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Viola Klein: Forgotten Émigré Intellectual, Public Sociologist and

Advocate of Women
E. Stina Lyon
Sociology 2007; 41; 829
DOI: 10.1177/0038038507080439

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 Sociology
Copyright © 2007
BSA Publications Ltd®
Volume 41(5): 829–842
DOI: 10.1177/0038038507080439
SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore

Viola Klein: Forgotten Émigré Intellectual, Public

Sociologist and Advocate of Women
■ E. Stina Lyon
London South Bank University

ABSTRACT
This article revisits the much neglected work of Viola Klein, one of the first sociol-
ogists of women in Britain. Her contribution to sociology lies both in her innova-
tive work on patriarchal conceptions of seemingly scientific knowledge about
women, undertaken under the tutelage of Karl Mannheim, and in her empirical
studies of women’s changing position in the labour market.The article places her
work in a biographical as well as theoretical context and raises issues about the
impact of her triple marginality as a Jewish refugee to Britain, a woman in search
of an academic career, and as a public sociologist in women’s studies, at the time
not seen as a mainstream field in sociology, nor uniformly understood by later
waves of feminist theorists.

KEY WORDS
history of sociology / sociology of knowledge / Viola Klein / women and work

Introduction:Viola Klein – Female Sociologist in Public and

Private

he sociologist Viola Klein (1908–73), became one of Britain’s first sociolo-

T gists of women and an internationally known public intellectual. Despite

being marred by dislocation and a triple marginality in post-war British aca-
demic life – as a Jewish refugee, as an academic woman in search of a voice and
a career in a male-dominated profession and as an empirical researcher at a
time when theorizing was at a premium in sociology – her life and intellectual
contribution was marked by great creativity, and by frequent contributions to
public debates about the changing roles of women. Her contribution lay both

829
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830 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

in her path-breaking theoretical work on the social construction of seemingly

scientific knowledge about women, undertaken under the tutelage of Karl
Mannheim, and in her contribution to the development of better empirical
knowledge about women’s changing attitudes and positions in the family and
in the labour market, directed at ordinary women in changing public domains.
Unlike more famous intellectual women of her time, such as Simone de
Beauvoir and Alva Myrdal, with whom she wrote an internationally widely
read book, she was most of her life a solitary and self-employed worker with-
out a male academic partner or ‘patron’ to help sustain entry into academic life,
and was until late in life without permanent academic employment leaving her
in constant search of means of support. Like many other women of her gener-
ation, her contribution to sociology in Britain was largely unrecognized in her
own life time, though more recognized internationally at a few points of ‘redis-
covery’. Much of her work became caught between the critical disdain on the
one hand of male colleagues sceptical of the academic significance of women
intellectuals and of women’s issues as a legitimate topic for academic enquiry,
and on the other of new waves of feminism, doubtful of sociological
approaches to the study of women that did not demand a radical collective
protest against men. Dale Spender has argued that theorists of women have
repeatedly had to reinvent their feminist rebellion, largely because women have
had so little control over knowledge about them. Women, she notes, must
repeatedly unlearn what society has taught them about themselves, reject pre-
vailing wisdoms and begin afresh with their own experiences, to seek to ques-
tion, and to reconceptualize (Spender, 1983). Some writers on women have
concentrated on what was left out of public knowledge when produced by men,
and some, like Viola Klein, have focused on the patriarchal ways in which
women are made visible. With changing waves of theoretical and political fem-
inist priorities, women continually need to rediscover their radical sisters of ear-
lier generations (see for example Stanley’s recent book on Olive Schreiner,
2002). In her writings, Viola Klein, as a woman and a Jew, wrote in accordance
with her own firm belief in the right to freedom of individuals, women as well
as men, from collective constructions and misrepresentations. The ultimate
hope for progress in social relations lay, in her view, in intellectual scepticism
of ideologically grand solutions and in openly accounted-for empirical evi-
dence, rather than in the replacement of one set of stereotypical constructions
with another. This makes her a sociologist highly relevant to contemporary dis-
courses about the role of public sociology in general and about the dilemmas of
female sociologists as advocates of women in particular.

