A Woman on the Edge of Time (18 page)

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.