My engagement with sociology is interlinked with my personal history, and so the two have to be described together. I graduated in English (literature) in 1958. No careers advice was offered, beyond directing ‘girls’ into secretarial or teaching work. I tried various avenues and had a memorable experience at the BBC. I applied for a job as trainee drama director and when I got to the interview, they said, ‘We thought we would ask you to come along, because we wondered why you applied: we don’t take women.’

The social and political climate for women, whether or not graduates, in the 1950s and 1960s was dire. Woman’s destiny was marriage and children, and when some of my cohort got married on the last day of the last term at university, we fellow graduates thought that was success. Commentators at the time, proclaimed that women must and would spend 15 to 20 years bringing up their two or three children, but that after that there was plenty of time for them to take up or resume their careers (for example, Titmuss, 1958). There were a few dissenting voices – women mostly, arguing that it was a waste of education (paid for by the state) not to use women’s education and skills (Banks and Banks, 1956 ) and in 1949 governmental concern about shortages of ‘manpower’ led to a Royal Commission on Population Report which argued that measures be introduced to allow women to combine motherhood with paid work (see Myrdal and Klein, 1956: 196). Later – in 1964 – the government relaxed its rules on not expanding nursery places, provided the new nursery place would release a woman to resume her job as a teacher.

After some false starts, however, I took the traditional course and from 1959 taught in girls’ grammar schools (this is just before comprehensivisation came in). Then after marriage and child, I taught very part-time for the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) in a further education college. By the late 1960s, however, ILEA decided that all its teachers, however experienced, must do a training course, and word in the staff room was that it was excruciatingly boring. So I cast around. Maybe there was something else I could do.