Slivers and footnotes: recognising wives and women in sociology

Welcome to Thanks for Typing, a podcast that uncovers the largely invisible contribution of social researchers' wives, to studies that laid the foundations of modern sociology. I'm Ros Edwards, and I'm a Professor of Sociology at the University of Southampton.

And I'm Val Gillies, a Professor of Social Policy at the University of Westminster.

Over the last decade, Val and I have been researching the role that the wives of social researchers played in post war British studies. Using archive materials and diaries kept by the wives of well known sociologists, we've been piecing together their central involvement in groundbreaking social research of families, class, and community life.

In this podcast, we reveal the major but unrecognised contributions sociologists' wives have made to the discipline and consider the implications of those overlooked collaborations for the development of social knowledge both then and now.

In Episode five, we're talking about the contribution that wives have made to the discipline of sociology in the past, but also how this has helped to shape the sociology of the present. We're excited to be joined by Lebogang Mokwena, who is a lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town, and John Goodwin, Professor of Sociology and Sociological Practice at the University of Leicester. Lebogang's work intersects cultural and historical sociology. As well as work on the cultural, economic and global histories of objects, she's studied the early twentieth century career of the sociologist, Sol Plaatje. John has a broad interest in sociology as craft and skill. And of particular relevance to our discussion today, he's researched the sociologies of Pearl Jephcott, Norbert Elias and C. Wright Mills. Lebogang, if we could start with you, would you tell us about your research on Sol Plaatje? Who he was? Why he's important?

He's understood as the founding father of the African National Congress, sort of the face of the South African liberation movement. And he's one of the sort of five or six men in the early twentieth century, who established the forerunner to the African National Congress, the South African native National Congress. And he was a prolific journalist. He was a social commentator, he was a poet. He was quite a polymath, actually. But one of the most seminal texts that we refer to is his ethnographic study of the immediate implications of the Native Land Act, which was the Act enacted in 1913, that basically dispossessed black South Africans of their land, and sort of left them in 13% of the landmass of what is now South Africa, in the native reserves. So he was sort of a frontline witness observer, and political agitator, trying to fight against the enactment and really trying to also get the British to help repudiate this Land Act. At the time, as you will know, South Africa was sort of really part of the British Empire. And so he then went on expeditions to England to try and get the British Parliament to put pressure on the South African Governor to repeal this Land Act. So a formidable literary figure, political figure, and really sort of very central to our imagination of black liberation struggle in South Africa, but also transatlantically between the United Kingdom, South Africa and the United States.

And we're really interested also in the role that his his wife played in his life, the public sociologies side of his life. What were you know, his wife's contribution to the production of knowledge?

Absolutely. And I must thank you, Ros for pushing me in this direction. Last year, firstly, at the International Sociological Association Conference, when I was presenting this paper, trying to claim Plaatje as sort of South Africa's first public sociologist, and you asked this question, because I think I mentioned that he acknowledged his wife, Elizabeth Lilith Nomteth M'belle, and her contribution in helping him put together the materials to write his book, Native Life in South Africa. And, you know, you sort of said to me, "Oh, this is intriguing, who is this person?" And it had never occurred to me to ask this. And as I've started digging, you know, principally sort of over the past year, I've realised many of us actually in South Africa, whether it's feminist scholars, whether it's political theorists haven't bothered to think about her role. So she was born in 1877. She was actually better educated than Plaatje. So by the time that they meet in 1898, and get married, she's already a teacher. So she's a professional. You know, she's had much more formative formal education than what Plaatje's had. He was really sort of self-taught and autodidact. I taught on his war diary of the Anglo Boer War in the in the late nineteenth century in South Africa. And I'd read this diary of Plaatje he's when he was recording this war. And he'd never even mentioned that actually, he was a father at this time in, you know, in what is a very personal medium, the diary, the sort of confessional medium. He doesn't mention that he's married, he doesn't mention that he has a one year old and he doesn't mention that he separated from his family. So I'm realising there is actually also a lot about his public profile that kept M'Belle out of, out of the picture.

Oh, this has echoes of our episode two discussion with Anna Funder about George Orwell's wife. So what did you find out when you started to dig into Elizabeth M'Belle's contribution to Plaatje's work?

