What began life as an academic doctoral thesis ended up being probably the most influential of all my books. The birth, gestation and delivery of The Sociology of Housework are described in detail elsewhere but the summary version is as follows: in 1967-9 I found myself performing the customary occupation of many women throughout the world, looking after small children and a home. The children were wonderful (the home less so) but I had become seriously irked by the social isolation and under-valuation of this role, which was especially a shock to those of us women who had benefitted from the 1960s expansion of higher education in the UK, and had absorbed as a result the deeply erroneous idea that from henceforward all doors would be open to us, just as they were for men. Children and housework closed those doors, it seemed. Having studied philosophy, logic, politics, economics and sociology at university, I thought perhaps it would be worth applying those frameworks of understanding to the subject of domestic labour. It proved difficult to find an academic home and a doctoral supervisor for my idea, and publishing houses were similarly unreceptive when I turned the completed research into a detailed narrative, not only of what the women I interviewed for the project actually said about housework, but of how women, historically, had been manoeuvred into this position of doing the world's dirty work.

The difficulties of getting a supervisor and a publisher are, of course, intimately connected to the topic itself. How could housework possibly be a serious academic subject? Who would want to spend good money on buying a book about it? The unexpected career of The Sociology of Housework owed much to the political and intellectual climate of the 1970s, which was populated by some people who considered that the time was overdue for a re-evaluation of housework and, indeed, of the whole awkward subject of women and gender.

The Sociology of Housework opens with an ingenuously spirited attack on the treatment of women in sociology and the gender-blindness of its founding fathers. I wrote this at the suggestion of the publisher I eventually found for the book, who probably had more of an eye than I did then on the way in which the sociology of domestic work was about to benefit exponentially from the increased public and academic interest in gender.