DOREEN MASSEY the Passing of Doreen Massey Has Been the Occasion for a Recounting and Celebration of Her Achievements, and These Were Many
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‘PLACING’ DOREEN MASSEY The passing of Doreen Massey has been the occasion for a recounting and celebration of her achievements, and these were many. She was a major figure in post-war Anglo-American geography and her work has been rightly celebrated. She is also an exemplar of a particular generation of British geographers that came of age towards the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 70s. It merits some reflection. In terms of the advancement of geographic ideas, it is a notable, even remarkable, group. It includes not only Doreen but also the likes of Brian Berry, Dick Chorley, Peter Haggett, David Harvey, Ron Johnston, Allen Scott, Peter Taylor and Michael Webber; and to be followed quickly by people like Ray Hudson, Derek Gregory, Linda McDowell, John Agnew and Michael Watts, who all left their marks on the field, particularly at the level of theory. So what happened? The original and crucial spark had, aside from Brian Berry and Peter Gould, little to do with the Brits. This was the spatial quantitative revolution, which in its origins was an almost entirely American development. Its success reflected both the technocracy of the period, a technocracy particularly evident in the US at that time and celebrated by books like Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology – hard to imagine a book with a title like that being published in Britain at that time; and also the demoralized state of American geography subsequent to the Department closures at Harvard and Yale: these made the spatial-quantitative work especially attractive as a way of retrieving some ground in the academic pecking order. It was, in fact, a breath of fresh air. Before, theory was almost a dirty word and method rarely discussed. Afterwards things would be entirely different and not necessarily in ways that the revolutionaries could have imagined. For what it set off was a critical reaction that retained the focus on method and theory while opening the field up to social thought of a more radical nature. And the Brits, including some, like Allen Scott, Mike Webber and David Harvey, who had been prominent in the spatial quantitative work, were to the fore. Several things had happened to make this possible. Absolutely crucial was the 1944 Education Act. This paved the way to higher education for children from modest social backgrounds and if the biographies of most of this generation are tracked down, that is exactly what they were: children of blue collar and lower order office workers, often living in council housing, like Doreen Massey, sometimes from mining villages, who, after the age of eleven, went to some sort of selective school. Sometimes these were private schools but a system of government grants introduced by the Act allowed children from homes of modest means to attend free of charge; of major importance given the prestige enjoyed by many of these schools and the sort of staff that they could, in consequence, recruit – typically with the Oxbridge culture that would pave the way to the ancient universities. And then for the more successful of the children there were government grants that allowed them to attend university: not just fees but also money to cover living expenses. In the British context, lacking any tradition of paying your own way through college, and with a structure of teaching that would have made that difficult anyway – no evening classes, for a start! – this was major, even while it had, in virtue of a broader social climate, a strong gender bias. But it is a woman, Joan Bakewell, journalist and one-time TV presenter, who aptly summarizes the Act’s implications: “Let me take you back a decade or five. The 1944 Education Act changed the lives of thousands of bright children from humble backgrounds who wouldn't otherwise have had a grammar education. I was one of them; Stockport high school for girls suddenly swarmed with clever pupils keen for the rigours of Latin and physics. The gates of learning swung open and we rushed through. And we prospered; we won scholarships to universities, lost our accents, competed with the toffs from St Paul's, Westminster and Eton. We emerged into jobs in the health service, the BBC, publishing, academic life, the civil service, even business and trade. We were social mobility personified.” (Joan Bakewell, “Just Seventy” Guardian 8/12/05).1 The British social climate of the late 40s and 50s also played a part. Despite a growing consumerism towards the end of the period, and compared with today, in its mood it was remarkably egalitarian. The British welfare state has always had a bigger social presence and there was a deep attachment to its ideals. In the context of post-war austerity, council housing and the National Health Service quickly became national institutions. But one of the other things 1 The rise from working class background, through the 11+ to select schooling and then to university is a common theme in the autobiographies of that generation; Margaret Forster’s Hidden Lives and Brian Thompson’s duology, Keeping Mum and Clever Girl are good examples. that marked it out, along with the debates around it, was the way it was framed in thought: not the outcome of an interest group process as it had been and would continue to be in the US, but as the emanation of processes at the heart of which were ideas about social class. It was hard in 1950s Britain to be unaware of this world view. We should not be too surprised, therefore, that when the spatial quantitative revolution came under critical challenge in the early 70s it would be Brits like Doreen Massey who would take the lead. This is not the entire story. Geography has always enjoyed a much stronger presence in British education; it has been accepted in a way it never has been in the US. So children were inducted into it and what it had to offer early on. The fact that sociology and political science were relatively weak in British academia up until the 60s also made a difference. It was, in other words, a convergence of conditions of the sort that Doreen would herself have taken an interest in; in this case, how a particular geography made geographers. But the British welfare state, its implications for higher education and the way it was all framed intellectually was part of the mix. Otherwise, things would have been quite different. .