The Roots and Sociological Creativity of Social Marginality

When Viola Klein arrived in England in 1938 as a refugee from Prague, she
already had a well-established academic trajectory behind her. Born into a
progressive Jewish household in Vienna, which valued learning and the

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 Viola Klein Lyon 831

independence of women, she was as a young student forced by political

circumstances to move with her family to Prague (Deegan, 1991; Sayers,
1989). Having studied for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, and for a brief
and politically turbulent period at Vienna University, she became a gradu-
ate student at Prague University in languages, psychology (which at the time
included psychoanalysis) and philosophy. As a young and independent rad-
ical woman she also took an interest in contemporary literature, and her
first doctoral thesis (Klein, 1936) was written on the linguistic style of the
modernist French author Louis-Ferdinand Celine, pseudonym for Louis-
Ferdinand Destouche. His dark and shocking novel Journey to the End of
the Night was published in 1932 (Celine, 1977[1932]). The social nature of
linguistic constructions and usage addressed in her thesis, and the ways in
which oppressive lived realities become ideologically constructed in oppor-
tunistic political and scientific discourse, exemplified by Celine, became a
lifelong intellectual concern. In her introduction to the thesis she wrote: ‘In
the beginning was the word, and it has changed worlds, sparked revolutions
of the mind, and determined the happiness and unhappiness of humanity’
(Klein, 1936). Her thesis research also led to her first contact with the writings
of Karl Mannheim.
Celine, a doctor of social medicine by training, worked with the poor.
His forthright descriptions of ordinary human relationships on the battle-
fields of the First World War, in factories, slums and bedrooms were a lit-
erary sensation, often compared to the works of Henry Miller. The ‘journey’
exposes in great cynical detail the darkness of the decades between the great
wars through the eyes of those directly experiencing it, observed by its
‘hero’, a young doctor on his journey through the First World War, psychi-
atric clinics, French colonial Africa, American cities and factories during the
Great Depression and the misery of Paris suburbs. When it was published,
Sartre and de Beauvoir declared it the book of the year, Gorkij and Trotzki
praised it and Stalin is said to have had the Russian translation on his bed-
side table. This novel had all that an intellectually engaged central European
could wish for. It reflected contemporary intellectual approaches to classi-
cal questions about the nature and function of language in all its represen-
tations and the rapid social changes in which they were enmeshed. It was
linguistically revolutionary, abandoning formal literary French in favour of
a brutally honest working-class prose with clinically factual dissections of
miserable lives, with the purpose of debunking the idealistic myths of words
like ‘peace’, ‘progress’, and ‘patriotism’ as ideologically propagated by those
in power. The formal language of the French literati was here replaced by a
new kind of linguistic construction, closer to the real world, but in Viola
Klein’s analysis also seen to be purposefully created for affect in its cynical
and deprecating depictions of the poor and down tradden. This attempt at
factual realism was in the end Celine’s own construction. It was not that of
a detatched observing eye open also to ordinary human beings’ capacity for
humanity.

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832 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

As her short thesis bibliography indicates, she brought to her analysis

works by Saussure, Heidegger and the novelist Karl Kraus, another writer who
exposed the power and hypocrisy of language as a form of political abuse. The
search for explanations of the social contexts that gave rise to and legitimated
such uses, as well as of the linguistic changes exemplified by Celine’s work, led
Klein to read Karl Mannheim’s early work Mensch und Gesellschaft in
Zeitleiter des Umbaus (Mannheim, 1935). Her acquaintance with his works
proved to be an intellectual life saver when a few years later she was in search
of a supervisor in London. In 1938 she and her brother fled to England, leav-
ing both parents behind, later both killed in concentration camps. She must
have carried a copy of her thesis in her suitcase, since a typed thesis manuscript
remains in her archive (Viola Klein Archive[VKA], 1936). In a case of extraor-
dinary intellectual, and emotional, self-denial she never referred to her work on
Celine again.

Patriarchal Knowledge and the Intellectual Construction of

the Feminine

On arrival in Britain, Viola Klein first found work as a domestic servant.

