course, Bernice says, Hannah may well have ‘got up Mac’s nose personally’. She remembers a cabaret at the Bedford sociology graduation party of 1959 at which Hannah had organised a skit about McGregor and another teacher based on a Calypso song. Nothing like that had been done before at Bedford, she says, and she doesn’t imagine McGregor liked it very much.

‘He wasn’t used to people who stood up to him and did something different. Hannah was moving in a new direction, she was a pioneer, what she was doing was quite new in England, and she was doing it herself, from within herself.’

‘The sense she gave to people like me was that there was more to life than you’d seen and she was determined to have it,’ she says. ‘But she was struggling against strong men. Even strong women buckled under that sort of pressure.’

THE GENERAL IMPRESSION of the 1960s is that it was a period of female liberation and advance; but talking to Hannah’s contemporaries, reading their books, suggests that Hannah’s last few years, the early years of the 1960s, were a time of particular, and particularly acute, challenges for women, and especially strong, bright, ambitious women like Hannah.

In the 1950s, things were at least clearer. If a woman wanted a career, she had to sacrifice something. ‘It was exhausting to be even moderately “extraordinary” in that decade,’ Sheila Rowbotham wrote in a review of Rachel Cooke’s Her Brilliant Career: ten extraordinary women of the Fifties, and there were ‘painful costs’. Such women’s ‘endeavour isolated them from other women’, and if they had children they were ‘apt to bundle’ them ‘off to boarding school’.

An article published in Historical Research in 2003 by Elizabeth Kirk, ‘Women Academics at Royal Holloway and Bedford Colleges, 1939–69’, explores the experiences of the generation before Hannah’s.

The article quotes Gertrude Williams, Hannah’s original head of department, confessing ‘in a sad moment that she had been successful in large because unfortunately she had been unable to have children’. Of the other two senior women sociologists at Bedford in the 1950s, Barbara Wootton was childless, and Marjorie McIntosh, who had three children, ‘paid the price of an early death’, by stroke in her early fifties. Her death ‘sent a clear message to her students: “having it all” (a stressful job and a family) could have fatal consequences’.

As the 1960s progressed, things began to change. More women, helped by the new grants system, were going to university. More jobs were opening up for young women like Anne Wicks in the expanding businesses of the media and advertising. The arrival of the pill meant that women could have sex without worrying about getting pregnant. But while one foot was advancing into a new age, the other was still firmly planted in the 1950s.

These were the days when abortion was illegal, when men filled out their wives’ tax forms, when a husband couldn’t legally rape his wife. When Jessica Mann, a Cambridge graduate, went to live in Edinburgh with her husband in the early 1960s and applied to the university appointments board for work, she was asked by the man interviewing her, ‘What do you want a job for — you’re married, aren’t you?’

Most of Hannah’s contemporaries at Bedford, graduating in 1959 and 1960, went into traditional caring professions, and gave up work when they had children. One did manage to become the first woman on the graduate trainee scheme at Ogilvy & Mather, and went on to have a career in advertising — but she recalls sharing a flat with several women on the Shell graduate-trainee scheme who were in training to be secretaries for their male counterparts.

Sexual behaviour was changing, but sexual attitudes lagged behind. Sheila Rowbotham, who went up to Oxford in 1961, writes in Promise of a Dream, her memoir of the 1960s, how a girl she knew was found in bed with a boy. The girl was ‘kicked out of college, lost her grant and could not get into any other university’. The boy ‘was sent away from his college for two weeks’.

This was still a time when the BBC could send Christopher Brasher to Birmingham University to interview female students for a programme on whether ‘women want to compete with men or be competed for by men’.

These mixed messages pervaded married life for women of Hannah’s generation. An entry from Phyll Willmott’s diary in October 1965, a few weeks before Hannah’s death, gives a fascinating glimpse into the dynamics of a 1960s London middle-class marriage. Phyll’s husband, Peter (‘Petie’), was the breadwinner and a renowned sociologist, but Phyll was herself an expert on the social services — a book she co-edited, The Social Workers, was published by Penguin around the time of this entry:

Petie gave me a little ‘pep talk’ this morning before going to work! I explained I felt a bit at sea — not sure where I was going from now on, wondering a bit whether I ought to take on more of a ‘proper job’ with the boys so nearly grown. Feelings of guilt and parasitism etc. Petie, he says, would rather, ideally, I did less not more. He says he wants support from me in carrying his own load of responsibilities and although he likes me to have my own interests and sees I need them, he wants me not to get more pressed and so on. In other words, he would prefer me to go on much as I have been in the last two years. Free-wheeling away, taking an interest in his work, having my own small ‘reputation’. The talk helped.

Hannah was more fortunate in some ways than Phyll, and other women of her age. Her husband’s success in his work meant she could afford a full-time nanny, and later an au pair girl, and as long as it didn’t interfere with the running of the household, my father encouraged Hannah to study and work.

She was lucky, too, in being naturally strong in will and character. One of Hannah’s Bedford contemporaries told me how she went back to the college to do some research on battered babies, but McGregor ‘called me in and told me that no one was interested in the subject, and bullied me into giving up’.

Hannah didn’t give up. ‘She had no sense of deferring to authority,’ Bernice Martin said. ‘To succeed in those days, women had to give up something — children, work, femininity — whereas Hannah wanted and appeared able to have everything.’

But having everything, as the brave new world of the 1960s seemed perhaps for the first time in history to be offering, wasn’t easy. It took a lot of effort, as it does today, to be a mother, a wife, a worker. There was little slack in Hannah’s life, Gunilla Lavelle told me. There was no room for spontaneity in how she lived, Erica said. And there was also the not-so-brave old patriarchy waiting to trip up the new woman, belittle her, force her back.

TOWARDS THE END OF 2010, around the time I was having these conversations, I went with my wife to our local cinema to see Made in Dagenham. It is based on the true story of the strike for equal pay by the women workers at the Ford car plant in Dagenham in 1968. I thought it might have some relevance to Hannah’s story, but that was not our main reason for going. It had been reviewed well, as a British ‘feelgood film’, so it promised to be a relaxing night out.

The film was chirpy, cheeky, and we were soon laughing with the rest of the audience. (‘Chop, chop, or we’ll miss the buffet,’ one of the young women workers tells her boyfriend as he has sex with her in his car.)

But as the film went on, and though the tone remained mostly light, and the jokes continued to come, my own mood changed. As the women workers — and, in particular, the main character, a young woman who even looked with her dark bob and big smile a little like Hannah — grew in militancy, in determination, they met with increasing condescension, anger, and obstruction from most of the men in the film. Watching the slights the main character received at the hands of a bullying schoolmaster, patronising union leaders and bosses, an initially uncomprehending husband, and even her female friends — let alone having to deal with her own uncertainties — it seemed to me that I was seeing into Hannah’s heart, my mother’s own struggles, and I watched the last hour with tears running helplessly down my cheeks.