Ann Oakley, Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the Institute of Education in the University of London, is the author of this first full-length biography of Barbara Wootton (1897–1988), Baroness Wootton of Abinger. The apt if curious title − ‘A Critical Woman’ − well describes the character and nature of Wootton's thought and writing and suggests as well, her critical qua important life-work in a career of applied social research and public service which spanned the greater part of the twentieth-century. The subtitle, Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century, well describes the principal theme of the book − Wootton's polymath contributions spanning six decades, as an economist, social scientist, Professor, writer, magistrate, lecturer, BBC broadcaster and Life Peer.

A Critical Woman is written with clarity and elegant prose. It is a well-researched and documented account of Wootton's public career and life. The author has made excellent use of the archival materials deposited in Wootton's alma mater, Girton College, Cambridge, read and analysed the corpus of her published work and many of her contemporaries, and interviewed those who knew her. Published by Bloomsbury Academic, with research funded largely by the Nuffield Foundation, the book has seventeen chapters with an appreciative Foreword by Baroness Blackstone who writes of her own earlier plan (abandoned) to write a biography of Wootton. Late in life, Wootton is reported to have invited the writer Tony Gould to write her biography, who agreed to do so, but the biography failed to be realised (p. 4).

The problematic posed by the author is one of paradox: ‘Barbara Wootton's life and work are remembered by only a few people today. Her name is not one that conjures up a notable record of public achievement even though this was the nature of her work, in her lifetime, which spanned the greater part of the twentieth century (1897–1988)’ (p. 1). The challenge driving Oakley's narrative is her question: ‘How is it, and why is it, that the world appears largely to have forgotten what she did; and ― much more general question ― what might this forgetting tell us about our habits of regarding only certain types of lives as worth remembering?’ (p. 9). The subject thus posed is a biography of a ‘forgotten’ worthy, the approach invoked is one of recovery, prompting the reader to reflect upon the politics of reputation and commemoration, of memory and forgetting and, perhaps more generally, upon the changing fortune of intellectuals in modern Britain.

In her Introductory chapter entitled ‘Writing a Life of Barbara Wootton’, Oakley sets forth the challenges encountered in writing biography − issues such as the relationship between biographers and their subjects (p. 6), identification/disagreement/dialogue with one's subject, the challenge of organising large amounts of materials gathered and explored and her specific goal of contextualising the life of the individual within social parameters. Informing the relationship of biographer to her subject is Oakley's personal connection to Wootton, having been introduced to her on various occasions by her parents, Professor Richard Titmuss, a colleague of Wootton's in the University of London, and his wife Katherine (Kay) (pp. 2–3). Oakley remarks upon the particular challenge of writing the life of a woman − a remarkable woman − who frequently served on numerous commissions and committees as a first (sole) and statutory woman. Wootton fought for equity, favouring a socialist-egalitarian argument more readily than a gendered, woman-centred politic.

More challenging for the author was the absence of personal diaries, ‘relatively few personal letters’, ‘no correspondence with her parents or with either of her husbands’ (p. 3), which would help to illuminate the private life of the public person. Some personal aspects of Wootton's life remain somewhat elusive. The author's introductory remarks on the personal qua political, qua social interaction lead to a summary judgement ‘Wootton was married twice, and for two periods in her life she lived with two women. She was clearly very close to one of these women . . . her second female domestic partner was someone with whom she obviously enjoyed a considerable emotional and intellectual intimacy. Having considered the evidence, I do not think there was a physical intimacy as well – at least not in the sexual sense’ (p. 10). A subsequent chapter discussing Wootton's ‘second female domestic partner’, gives greater depth to the discussion of the professional career of partner Barbara Kyle, than to exploring the nature, significance and historic tradition of female friendship and partnership.

Despite these challenges of biography/life-writing, Oakley constructs a formidable narrative of Wootton's work and life. An initial chapter entitled ‘Ladies of the House’ positions Wootton and her accomplishments as one of the first four women created a Baroness under the provision of the Life Peerages Act in 1958. Subsequent (seventeen in all) chapters follow in chronological order, strategically mixing ‘interludes’ of personal life with in-depth analyses of Wootton's work and publications. There is a moving chapter which relates Wootton's marriage at the age of twenty during the First World War and the life-altering experience of loss with the death of her brother Arthur at the battle of the Somme and her husband of thirty-six days, Jack (John Henry) Wootton, in the campaign at Passchendaele. Several chapters explore Wootton's early work as an economist, as researcher for the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, her internationalist argument for a supranational Federal Union during the interwar years, and her role as Principal of Morley College and Director of Studies for the University of London's Extra-Mural Department.

Wootton's post-1945 activities marked her turn to social science and social research and another phase of her life. In the chapters which follow, the author's narrative and analyses gain momentum, demonstrating Wootton's rationalist argument and methodology as applied to contemporary issues. They include a chapter contextualising Wootton's Testament for Social Science: An Essay in the Application of Scientific Method to Human Problems (Reference Wootton1950) and another which deftly describes the circumstances surrounding the Nuffield Foundation's six-year funding of Wootton's research which culminated in her book Social Science and Social Pathology, assisted by Vera Seal and Rosalind Chambers (Reference Wootton, Seal and Chambers1959). The latter volume provoked social workers and others, with its chapter critical of social work as practiced in mid-twentieth century. Wootton's remarks on law, penal policy and criminology are well-represented in a chapter entitled ‘Crime and Penal Policy’ which explores Wootton's long career as a magistrate and her particular concern for young offenders. Familiar to students of the law and well analysed by Oakley is her exchange with jurist H. L. A. Hart about the doctrine of mens rea, or guilty intention, and the concept of (criminal) responsibility, followed by a brilliant discussion of Wootton's work on law and penal policy and her argument for the abolition of the death penalty.

Oakley concludes with an assessment of Wootton's contribution to public policy in Britain, affirming the need for remembering her life and work ‘her approach to a systematic social science makes her a founding mother in Britain of a new tradition: that of evidence-informed public policy’ (p. 347). A Critical Woman is an excellent contribution to the history of social science and public policy in Britain and is accessible to a general public as well as to specialist readers. It also invites further analysis of the role of women intellectuals in modern Britain and for further studies which seek to integrate the history of women intellectuals into the historiography of modern Britain.