Conditions for ordinary refugees were hard, but with the help of a scholarship
from the Czech government in exile, she gained a place at the London School of
Economics (LSE) to study social science. In 1941 she wrote to Karl Mannheim,
by then a refugee in Britain and a member of staff at the LSE, who immediately
agreed to be her supervisor. They shared a cultural background of respect for the
Enlightenment ideal of reason, ‘Bildung’, a multidisciplinary approach to social
issues and an interest in literature, art and the ‘camaraderie’ of continental
conviviality. Their learning had been characterized by travel between different
universities at a time when continental students were free to follow their men-
tors and ideas across national borders and cultures, sampling disciplines and
learning environments. They also, like many other continental intellectual émi-
grés, shared a political attraction for the social democratic movement, both hav-
ing rejected the socialist left in the light of Soviet-communist ideological
obfuscations in which grand words replaced care for the individuals within it
(Hickox and Moore, 2006). Having visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s, she
wrote in British magazines about the ‘double speak’ in which the party spoke of
the ‘new’ role of women in marriage and the family (VKA). She sent her thesis
proposal, stating that ‘if humanity is to survive, a fundamental reconstruction of
almost all our institutions seems to be necessary’, expressing the need for an
examination of ‘the democratic ideals and their realisation, as far as it has been
carried out, one by one in order to find out what changes have to be performed
to adopt these ideals to the needs of the present day society’ (VKA, letter to KM,
16.9.41). Amongst the many possible topics available, she chose to study
‘women’s emancipation’. As Mannheim was aware, she could equally well have
taken anti-semitism as her topic, and he immediately recommended that she read

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 Viola Klein Lyon 833

a research proposal for a multidisciplinary study of anti-semitism drawn up by

intellectual refugees at the Institute of Social Research in New York under the
leadership of Max Horkheimer (1941). In her final thesis the parallels between
the social and scientific construction of women and that of Jews, are stated
though never explicitly addressed.
The project of dissecting the relationship between seemingly solid scientific
thought, with its ‘descriptive’ categories, and the social position of scientists
was for Mannheim also a political one of creating an intellectual tool by which
rigid ideological positions could be made more open to ‘piecemeal’ reconceptu-
alizations and thus more receptive to new facts buried under rigid partisan con-
flicts. It should be the task of intellectuals as rational thinkers and critics, and
sociologists as researchers of social facts, to create both public enlightenment
about a world in which there were no social or economic ‘quick fixes’, and a
climate of debate in which inclusive democratic progress could be rationally
planned for (Kettler and Meja, 1995; Mannheim, 1936, 1943). A supportive
mentor, Mannheim enthusiastically engaged her in what would today seem an
eclectic set of readings in American psychology, sociological studies of the fam-
ily and works on women of all kinds, including writings by the American
satirist H.L. Mencken (VKA). Her thesis became a critical investigation of patri-
archal assumptions underlying traditional and changing psychological scientific
conceptions of femininity as presented by psychoanalytical and experimental
social psychologists such as Freud, Weininger, Haverlock Ellis, and Terman and
Miles. Margaret Mead and W.I. Thomas are given a more positive, though not
uncritical treatment in their attempt to study the nature of ‘the female’. In a the-
oretical analysis rather than a political one, Viola’s feminist credentials are laid
out from the start when she asks, ‘What have been the effects of their inferior
status upon the personality of women? What characteristics have they in com-
mon with other suppressed minority groups?’ (Klein, 1989[1946]: 1).
With Mannheim’s help, her thesis was published in 1946, as one of the first
in the new Routledge series, International Library of Sociology. The first case
study in Britain based on Mannheim’s conception of the sociology of knowledge,
it preceded Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) as a theoretical chal-
lenge to prevailing male conceptions of femininity. But as a work in defence of
women, the spectre of relativism, raised against her mentor, came to haunt also
her. Its theme of identifying the patriarchal position and assumptions of knowl-
edge creators about women inevitably raised suspicions that such assertions
might in themselves represent a partisan feminist view. Mannheim’s introduc-
tion to the book, though flattering, turned out to be a bit of a dubious honour.
He made virtually no reference to the fact that the book was about patriarchal
conceptions of women, and the use of his own theoretical tools to expose them
as such. The book was not fully appreciated at the time of publication, its ana-
lytical nature largely misunderstood. It was criticized for its ‘militant feminism’
and for its ‘sternly masculine objectivity’, for encouraging women to work and
for undermining their own sex (Sayers, 1989). There was in Britain at the time
no academically engaged female audience to rise to its defence. Despite the fame

