Ann Oakley was born in London in 1944, the only child of Kay Titmuss, a social worker, and Richard Titmuss, one of the 20th century’s foremost social policy theorists and an architect of Britain's welfare state. She lived with her parents in West London and went to a single sex grammar school until the age of 16 when she escaped to the less authoritarian setting of a polytechnic, where she took A levels in English, French and Art. At 18 she went to Somerville College, Oxford, to study for a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. She was one of the first students to take Sociology at Oxford, which became an option on the Politics syllabus for the first time in 1964. Her biography of her parents' early work, Man and Wife, published in 1996, contains some reflections on the relationship between her early family life and her own subsequent life and work.

After university, Ann Oakley wrote two novels, but she couldn’t find a publisher for either, and so decided to ‘do sociology’ for a few years before trying fiction again. Her first two children were born in 1967 and 1968; a third child and second daughter was born in 1977. In 1969 she registered for a PhD on women’s attitudes to housework, a subject that much puzzled the academic establishment at the time. During these years she had a variety of part-time jobs, in market research, telephone sales, doing contract research in education, and writing scripts for children’s television. Her first academic book, Sex,Gender and Society was published in 1972. This was later credited with introducing the term ‘gender’ into academic and everyday discourse, and providing a critical tool for the new women’s studies, which needed a way of distinguishing the social treatment of men and women from the biology of sex. This was followed by two books on the housework project in 1974, The Sociology of Housework and Housewife. These argued that the social sciences ignored housework as work, conceiving of it unhelpfully as an aspect of femininity. This ideological bias made it difficult to appreciate how culture-bound definitions of domestic work and sex roles in Western countries currently were.

Ann Oakley’s next project, undertaken while she was on the research staff of what was then Bedford College, London University, looked at social and medical aspects of the transition to motherhood. This again resulted in two books, Becoming a Mother (1979), later reprinted as From Here to Maternity,and Women Confined: Towards a sociology of childbirth (1980). The focus of these was on childbirth as a human life event, and on medicine as a controlling institution. During the early 1980s the second of these themes was expanded in the first thorough history of the development of antenatal care for childbearing women: The Captured Womb (1984). In the same year she published an account of her life so far, Taking it Like a Woman. Like much of her work, this departed from normal writing conventions; it mixes autobiography with fictionalised narratives. A book of essays, Telling the Truth About Jerusalem (1986) combined academic work with poetry. Her fiction explores many of the themes that have preoccupied her as a social science researcher. She has so far published seven novels, beginning with The Men’s Room in 1988,which was turned into a successful BBC television film series.

In 1979 Ann Oakley moved to work in the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit in Oxford, a pioneering research unit set up by the health services researcher Iain Chalmers. In 1985 she moved again to a post at the Institute of Education in London, as the Deputy Director of the Thomas Coram Research Unit. In 1990 she set up SSRU (the Social Science Research Unit), a new research unit at the Institute, with a general brief to conduct policy-relevant research across the health, education and welfare domains.   Ann Oakley’s research interests since 1990 have increasingly been in the area of social science methodology and the contribution of the social sciences to public policy. This has led her to explore the history of experimental ‘ways of knowing’ and the applicability of this approach in the social policy field, and to develop, with colleagues, methods for systematic research review which can deliver relevant and reliable research evidence to policy-makers and the public. Her most recent book in this area, Experiments in Knowing: Gender and method in the social sciences (2000), charts the buried history of social experiments and research synthesis. It also analyses the current ‘paradigm’ war about ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ methods, and argues that this is an example of a broader gendered division of labour between the social and natural sciences. Rather: like the topic of housework in the home, arguing about who does what in terms of methods doesn’t help the work (of social science) get done in the most efficient and appropriate way.

Ann Oakley has maintained her interest in feminism throughout her academic career. Examples are the three collections of essays, jointly edited with Juliet Mitchell: The Rights and Wrongs of Women (1976), What is Feminism? (1986) and Who’s Afraid of Feminism? (1997). She returned to the topic of gender differences and culture in her wide-ranging Gender on Planet Earth (2002), which links many of today’s most pressing social problems with gender ideologies and arrangements. Issues such as rising crime and disaffected youth, and pollution and the ‘rape’ of the environment are connected through an ethos about gender in which women remain cultural outsiders and men are alienated from the full range of human experiences. Gender on Planet Earth also contains an interesting discussion of the four ‘delusional systems’ which maintain these ideas and practices: sociobiology, psychoanalysis, neo-classical economics and postmodernism.

As her father, Richard Titmuss’s, literary executor, Ann Oakley has edited and reissued three volumes of his work: The Gift Relationship (1997, edited with John Ashton), Welfare and Wellbeing (2001, edited with Pete Alcock, Howard Glennerster and Adrian Sinfield), and Private Complaints and Public Health (2004, edited with Jonathan Barker). Since much of her own early work is now out of print, she has written an Ann Oakley Reader, published by Policy Press in 2005. In her ‘spare’ time Ann Oakley enjoys swimming, walking, rural life, music and the company of her family and friends, especially her grandchildren.

For Ann Oakley's work on Richard Titmuss's archives click here

See also the London School of Economics archives.