Personal Life: New Directions in Sociological Thinking

229 Pages·2007·1.464 MB·English

by  Carol Smart

Personal Life

Personal Life
New directions in
sociological thinking
CAROL SMART
polity
Copyright © Carol Smart 2007
The right ofCarol Smart to be identified as Author ofthis Work has been asserted in
accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2007 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
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ISBN-13: 978-07456-3916-1
ISBN-13: 978-07456-3917-8 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 11 on 13pt Bembo
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
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Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 A Sociology of Personal Life 6
2 The Cultural Turn in the Sociology of Family Life 32
3 Emotions, Love and the Problem of Commitment 53
4 Connections, Threads and Cultures of Tradition 80
5 Secrets and Lies 108
6 Families we Live with 133
7 Possessions, Things and Relationality 156
Conclusion 183
Notes 192
References 199
Index of Names 214
Index of Subjects 217
List of Illustrations
Plate 1.1 My paternal grandparents 2
Figure 2.1 Overlapping core concepts 37
Plate 5.1 Gertrude in her prime 113
Plate 5.2 My maternal grandfather 114
Plate 5.3 My aunt at a cabaret rehearsal, Paris 1932 115
Plate 5.4 Society wedding 118
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to my colleagues in the Morgan Centre for the Study
of Relationships and Personal Life at the University of Manchester
for providing the immensely supportive and intellectually exciting
context within which I was able to write this book. In particular I
wish to thank Jennifer Mason, Brian Heaphy, Vanessa May, Wendy
Bottero and Dale Southerton who have all contributed substantially
to my understanding of personal life. Other forms of intellectual
support have come from colleagues whose work has been inspira-
tional, including David Morgan, Janet Finch and John Gillis. Those
with whom I have worked on previous research projects must also be
acknowledged for their intellectual generosity and hard graft. These
include Bren Neale, Amanda Wade, Beccy Shipman and Jennifer
Flowerdew. And, in addition, I want to give thanks to the ESRC, the
Nuffield Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, all of
whom have funded the various projects drawn upon in this book,
and to the University of Manchester for allowing me time to write.
Finally my most personal thanks go to John Adams.

Introduction
Some years ago I became the keeper of my family’s photographs. I
‘inherited’them from my mother, whose main reason for keeping
them seemed solely that she hated throwing anything away. They
were not cherished but thrown together in no order at all in a large
carrier bag. My mother was not the sort to spend time putting
photos in albums with helpful captions and dates. Having inherited
them I then found I could not throw them away either and so they
lived for about two decades in the same plastic bag until I was left
another batch from a maternal aunt – this time kept with slightly
more reverence in an old sewing box. I was prompted to start sorting
them, a task as yet unfinished. In the processes I found myself going
through a journey of the imagination, of memory, of emotion and
of history. I found photographs of relatives I had never met and of
whom I had only the dimmest knowledge. Take the couple overleaf
whom I know to be my paternal grandparents. They died when my
father was twelve years old and all I know about them is that my
grandfather was a butcher with a stall on Harrow Road in West
London sometime after the First World War.
I found myself trying to imagine their lives and to read into
the photograph whether they were happy or not, whether their
lives were very hard or reasonably comfortable, whether they were