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834 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

of her supervisor and the publication of her thesis, she was not in a position to
pursue her work as a stepping stone to an academic job. At the end of the war
men were returning to civilian life in large numbers, including to academic life
at the LSE and elsewhere (Dahrendorf, 1995). She repeatedly, but unsuccess-
fully, asked Mannheim for help in her search for work, and in 1944 she sub-
mitted a detailed research proposal on changing family structure and attitudes
to D.V. Glass and A.M. Saunders, but again without success (VKA). In 1945
Mannheim moved to the Institute of Education, and when he shortly afterwards
died she was left without a much needed academic patron.
To support herself, she took on work as translator to the British Foreign
Office, working on secret German archives. Demanding great skill and profes-
sionalism, this enhanced her ability to write clear and concise English as well as
her interest in the details of official information and its interpretation. She was
then given a project by the LSE to research and report first on homelessness and
later on the post-war housing crisis. She also continued her journalistic efforts
and wrote several articles and book reviews for British, German and American
publications and newspapers, on a variety of topics relating to women and edu-
cation. Her enthusiasm for all things British, shared by Mannheim, was not
always shared by German editors, as indicated by rejection notes (VKA). Her
role as a female civil servant was however noted by the British press. In 1948
she took part in a series of ‘anonymous’ debates published by the Daily Mail
alongside three university women, two civically active housewives and a
woman doctor (‘The Council of Seven Women’), which aimed to offer a ‘female
point of view’ on a variety of topics such as working married women, the rela-
tionship between home and school, communism, and the need for part-time
work. Privately, however, Viola Klein expressed doubts about such women-
only gatherings, especially ones without representation from working-class
women, and about the validity of a specific women’s perspective on universal
human problems such as parenting (VKA). But a rousing piece of hers on
female stereotyping and the continuing representations of women as unpoliti-
cal, child loving, domestic and useless at maths, was accepted for publication in
the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag (22 April 1951). This article, with
its strong feminist message, was ironically illustrated by a glamorous fashion
photograph – an equally unreachable fantasy for post-war German women.

The Factual Reality of Women’s Dilemmas

Statistics came to appear to Viola Klein as ‘exciting as a detective story’ and she
could ‘throw one glance at figures and immediately in her lively and stimulat-
ing style develop a novel from them’ (Die Weltwoche, 30 June 1961). Her inter-
est in the ‘facts of the case’ made her a trusted researcher with a growing
reputation. Knowledge of her book on the feminine character also soon spread.
Through common acquaintances in the International Federation of Business
and Professional Women, an important network and pressure group for work-

