Ann Oakley was born in London on January 17, 1944 in St. Marys Hospital, Paddington, Which is currently know for the births of royal babies. She was born the only child of Kay Titmuss, a social worker, and Richard Titmuss, one of the 20th century’s foremost social policy theorists and an architect of Britain's welfare state. Richard and Kay married in 1937. Kay was from a middle class family in South London. Her father Thomas Miller was a cutlery salesman which was a prestigious job in these times. Her mother Katie Louisa Miller was the daughter of a Norfolk wheel-wright and an Irish woman with a fiery temper. Richard, on the other hand, came from a farming family in Bedfordshire that fell victim to the great depression. Morris Titmuss was his father who died unexpectedly after their move to Hendon in the 1920s. Morris' death left Richard in charge of his elder sister, a younger brother, and his mother who had now become a desolate widow. Oakleys parents came from both sides of the spectrum. Oakley lived with her parents in West London and went to an all girls grammar school until the age of 16 when she escaped to the more normal setting of what was called a polytechnic. Here she was able to meet men of her own age for the first time, became a political radical, and received the grades of A's in English, French and Art. At 18 years old she attended Somerville College located in Oxford, to obtain a three year degree course in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She was one of the first students to take a Sociology option in this degree at Oxford in 1964. The Sociology degree was offered after Oakley had written a piece called On the Disadvantages of an Oxford Education. The main focus of this work was that an Oxford education was too specialized; you didn't learn how society works. Whilst at Oxford Ann met Robin Oakley who would eventually become her husband. Oakley met Robin at a seminar on Marxism and social anthropology at Nuffield College on May 18, 1964. It was on this day that Ann decided she was to marry Robin. On December 17, 1964 the two were happily married. Her biography of her parents' early work, Man and Wife, published in 1996, contains some reflections on the relationship between her early family life and her own subsequent life and work. After university, Ann Oakley wrote two novels, but had trouble finding anyone who would publish her work, She had a variety of part-time jobs, in market research, tele-marketing, doing contract research in education, and writing scripts for children’s television. Her first two children were born in 1967 and 1968. In 1969 she registered for a PhD on women’s attitudes to housework, a subject that much puzzled the academic establishment at the time. Her first academic book, Sex, Gender and Society was published in 1972. This introduced the term ‘gender’ into academic and everyday use, and provided a very useful tool for the developing field of women’s studies: ‘gender’ distinguishes the social treatment of men and women from the biology of sex. By this time, Oakley had discovered feminism and had joined the infant women’s liberation movement. Two books on the housework project followed in 1974, The Sociology of Housework and Housewife. These pointed out that the social sciences ignored housework as work, and that very few serious studies of women’s work in the home existed. Ann Oakley then became a researcher at what was Bedford College now known as London University, for her next project: women’s experiences of the transition to motherhood. Her research resulted in two more books, Becoming a Mother (1979), later reprinted as From Here to Maternity, and Women Confined: Towards a sociology of childbirth (1980). These two works looked at childbirth as a human life event, and on medicine as a controlling institution. In 1977 she had another child, her third, and soon afterwards was treated for oral cancer. In 1979 she moved to a part-time job at a research unit in Oxford known as the National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit which was set up by the pioneering health services researcher Sir Iain Chalmers. While working here she took on a project looking at the history of antenatal care. Her research yet again became another book: The Captured Womb (1984). In the same year she published an account of her life so far, Taking it Like a Woman. Like much of her work, this departed from normal writing conventions, here in mixing autobiography with fictionalized narratives about a love affair. A book of essays combined with poetry, Telling the Truth About Jerusalem (1986), came next, though the poetry was left out of the second edition which appeared as Essays on Women, Medicine and Health (1993). Ann Oakley’s first published novel, The Men’s Room, was published in 1988. This was made into a successful BBC television film series starring Harriet Walter and Bill Nighy. Six other novels, exploring many of the themes that have preoccupied her a