Janet Beveridge's career as a wife is the most complex of the four that form the focus of this book. It raises particular questions about the function of gender stereotyping in the description of wifely careers, and confronts any biographical historian with a jungle of plots and conspiracies that are hard to untangle. She was married twice: first to a taciturn civil servant and mathematician called David Beveridge Mair; and, second, to his cousin and Jeannette Tawney's brother, William Henry Beveridge, the man who is credited with founding the British welfare state. In the first capacity she was known as Mrs Jessy Mair; in the second as Lady Beveridge, with an accompanying change of forename to Janet. (William Beveridge in his writings about his wife solved the problem about which forename to use by simply calling her ‘J.’)

These changes in nomenclature signal a life divided into very different stages. As Mrs Jessy Mair, Janet Beveridge lived the life of a housewife in a small village in Surrey in the early 1900s. Her and David Mair's four children were born there, but raising them and cooking a threecourse meal every night failed to absorb her abundant energy. Her engagement with the local Women's Institute was not a success; she railed against the role of ‘professional hausfrau’; and she hated Banstead, which was still a village rather than the suburban conurbation it is now, although ‘suburban’ as a negative epithet probably did describe it. In her book about William Beveridge – unlike Mary Booth’s, Janet's was written when her husband was still alive – she describes the moment she first met the man who would eventually become her second husband: ‘One Sunday morning in the spring of 1904 he came down to Banstead, where we were living and raising our family. The first two of them were still at the perambulator stage. As I wheeled them home from their morning outing, I caught sight of a young man loping along the path towards me. He was loosely built and badly dressed, but he had an air which put him in the interesting class at first sight.’

In 1904, too, Janet attended a gathering at LSE that marked a lifelong interest of hers and presaged many efforts she would make, along with both her husbands, to alter the future course of British social science.