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 Viola Klein Lyon 835

ing women, her work was brought to the attention of Alva Myrdal. This
Swedish social reformer, politician and social scientist had at the time just
moved from being Principal Director of the UN Department of Social Affairs to
the post of Director of the UNESCO Department of Social Science, making her
one of the world’s most prestigiously employed women in public affairs (Lyon,
2000). As the author of the book Nation and Family (1941), Alva Myrdal was
also already an internationally well known theorist of family and women-
friendly welfare policy (Holmwood, 2000). In 1952 she was in search of a col-
laborator to help her ‘put into shape’ an old draft manuscript on the policy
consequences of the increased longevity of women (Lyon, 2003). ‘Putting it into
shape’ turned out, for Viola Klein, to be a labour intensive (and poorly paid)
collaborative task, which was conducted mainly by correspondence. The part-
ners had a lot in common, being both well read and travelled, and speaking sev-
eral languages. They both enjoyed their femininity – sewing, fashion, home
keeping and the company of men. Unlike Alva Myrdal, Klein never married and
had no children, though she shared her life with a partner who shared her
enthusiasm for figures and statistics. Despite Viola Klein’s stronger academic
credentials (Alva Myrdal never finished her doctoral thesis), they shared the
desire to communicate their thoughts and findings to ordinary women and to
make a difference through popular dissemination of information for the sake of
greater cross-national gender solidarity. They also shared the belief that small
children need mothers around, which was later to prove a bone of contention
both for more radical feminists, who thought it should be shared by men, and
for some men who thought caring for children as a part-time occupation would
have detrimental societal consequences.
When Alva Myrdal sent her short, but politically rousing, draft outline, she
explained that the core problem of the book, later entitled Women’s Two Roles:
Work and Home, was to be that of ‘the social problems created by the increased
longevity of women’ (Lyon, 2003). The proposal starts with the premise that in
an economically developing society both motherhood and productive work are
important for women. The increased lifespan of women, following industrial-
ization, improved standards of living and the free availability of birth control,
had left them with a set of often contradictory choices, roles and expectations.
As married women should have the right to employment, so working women
should have the right to marry and have children without being excluded from
the labour market later on in life. Such choices, they both argued, should be bet-
ter institutionally supported by the labour market and the state, and individually
planned for through better education for women. Policy makers should be pre-
sented with a range of practical proposals for combining work and childcare,
supported across all aspects of public and community life, although, Myrdal
noted, ‘… no machinery is as valuable when it comes to aiding the wage earn-
ing housewife with her duties as the participation of her husband’ (Lyon, 2003).
By the time of the collaboration, both women were reaching ‘middle age’ and
strongly objected to any thought that women of their age were ‘passed it’ when
it came to productive work. Viola Klein wrote in one of her letters:

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836 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

… there is no earthly reason why under present conditions women should regard 40
as their ‘retiring age’ when, at the same time, they feel that ‘life begins at forty’ and
also quoting the examples I mentioned to you of refugee women starting a career in
middle-age and of war-time experiences. Why if it can be done in an emergency,
don’t we plan for it. (VKA, letter to A.M., 14 November 1951)

With typical statistical precision she added that if women only worked through
half of their married life, this would leave them 17.5 years to devote to their
children and at the same time increase the total labour force of Britain or the
USA by 12.5–14 per cent and the same amount of goods could be produced in
five rather than six days. ‘Taking stock’ of existing states of affairs was to be
an international and comparative exercise, and the countries chosen for com-
parison were Great Britain, Sweden, the USA and France. It was left to Myrdal
and her many governmental and organizational contacts to collect whatever
research evidence existed at the time regarding women in the labour market –
a motley collection of national official statistics and ad hoc surveys – and to
Klein to use her academic and research experience to synthesize the material in
comparative tables and summaries, to empirically ground the practical policy
recommendations. This was in itself a ‘visionary’ task at the time, given the
absence of any truly comparative empirical information about the social and
economic position of women. Not surprisingly, given her logical and theoreti-
cal mind, Klein often complains in her letters of problems of conceptual con-
sistency and coherency of interpretation between census data and their
interpretation, and of missing and incomparable data. She also points out that
‘… every social situation consists not only of objective data but of the subjec-
tive attitudes of the people …’ and that she feels over weighted with statistics,
not entirely convinced that much is gained by including so many figures. She
writes that ‘... it seems absurd that each country should publish its data in a dif-
ferent form as to make comparison if not altogether impossible, at least a hard
labour’ (Lyon, 2003). It proved ‘hard labour’ to get all the tables into shape, for
which she got the help of another women refugee in London, who designed
innovative pictograms of the data to make them more attractive to a lay audi-
ence. It took four years and many letters before the book was finally published
by the Routledge Press in the International Library of Sociology (Klein and
Myrdal, 1968[1956]). W.J.H. Sprott, its then editor, first sceptically rejected it
as perhaps ‘… too American for us’, referring to its emphasis on empirical data
collection. He later came to see its strength as lying in its comparative frame-
work, but also in its timeliness ‘particularly as there is at present controversy
raging in the TIMES on this subject’. The dilemmas of working women in a
male world did not carry equal worth in the eyes of everyone and Sprott in a
letter to an American publisher referred to the book as Myrdal and Klein’s
work ‘On Les Girls’ (Lyon, 2003).
The empirical evidence presented in the book shows that women’s entry to
the labour market, both for married and unmarried women, had continued
unabated since the early decades of the century, but also that prejudices against
working women remained amongst both employers and the public at large.

