Richard Titmuss. Stewart, John
unusual in continuing to work after her marriage, albeit for only a few years. In the inter-war era only 10 per cent of the workforce consisted of married women, a group which constituted 16 per cent of the female workforce. The huge change in this situation was to come after the Second World War, and was analysed by, among others, Titmuss.53 Kay may have been thwarted in her career, but hers was, nonetheless, not an unusual experience. This is not to condone it, simply to suggest that the picture is complex. Oakley’s ‘uncompleted journey’ was not confined to Mrs Titmuss.
Yet for Oakley, Titmuss had, for various reasons, a ‘passion for the stable breadwinner-father formula of family life’ – he was, and remained, in other words, a supporter of the ‘traditional’ family.54 She agrees that he was, in important ways, a radical who analysed to effect various social divisions. But when it came to gender it was ‘as though for him the social divisions between men and women were different from all other social divisions. They were not about power’.55 What she is arguing here is that while Titmuss was clear-sighted about, say, the way in which social inequality involved the exercise of power by one part of society over another, he could not, or would not, see existing social arrangements as also embracing the exercise of power by men over women. In the case of Kay and Titmuss, this could be clearly seen on the domestic front as they engaged in ‘their tireless enactment of gendered ideology’. Her parents, Oakley suggests, were to collect ‘around themselves a coterie of people who shared their commitment to improving public and personal welfare through the analytic and prescriptive power of thought … Actually, he thought and discussed and she served the meals’.56
As an outsider, it is again difficult to know what to make of this. Oakley, of course, knew her parents in ways that nobody else could. However, whatever the particular dynamics of the Titmuss marriage, McKibbin, while acknowledging that society was dominated by men, nonetheless points to the complicated nature of gender relations in middle class households. In the search for ‘companionate marriage’ not only were men expected to perform at least some domestic tasks, it was also assumed that husband and wife would have ‘interests and friends in common’. Needless to say, this was not unproblematic. But, at the very least, it did suggest a not completely subordinate role for middle class women.57 Of course, none of this necessarily tells us much about the actual nature and texture of Titmuss and Kay’s relationship. But it is suggestive. So, for instance, while Titmuss may well have done little more around the house than wash the dishes, at least early on in their relationship he and Kay clearly had mutually enjoyable interests in common, such as hiking. Nor is it to reject wholesale the argument that Kay sacrificed her career to the project that was Richard Titmuss. Arguably, though, it was Kay who drove this project forward, albeit that Titmuss was undoubtedly ambitious in his own right.
If the details of Titmuss’s early life are patchy, the broad outlines are clear enough. He grew up in modest, possibly very modest, but not impoverished, circumstances. He was educated at an institution which does not seem to have shone academically, but there is no reason to suppose that it was any worse than the many other private and preparatory schools then in existence, and which catered in the inter-war era for over a quarter of a million scholars.58 And, in any event, Titmuss’s poor health did little to enhance his educational experience. Titmuss’s first major employer, the County Fire Office, provided him with, if nothing else, financial security and a solid foundation in statistical analysis. He was clearly good at his job. So far, so relatively straightforward. We have an ambitious, talented, young man, keen, as we shall see in the next three chapters, to make an impact on inter-war society, although at this point his future successes could hardly have been anticipated. In making his mark, and here matters become more complicated, he was supported and encouraged by Kay. But at what cost to her? Ultimately, this is an extremely difficult question to answer. For present purposes, what we can say is that her experience was hardly untypical, oppressive and constricting as we might now perceive it to be.
Notes
1M. Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss, 1907–1973’, Proceedings of the British Academy, LXI, 1975, pp 3–30.
2‘The Observer Profile: Welfare Professor’, The Observer, 22 March 1959, p 13.
3G. Moorhouse, ‘The Poverty Lobby’, The Guardian, 3 December 1966, p 7.
4LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, R.M. Titmuss, ‘Application for the Chair of Social Administration’, undated but 1950.
5COHEN, Box 235, folder 7, letter, 1 October 1973, Kay Titmuss to Eloise and Wilbur Cohen (emphasis in the original).
6Oakley, Father and Daughter, pp 39–40.
7A.H. Halsey, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004.
8See, for instance, the description in Oakley, Man and Wife, pp 6–7.
9Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 30 (emphasis in the original).
10LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, letters, 27 July 1973, Gowing to Adams; and 23 and 24 July 1973, Adams to Gowing.
11H. Glennerster, Richard Titmuss: Forty Years On: CASE/180, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London, 2014, p 1.
12For an account of Titmuss’s forebears, Oakley, Man and Wife, p 21ff.
13W. Page (ed), The Victoria History of the County of Bedfordshire: Volume 2, London, Archibald Constable and Co, 1908, pp 348, 374.
14Oakley, Man and Wife, p 27.
15Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, p 3.
16Oakley, Father and Daughter, pp 45–6.
17Gowing, ‘Richard Morris Titmuss’, pp 3–4.
18Oakley, Father and Daughter, p 51.
19LSE/Staff Files/Titmuss, Allied Assurance Company Ltd: Proposal for