Her contribution was massive, because when Plaatje leaves in 1914, and he comes to England, to try and sort of do the sort of political work of getting the Land Act repealed, she's the person who's not only continuing to maintain the newspaper publications he'd launched at that time, it was Tsala ea Becoana. So she's running the newspaper in his absence. But she's also collecting materials, commentaries, columns, letters, about the situation in South Africa, and the kind of unfolding implications of this Land Act. And she's sending them to him to support him in making a coherent and credible case for the South African people, at a time when at that stage, he was separated, so he wasn't exactly on top of what was happening sort of in current affairs. So I think her role is huge. She was, she was intellectually at the heart of curating Plaatje's understanding of the impact of the Land Act and helping him to craft a political strategy, actually, around and an evidence base a portfolio of evidence about what the implication of this Act was. And I've been gobsmacked that none of us actually have paid attention to this formidable role.

Yeah I feel a bit gobsmacked too!

John, could you tell us a bit about your work on Pearl Jephcott. Because I think a lot of people still won't know who she is. She wasn't an academic wife. But do you think maybe she was seen as a kind of adjunct academic wife to the men that she worked alongside?

So Pearl is somebody that still, you know, despite, you know, me working with Henrietta O'Connor and others, on Pearl for the last well, it's getting on for 20 years now. She remains, somebody that's largely unknown. And I think that is a consequence of her being a woman and her relationship with male academics in her early career, but I'd never heard of Pearl, it was a chance encounter when I was doing some archival research for another project, I came across a description for a research project on married women working in the Peek Freans bakery in Bermondsey. And it just there was something about it that piqued my interest. So I started to follow up on it, I found another report that was, that Pearl had put together that was beautifully illustrated, you know, it was a, there's a really nice diagram in there on leisure activities. And rather than using a standard graph, she'd used a cricket bat and balls for the, for the axes. And it was just so it was just, there was something about it, that was really appealing. But then when I spoke to people, I'd say, you know, I remember speaking to the late Bob Burgess and saying to him, you know, do you know anything about Pearl? And he said, Well, I know the name, but no, not really. And that was that was a fairly typical response. So what started out as something of a kind of general interest became a real obsession, because the more I researched, the more I discovered that Pearl was an outstanding sociologist, an outstanding social researcher, multiple publications to her name, all dealing with gender, work, family, community, youth, young people, and it just seemed very odd that she was not, you know, not well known.

So when you really started to dig into her backstory, what were you able to discover?

So Pearl, started out as a youth worker, had very clear views herself about youth work and about the role of, of clubs for girls in particular what what they should be doing to support girls. There was some disagreement with a, with a colleague while she was doing that work, and she left that work. At age 50, she shifts track moves to the LSE does various projects, most notably working with stroke for Richard Titmus on the married women worker project, the one I mentioned the the Peek Freans study. And at the LSE Pearl was very much supported by other women, such as Eileen Younghusband, who developed the social work programme there. So received a lot of support from other women, and was clearly talented, and creative and imaginative, and very good at what she did. What the archives reveal and what Ann Oakley reveals in her book, Father and Daughter, Titmus, was very threatened by Pearl and Pearl's employment is terminated quite abruptly. Pearl carries on her academic career right up until, you know, the year before her death in 1980, when she was, you know, she was aged 80 at that time, she was still doing academic work at the age of 79. She She carried on as a kind of independent researcher, a kind of contracted researcher, she moved between institutions that allowed her to research the things that she wanted to research. But I think inevitably, it meant that she remained fairly anonymous. She had an incredible publication record, but because she didn't have a tenured position, because she didn't have a permanent base. I think that really kind of hindered the extent to which people were aware of her work.

Can I ask you about C. Wright Mills, who's another great sociologist who seems to have relied quite heavily on women's labour. And in fact, he even acknowledged in a letter that his wife's editing of his work could amount to contribution. Could you shed any light on that for us?

So the thing that connects Mills and Jephcott is the emphasis on craft - sociology as a craft, a practice. Sociology is something that we do not something that we read about. It's a set of activities. So Mills, famously was married three times. His second marriage was to Ruth Harper, an accomplished statistician in her own right. And Ruth provided the research assistance for the book, White Collar. Yeah, you're absolutely right in even in the acknowledgments to that book. C. Wright Mills says that he you know, often in the book, he writes, 'we', and he explains that when he writes, 'we' is referring to Ruth Harper, and says that, you know, during the production of the book, her assistance amounted to collaboration. So Harper had a very direct and real and significant contribution to the book. Other writers, Oakes and Vidich, for example, they've written about collaboration and reputation and ethics. And they're very critical of Mills' relationship with women as research support. It's a difficult one, because whilst it's clear that he definitely relied on the support of women, it's hard to kind of extrapolate the kind of the kind of relationship between the kind of personal aspects and the work aspect. Was Mills exploitative of women? I'm not sure he was because, you know, his daughters have done a great job in releasing his autobiographical writings and letters. I think you get a very different picture. This is not somebody who simply used women for his own ends. He was very, very passionate and very committed to the relationships that he was in. I think, you know, undoubtedly benefited but whether it was in an exploitative way or problematic way, I'm less, I'm less convinced.