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 Viola Klein Lyon 837

Ironically, the demands on women’s performance in the home had also become
strengthened and ‘the cleavage between the two worlds of work and home, is
for the majority of people, more complete today than it ever was in the past’
and this despite improved labour saving devices (Klein and Myrdal,
1968[1956]: 27). Though outlining the many different social and labour mar-
ket reforms, such as better opportunities for part-time work and better educa-
tion, which were needed to help facilitate women’s participation in the labour
market, there was little optimism about what lay ahead for women, especially
with respect to financial autonomy (see also Klein, 1963). Both women saw the
need for men to contribute more, treated in the book, however, as an unrealis-
tic solution in the short term. There was also a distinct sense of bitterness about
why questions concerning women’s work need be asked at all, given women’s
equal abilities and skills.
At its publication the book was seen as neither path-breaking nor radical
in the Anglo-Saxon world by a new wave of younger and more radical femi-
nists. In Sweden, where long-standing feminist demands for full-time work
made the book’s emphasis on the relationship between mothering and part-time
work seem outmoded, its perceived conservatism was erroneously seen to be a
consequence of the influence of Viola Klein (Lyon, 2003). Sayers sums up the
British view of the book as an empiricist survey of problems ‘… rendered acute
to middle-class women by the post-War pressure both for an increased birth
rate and for women’s paid work’ (Sayers, 1989). But its attraction for both pol-
icy makers and women at large was evident in its rapid translation into
German, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch and Japanese. It became widely used over the
next decades as a key sociological teaching text on women in the social struc-
ture. Also, not all countries were equally advanced when it came to ‘the woman
question’. In Germany, the book was favourably reviewed in newspapers and
women’s magazines as a contribution to women’s education. When in 1962
Klein gave a series of talks across Germany to women’s organizations and edu-
cational institutions, feelings ran high in a local press polemic over whether
mothers should go to work at all. She wrote to an American colleague that, ‘the
topic of working wives still arouses very strong feelings and the idea that a
“Housefrau” might return to work is still considered “revolutionary”’ (VKA).
During this period, Klein’s professional career, albeit not as a full-time aca-
demic, developed alongside that of the discipline herself. She became an early
member of both the British and the International Sociological Associations, nei-
ther rich in women’s members (Platt, 1998, 2003). Her writings also brought
her into international networks of sociologists of women and the family. She
became a founder editorial board member of the International Journal of
Comparative Sociology, joined by a group of well-known sociologists such as
Bottomore and Titmuss from Britain, Konig from Germany and Gurwitz from
France. In its first volume she wrote a contribution on married women in
employment, based on a paper given the same year to the British Sociological
Association and on her work for a research report commissioned by the British
Institute of Personnel Management (Klein, 1960). She also became a member of

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838 Sociology Volume 41 ■ Number 5 ■ October 2007

the International Seminar of Family Research, which began under the auspices
of the UNESCO, and later moved to the Standing Committee of Family
Research of the International Sociological Association. This grouping held reg-
ular meetings across Europe and provided the opportunity for her to return to
the Continent. When giving a paper in Istanbul in 1961 she entitled it with jus-
tification, ‘Women’s three roles – home, work and public life’ (VKA). In 1965,
she was invited to the University of Bonn to give a lecture on British sociology
as part of a series on European sociology. She approached the task with typical
thoroughness, praising British sociology for its empirical and policy-relevant
nature in comparison to classical continental sociology. This is a sceptical soci-
ology, she argued, not easily led into theoretical obfuscations or political
straightjackets, and grounded in empirical knowledge about its public (Klein,
1967). In retrospect it is ironic to note that her own positive conception of what
constituted British sociology was at the time undergoing a process of change
away from the very style of doing sociology that she had, as a continental émi-
gré, come to value so highly. When, in 1965, her various papers on married
women in the labour market, including comparative research done for the
OECD on the comparative contexts of working women, were published as a
book, reviews were not flattering and she was charged with an empiricist lack
of theory (Klein, 1965; VKA).

