Remembering Leonore Davidoff: Subjectivity inThicker than Water

Abstract

��� I arrived at Essex from Melbourne in 1985 with the intention of beginning an oral history PhD on the feminization of clerical work in Britain. Sitting in on Lee’s Gender History MA seminars, however, and encouraged by her emphasis on the relational aspects of gender, my focus began to shift towards the study of masculinity. Although taking part in the Gender History seminar was not always comfortable – I was the only man in the group, and there were discussions both about the potentially diluting effects of a focus on women and men, and indeed about whether the seminar should be open to men – it was a really stimulating experience. Family Fortunes was then in the final stages of preparation, and we read draft chapters. Motivated by Lee’s insistence that areas like business and economic history needed to be opened up to a gender perspective, I began a study of management culture in Britain after the Second World War. I came away from the seminar with a feeling of having stumbled into a new field and being set free to explore it. It was a great skill of Lee’s to be able to inspire you without necessarily seeming to want to exert a strong imprint on what you ended up producing. Lee remained an important figure throughout my subsequent life as an academic. She examined my PhD, giving me a detailed commentary that proved invaluable when I was preparing Masculinity and the British Organisation Man for publication. She wrote an effusive report for Routledge on Manful Assertions (1991), the volume edited by John Tosh and me. She brought me back to Essex to teach on the MA in Social History and helped me get a full-time post in the Sociology Department in 1991. She read the manuscript of The Secret Battle, my book on family relationships in the First World War, and remained an energizing and creative presence among the cultural and social historians at Essex. I count myself as very lucky indeed to have had Lee as a colleague. My own work in recent times has shifted somewhat from the study of masculinity to the history of subjectivity, and in what follows I want to reflect on how Lee understood subjectivity. She was always interested in the interior aspects of experience. Forty years on, her 1974 essay ‘Mastered for Life’ retains a contemporary feel, partly because of Lee’s concern with the subjective experiences of servants and wives. 1 She writes