I think one of the problems is kind of extrapolating, it's kind of a real challenge of our, our project.

One of the dangers that we have, you know, if you do any kind of archival or historical research, it's what Elias would call the prism of the present. It's very tempting to apply the kind of behavioural standards of contemporary society as a prism through which to judge what's gone before. That's very risky and problematic, because although now we would, you know, in terms of academic publishing, there is absolutely no doubt that, you know, Ruth Harper should have been a co-author on White Collar. But that was that wasn't the convention in the past. And it's very difficult. We can acknowledge that it's problematic, we can acknowledge that it's, it's maybe wrong, but it's hard to make a judgement call because that was the conventions I would say, of that time. Again, I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just saying it is what it is.

Yeah, sure. It's not necessarily about using that sort of present centred lens to say, you know, morally it was wrong, but it is about acknowledging the work that the the wives actually put in. And that's quite important.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'd wanted to say something in relation to John, and sort of talking about Pearl's relationship status. Because I think when we look at Elizabeth M'Belle, you know, by the time, you know, between 1898, when she marries Plaatje and 1910, they've had six children. And in 1910, that's when his sort of nationalist political career takes off. And he's beginning to travel quite extensively, domestically. And obviously, from 1914, until about 1923, he is travelling extensively outside of South Africa. So the kind of reproduction that had to be done in the absence of her husband, to six children, also, while then supporting in a very central way, his expeditions. Obviously, she would not have been the only person that was in correspondence with him about developments in South Africa. But she would have been a very important interlocutor for him, and a voice that he trusted, having worked with her editorially at two newspapers that he had started. So it makes me really think first of all, we see that, you know, she had to let go of her teaching career which she was beginning to establish when they met. But more than that, she she then really took on almost the sole responsibility for their children together with her brother who was helping her out. And in that time, it meant that she really couldn't have much of a public life in the way that she probably would had Plaatje been around. Sort of his travels not been so extensive, and had they not had as many children as what they had. So it's almost like the kind of reproduction tax that, you know, I imagine was a double whammy for her and to try and imagine what that was like for somebody who must have been very ambitious and very capable. Also, in a context of a country with a political scope for people for black people, but black women, in particular was closing in in a really, really frightening way.

Yeah, that's actually that's something I did want to ask you about which so I was wondering how the context of colonialism might have played a role in what you have been researching and looking into there.

Absolutely. I mean, I think we're seeing a time of huge first nationalist political awakening within the country, but also the beginnings of the fragmentation of South Africa, as a single country, with blacks kind of confined to these what are called native reserves. And within that context, the sort of early nineteenth century black middle class of which sort of an educated class that Plaatje and M'Belle belonged to sort of having really beginning to see how that the scope and the horizon of the equal citizenship was now not only under threat, but completely being dismantled. When there had been this moment of opportunity, leading up to to 1910 and when South Africa became a single union, from four different colonies.

I can imagine the challenges involved in researching a wife's hidden contribution in a context like that, how did you approach it?

I find myself having to rely a lot on a little bit what Saidiya Hartman says about what we do when the archival sliver is inadequate, when we cannot find enough of the voices of the people? So you know, it's unclear to me where to find letters that M'Belle would have sent to Plaatje on his on his travels. I'd imagine they're in archival holdings in the US and at SOAS but you know, without those, without a kind of a sense of her in correspondence, first with this big politician, but also with a husband with an obligation to their six children, you're sort of having to undertake this sort of what she calls, what Hartman calls critical fabulation, this kind of imaginative weaving of the experience. And I take the point that John makes to not just the kind of retrospective application of modern day moral standards, but even the danger of trying to fabulate. But it's part of what I'm having to do, or at least to, to help guide some of the questions, I would like the archive wherever it exists and in whatever form it might exist to be able to answer about what her feelings, her sort of emotional state was at, at this very difficult, personal, private and very big public crisis and dilemma.

I think that that's the challenge is there's so many gaps, aren't there so many kinds of holes?