Feminist Rebellion Rediscovered

It took 20 years after the completion of her thesis at the LSE before Viola Klein
gained a full-time academic position as lecturer in the sociology department at
Reading University. If she had worked hard as a freelance researcher in search
of grants, she now worked even harder writing lectures, marking essays and
supervising students. With a new wave of feminism exploding across America
and Europe in the late 1960s and early 1970s, her first book suddenly became
subject to renewed interest as an important classic in the study of patriarchal
conceptions of women. In 1971 an American sociologist, Nancy Reeves, assem-
bled a collection of readings ‘from the sexual ghetto’ to illustrate core themes
in the study of women’s dilemmas: their identity as women, marriage, the law,
home and work (Reeves, 1971). Reeves quotes Mannheim in support of her
reformulation of the educational needs of women: ‘Every epoch has its funda-
mentally new approach and its characteristic point of view, and consequently
sees the “same” object from a new perspective’, and Viola Klein’s radical cri-
tique of traditional knowledge about women was rediscovered as a rare schol-
arly critique (Reeves, 1971: vii). With growing numbers of women’s studies
courses in search of literature, the University of Illinois bought the American
rights to her first book. It was republished with a new introduction by Janet
Zollinger Giele (Klein, 1972[1946]), and billed as an example of ‘provocative
feminist analysis’ remarkable for having been published as early as 1946. Klein
was flattered by this new-found fame, though she refused to drop the foreword

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 Viola Klein Lyon 839

by Mannheim (‘He was too great a man for that’) from the title page. As a per-
son who took great pride in her ‘Bildung’ and academic credentials, she
expressly refused to be referred to with a sisterly ‘Ms’, demonstrably signing
herself as ‘PhD, DPhil’ – ‘I am not a manuscript after all’ – (VKA, letter dated
12 September 1971).
In Britain a new and revised edition of Women’s Two Roles was published
in1968 and a third German edition came out in 1971. This new edition, with
some updated comparative evidence, coincided with Alva Myrdal, and her
economist husband Gunnar, being awarded the prestigious German Publishers’
Peace Price for their work on disarmament. There was much coverage in the
German press, including church publications, and Die Welt (17 June 1971)
devoted a whole page to a joint review on ‘The end of patriarchy?’ in which
Women’s Two Roles was reviewed alongside Kate Millet’s radical feminist
opus, Sexual Politics, also published in 1971. In this and other reviews the book
was hailed as a standard text, and a breath of fresh air in the midst of feminist
debates, with its factual and statistical approach to women’s low pay and poor
educational opportunities, and to the continuing failure of the state and
employers to support child care and better part-time working conditions.
Amidst the fashion photographs and recipes, the book was seen as offering a
factual analysis of undervalued women’s work, not a utopian dream of full
equality with men, a dream not equally shared by all women as Viola Klein had
shown in her own empirical research.

Towards A Model for Anti-discriminatory Sociological

Research Practice

When faced with retirement from Reading University, Viola Klein was not yet
ready to abandon her research interest in the lives of women. On the basis of
her contribution to a BBC radio programme, she was invited in 1970 to con-
tribute a submission on women in European societies since 1945 to a series of
publications planned by the Macmillan Press: Studies in Contemporary Europe.
She started to tackle the project with great thoroughness, but due to poor sales
and lack of student interest in European studies the series was abandoned.
When Reading University offered her a post-retirement position as Honorary
Research Fellow, she forged new plans for a project on women and ageing. Her
interest in this topic was stimulated by a notice in a German paper on a theatre
project, which employed a psychoanalyst to help actors to develop greater
understanding of differences between spiritual and bodily age. Her aim, as she
explained to an American sociologist in 1973, was to investigate age as a suc-
cession of adjustments to ill-defined roles (VKA). It is evident from her notes
that she aimed for this new project to be theoretical, rather than statistical, in
its approach to differences between age as chronology, age as a statistical cate-
gory and age as a concept of social status, increasingly devalued in societies
putting a premium on youth. Is age a ‘class’, she asked, and is there as

