Hidden traces: Writing sociologists’ wives into existence

In this article we draw on our investigation of the un- and under-acknowledged contributions of major post-war sociologists’ wives to the development of the discipline in the post-war period, as well as others’ accounts of recovering wives of academics from obscurity. In the first part of the article we show how legitimisations of wives’ invisibility are sustained through an essentially empiricist approach to evidence of their intellectual endeavours, alongside the gendered politics of the intellectual great man narrative and of the institutionalised status of wifehood. The second part is a retrospective reflection on why and how researchers are enabled to write the wives’ involvement into existence using slivers and scrappy traces of their presence and contributions. We argue that feminist relational sensibility comprises a critical edge: reading against the grain as well as with it, and paying conceptual not just empiricist attention to the wider social, economic and political conditions of institutional and interpersonal power relations of post-war wifehood. The lens of these broader gendered relations enables informed analysis and plausible interpretations of the contributions of the wives of influential sociologists to disciplinary knowledge.