Oakley, Ann

Ann Oakley is a British feminist theorist who has published both fiction and nonfiction works contributing to the development of feminism as a social science. Oakley has devoted a significant part of her research to the sociology of motherhood and childbirth. This research has resulted in the volumes Becoming a Mother (1979), later reprinted as From Here to Maternity, and Women Confined: Towards a Sociology of Childbirth (1980). She has also authored the first history of antenatal care for child-bearing women in The Captured Womb (1984).

Like other feminist theorists, Oakley took issue with a romanticized vision of motherhood that makes it a natural event for women. In Becoming a Mother, Oakley has defined motherhood as “a handicap but also a strength; a trial and an error; an achievement and a prize.” While not primarily concerned with motherhood, Oakley's Sex, Gender and Society (1972) is regarded as a milestone in feminist theory as it introduced the concept of gender as a cultural construction in sociological discourse. Oakley's research has been innovative also on methodological grounds, refusing the notion of an objective interviewer and challenging the boundaries between interviewer and interviewed. Oakley has worked for, and has helped to establish, pioneering units in the health care, education, and policy-making sectors such as the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit in Oxford, the Thomas Coram Research Unit, and the Social Science Research Unit (SSRU) at the Institute of Education in London.

Ann Oakley was born in London in 1944 as an only child. Her mother, Kay Titmuss, was a social worker, while her father, Richard Titmuss, was a key social theorist and one of the designers of Britain's welfare state. Oakley and her parents lived in West London; at 18, she enrolled at Somerville College, Oxford, for a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. Within this degree, she was one of the first students to take the newly introduced Sociology option. After her graduation, Oakley devoted herself to fiction and wrote two novels.

The fact that she could not find a publisher for them made her return to sociology and, in 1969, she started to research women's attitudes toward housework for her Ph.D. dissertation. The outcome of this research was the two-volume The Sociology of Housework and Housewife, both published in 1974. Building on gender as a social construct, Oakley argued that the condition of the housewife was a gendered role built on women's economic dependence on men and on the constant devaluation of [Page 932]their work of taking care of the family—thus, linking women's oppression to cultural expectations of men and women rather than to biological differences between males and females.

Oakley's analysis of motherhood and childbirth, elaborated while working at Bedford College, London, is equally located in the strictures of the social relations effected by patriarchy. In particular, she has condemned the two popularized images of mothers in medical discourse. The first image portrays women not only as passive patients but also as malleable reproductive machines, while the second sees them as biologically determined in their female roles as mothers.

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