I think that there's a really interesting point that has been made there. So, so the gaps and the absence of archive, so in C. Wright, Mills' case, there's there's, you know, multiple archives relating to his work at the University of Texas, there's also work, you know, archive material held at Columbia from the time that he was there. And I think that reflects the fact that, you know, he was an established well-known scholar that that was, was deemed to be important. The same isn't true for Pearl. I've spent the last 20 years kind of constructing an archive. The slivers that we're referred to kind of pulling together the pieces of information from very disparate and odd sources, you know, everything from ancestry.com to publish your records to charitable foundations. Without that effort, it's very difficult to piece any of this together. And but there still remains remains gaps. It's that the kind of challenge of the archive when no archive exists or only partially exists, it is a real challenge for anyone who's interested in examining the the contributions of past scholars, but it also speaks to the idea that some scholars are deemed to be important, and others are not. There is a Richard Titmus archive at the LSE. There isn't a Pearl Jephcott archive at the LSE,

John. So I want to ask you what the implications are, do you think of uncovering this hidden gendered labour for sociology today?

For me, the kind of driving aim of writing about Pearl is, again is as has been said already, is to kind of reclaim her for sociology, to say this is somebody that was doing incredible, imaginative, creative work, and that she deserves to be read and understood. We're a discipline that goes through, you know, a huge range of of fads and trends. So we talk about the biographical turn - Pearl Jephcott was doing biographical research in the 1940s. Well, before it was fashionable. We talk about the visual turn - Pearl Jephcott was somebody who was employing artists to create research objects in the 1950s and 60s, well, you know, before the visual becomes fashionable again. So I think it's reclaiming her for the discipline. I think it's championing her work in terms of what we can learn. I think it speaks to her work speaks very much to writers like Graham Crow, who question the extent to which we're ever innovative in our research. Now, largely a lot of what we do builds on what's gone before and Pearl has got a massive contribution to make to that. I think it's about recognising the very heavily gendered nature of academia in the past, which means or which meant that those researchers in the field at the coalface disappear, whilst others perhaps go on to have illustrious, or more obvious careers. I do feel that part of my mission is to kind of vindicate Pearl in terms of what she did the quality of what she what she does, because she was treated very badly in the past, and actually, you know undeservedly so. This is an imaginative creative researcher, that most academics now would be, you'd be happy to happy to have published half the material that she has, she deserved better when she was alive. And so I just feel I've got to kind of push it if you if you know what I mean.

The first thing is to pay attention to the footnotes. Elizabeth M'Belle appears constantly in a way in a lot of materials. But all she is as a footnote, and I think the job of sociologists is to really think about moving certain figures from the footnote to the body to the full sort of centre stage of the text. And that probably requires a different kind of attentiveness - an attentiveness also to who is not being written about and why do they feature everywhere, only in the format of a one line reference that says, you know, this person was married to or this person participated or, you know, living in the shadow of this human.

And how should or could we pay more attention in your view?

Obviously I think it's much easier to be attentive to the ways that we are footnoting certain social subjects today. And I think the part of the imaginative task of historical sociologists is to really pay attention and confront and really wrestle with the archival sliver and how to pull that into something a bit more coherent that future generations can, can work from and build on, but also really elevate. So I'm really heartened and interested in John's work on Pearl and the kind of 20 year process of creative collection, curation and assemblage that he's done, because I think that's actually part of the task that I imagine is so urgent for and, in the context of South Africa for many black women, who as a function of our political history, really, really, are even less than a footnote but really feature in places that we do not tend to look as sociologists and/or historians.

I think we're dealing with the kind of absolute archetypal tip of the iceberg. You know, for me, Pearl is indicative of a whole generation or generations of women researchers that became footnotes. I like this idea of hidden in the footnotes because, again, I think the double challenge for Pearl was that, although she published, she still ended up in the footnotes. So if I go back to one of her main works, Married Women Worker, you know, she's the main author on the book on that book, but Titmus - he held the grant, he took credit, he was the one travelling around the UK offering the project to other universities in terms of collaboration. So although Pearl was kind of front and centre, she becomes relegated and marginal. And the irony of irony is that that was a project about the role that women as wives and mothers play in the labour market, how they managed childcare, how they support, you know, their husbands, etc. So, so even despite her best efforts, she ends up a footnote, in many respects.

It's actually it's been really lovely to share with you, both of you, the issues in terms of working with absences and with slivers and footnotes, and mentions in acknowledgments and so on. So, thank you so much to both of you. Thanks to our guests, Lebogang Mokwena and John Goodwin, and thank you to you for listening. Also, thanks to Chris Garrington and Krissie Brighty-Glover, our production team at Research Podcasts. In our next episode, Val and I will be in conversation with Katherine Twamley and Charlotte Faircloth of University College London. We'll be talking about contemporary gendered inequalities of academic labour.

Thanks for Typing is brought to you in partnership with the Sociological Review Foundation, whose mission is to share sociologically imaginative insights on our world and help pave the way towards a more just future. Find out about all the foundation's podcasts at the sociologicalreview.org