What we inherit from our parents – their treatment of us and the shaping of this by the conditions of their own lives – is a multilayered gift or burden. People who reduce it to a simple formula, a common feature of profit-driven celebrity memoirs, are deceiving themselves as well as us. At my school we sang a hymn which opened with the invocation ‘Let us now praise famous men’. As a female child, standing there in the school hall with some six hundred other girls and a staff of women teachers, I found this odd: why were we praising famous men, where were those men, who were they, and what exactly were they supposed to have done for us? This cryptic celebration of masculinity was one of many taken-for-granted habits of the time in girls’ education.

I couldn’t have emerged from childhood as the daughter of Richard Titmuss without being a socialist of some kind. I understood from very early on that the point of being on this earth is to work for the public welfare, not for private aggrandisement. I learnt that this means supporting public sector institutions like the NHS and state-funded education. By a process of permeation rather than direct appreciation, I saw that gross inequalities of income, resources and life chances are morally wrong and corrosive of a healthy society. My induction into socialism was a matter of emotion rather than reason. The reason came later. And with it, because I was a woman, came the additional perception that from the pursuit of class equality you cannot reasonably exclude equality between the classes of men and women. The problem was – I now see but didn’t then – that the politics of post-war reconstruction in which our family was embedded drew the social classes but not the genders together. The democratic ideal of one nation took as its binding ideal The Family as the nub of The Community. Equality for women meant complementary difference, not self-governing autonomy.

There was no moment of sudden revelation, and not much revelation at all until after I stopped living in the Blue Plaque House and became a discontented suburban housewife. Then I was absorbed into a process of epiphany which embraced no less than the discovery of gender, the academic study of women’s labour, and the politics of feminism.