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exaggerated a polarity between ‘young’ and ‘old’ as between ‘male’ and

‘female’? What is the difference between age as a statistical construction and
age as experienced by individual women? As throughout her life, to the end
Viola Klein kept her interest in the oppressive use of ‘short hand’ conceptual
categories to confine and delimit understandings of the lives as experienced by
individual women. Yet again she drew up an innovative research agenda on a
topic that later became a major field of enquiry for later generations of women
sociologists. But this was a project where the harsh contingencies of life in the
end proved insurmountable. When finally able to look forward to a bit more
space and economic security in which to pursue her passionate interest in the
study of women, Viola Klein prematurely died shortly after retirement.

Conclusion:The Dilemmas of a Public Sociologist

Viola Klein was a public sociologist who with her writings reached a large inter-
national audience of both academic and ordinary women, albeit most of them
middle class, but all of them trying to come to grips with the domestic dilemmas
to which expanding rights and labour markets had given rise. These dilemmas
are today as relevant, and as unresolved, as they were half a century ago and as
such continue to be subject to a great deal of sociological research and analysis
with little signs of progress for many women in the labour market, especially
mothers of young children. She brought the tools of the discipline to this task in
two ways: as an intellectual and a theorist, in her original application of
Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge to her critical examination of patriarchal
normative assumptions underpinning social science conceptions of ‘the femi-
nine’; and as a researcher, in her innovative use of cross-cultural sociological
methods, as well as in her methodological conviction that research into the struc-
tural position of women in the labour market needed to be complemented with
more subjective evidence about what ordinary women see as their own needs
and priorities. With Mannheim, another refugee from fascism and like her
unconvinced about the reality of what communism had to offer ordinary citi-
zens, she saw the contribution of social science to improved democratic practice
as lying in carving out a better informed path between ideological oppression on
the one hand and poorly assembled evidence about the daily lives of ordinary cit-
izens in urgent need of social and material improvement on the other. In this she
faced the same dilemmas as many other sociologists caught between the
demands for theoretical purity by an academic audience, at the time mainly
male, and the call for greater political activism by various and changing interest
groups, in her case feminist ones. For her it seemed as sociologically absurd, and
ethically dubious, to ask questions about the universal nature of ‘women’ as
about the inherent collective characteristics of Jews. Such attempts were in her
view invariably coloured by expedient demands for social control of ‘the other’
and a means of avoiding the hard slog of empirical research about the needs and
aspirations of real persons in all their variety and complexity. For three decades

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 Viola Klein Lyon 841

her theoretical work in the sociology of knowledge, The Feminine Character

(1989[1946]), was misleadingly listed by the publisher under the heading of soci-
ology of the family, and in a recent book aiming to provide a history of feminist
sociology in Britain, Viola Klein does not even get a mention (Delamont, 2003).
It is time her work was given the credit and attention it deserves in the history
of public sociology in Britain.

Acknowledgement

This article was written with the support of the project ‘Analysing and Overcoming
the Sociological Fragmentation in Europe’ (ANOVASOFIE) funded by the
European Commission, DG Research, Sixth Framework Programme, Citizens and
Governance in a Knowledge Based Society, Contract no. CIT-CT-2004–506035.

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E. Stina Lyon

Is Professor and Pro Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences, London South
Bank University. Her research interests lie in the areas of research methods, the history
of sociology, inequality and the welfare state. Her most recent work has been on the
contribution to sociology of the Swedish social scientists and reformers Gunnar and
Alva Myrdal: ‘Researching Race Relations: Myrdal’s American Dilemma from a
Methodological Perspective’, Acta Sociologica 2004 47(3): 203–17.
Address: Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences, London South Bank University, Borough
Road, London SE1 0AA, UK.
E-mail: lyones@lsbu.ac.uk

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