Juliet Mitchell

Juliet Mitchell interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 6th May 2008

0:09:07 Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1940 where mother had gone, as a botanist, as a research exchange student; we lived in a Jewish refugee enclave; many became lifelong friends and it is very crucial to me; came back to England in 1944 and stayed with mother's parents in the Midlands; I have no Jewish ancestry; my maternal grandparents were the only ones I knew; my grandfather was an architectural stone mason in Tamworth; his family had been stone masons since the late 1300's; we stayed with them when we returned and also in every holiday, in a house that was surrounded by workshops full of gravestones; I spent hours as a child watching the engravers; all the gravestones in the area were signed 'Mitchell' (the maker) which I thought were my hundreds of relatives; spent time trying to persuade my grandfather's apprentices to come and play football with me in the yard; I also have feeling rather than conscious memories of New Zealand; they are colours; I didn't go back for thirty years but I had always known that it was yellow but didn't know why, but that part of New Zealand is full of yellow flowers and sand; I went to look for the house we had lived in and to my horror it was the wrong side of the road; I went on further south to Dunedin where I was lecturing but went back to the house and suddenly everything became right; I realized that I thought in terms of coming up the map which affects my sense of direction still; going back cured the nostalgia but it is still an important memory

7:06:02 My father was a geneticist in Canada, where I was conceived, and America; he died when I was eleven and we never lived together; I knew him by letters which were very important to me; I had a stepfather and brother when I was five but that broke up; closely after my own father's death my mother married somebody who survived the camps; she was lecturing a lot for International Friendship after the war and he was in her audience; he is much on my mind as he died recently aged ninety-six; he was a very big influence on the later part of my childhood and adolescence; after their marriage he gradually became ill as a result of his four years in concentration camps; I would take tea to him with aspirin in it and was told to say the milk was curdled as he was an anthroposophist who only took herbal medicines; these psycho-somatic illnesses were not severe but made it difficult for him to keep jobs; he worked in the post office in the basement at Selfridges in the early 1950's and described the anti-semitism that he met there as being as bad as anything that he had experienced; after having experienced the holocaust you survive but are never all right; my stepfather recovered when he went to work on anthroposophy - Rudolph Steiner - which believes that suffering in this life brings a better next life; went to work in Forest Row with handicapped youths and then his illnesses stopped

13:13:24 The Jewish community where we lived in New Zealand was in no way a camp ; my Jewish godfather had been Professor of Linguistics at Frankfurt and he had got out to Florence University; when Mussolini's laws made it difficult to stay, he and my godmother went to New Zealand as independent refugees; I was very important to them as they had no children of their own; they did take some Jewish children with them to New Zealand; people like them gathered together; there was a story that a person who was a complete anathema to the community was Karl Popper who made it impossible for anyone to get any work of an interesting nature; the first person my mother lived with was the Muntz family - Peter Muntz was here in Cambridge as a philosopher; I grew up with him as an elder brother for those three years; I did have a half brother later whom I think of as a full brother, who is five years younger; my father was considerably older than my mother and had grown-up children with whom I was later in correspondence; I am still close to the Muntz family; when I first came to Cambridge at five or six, Peter Muntz was living there; I came from London on the train alone and he met me; it made a great impression on me

17:33:23 One day a week nursery school in New Zealand, where I met my first boyfriend; communicated by drawings after returning to England; met him again recently; in England, mother taught at a progressive school, Burgess Hill, which was an offshoot of Summerhill; we lived there but she didn't want me to go to that school so I went to King Alfred School, another progressive school, in London; started aged three and a half and stayed until I was seventeen; it was hugely important to me and I still have close friends from there; for History had a wonderful 'O' level teacher who also influenced Raphael Samuel who was there too; he was older than me but it was a small school and our afternoon classes were not age related; although he was three years older, we were in the same group; the person who influenced both of us was John Handford whom I met again at Raphael's memorial service; he was a member of the Communist Party and for 'O' level we read Marx and Engels; unfortunately he left before 'A' level and at that point English took over because of a teacher called Margaret Maxwell who had a passion for the subject; in a mixed ability school, I was coasting along at that time, and she encouraged me to make an effort; I had wanted to do Zoology at 'A' level but the only place one could go doing a mixed degree at that time was Keele and I didn't want to go there; instead I did History, English and Latin; I had got into Oxford before my 'A' levels and crammed Latin; learnt to love Virgil and Ovid; knew 'O' level Richard II by heart; this love had really started with my mother who had always wanted to do English but she was the first person in her family to go to university but her father had only allowed her to go to become a teacher and to do science; few teachers that were inspirational but the school was so small, only 230 children in the whole school

25:55:13 Great love of water - swimming, looking at the sea; also very sporty at school and could run fast; sports were amateurish as it was such a small school; very good at netball; as children we played on the bomb sites and made camps in air-raid shelters; we were gorgeously wild; went youth hostelling aged eleven on bicycles, two boys and two girls around southern England; then you could do it; we had working mothers so we were latchkey children; after school we played on the street very much as a group; I still know people from the street - Platts Lane; we had lived at Burgess Hill school until 1947 and then had come to a house in Platts Lane; we were the main people in the house but every room had one or two people living there; remember an election in 1949 or 1950 when people walking up from Kilburn to Hampstead Heath would stop in front of our house; by then my German-Jewish godparents had come to live with us from New Zealand; they had 'Liberal' on the ground floor, my mother, 'Labour', on the first floor and the top floor were anarchists who asked people not to vote at all; remember own ambivalence when people stopped to look at this

30:03:04 Went to read English at St Anne's, Oxford; at school was hopeless at music but love listening to it; recently went to a Barenboim concert and it was transformational; was at Oxford as an undergraduate and then started a B.Lit. for a D.Phil. but was not very happy with the subject I had chosen; at the end of that year got a job as an Assistant Lecturer at Leeds and abandoned the B.Lit.; as an undergraduate it was Beowulf to the Romantics; we had Milton for prelims. and a new optional nineteenth-century novel paper; it was nothing like Cambridge which was then Leavis; we had no sense of a critical tradition; what we did do was read; had one very good teacher called Dorothy Bednarowska who was very encouraging; she was Catholic and used to teach at one of the Jesuit colleges; once a month she would take me and three Jesuits out to lunch in the Cotswolds; at that time we were not used to amazing food; the condition was that we should talk about Langland, Chaucer, Piers Plowman - early Middle English - all the way there but were allowed to sleep on the way back; there were women teachers then that so loved their subject

36:28:22 Met Perry Anderson as an undergraduate but got to know him well when he had gone down and I was a post-graduate; I was living with Luke Hodgkin, son of Dorothy, and Anna Davin, his wife was daughter of my supervisor, Winnie Davin; my subject was Joyce Cary which I was allowed to do because there were manuscript sources; I was doing his African novels because I had become interested in the whole independence movement and he had been a District Commissioner in Nigeria at an interesting period; my then boyfriend went out to work in Ibadan at that point; it was difficult because if I made even a slightly critical comment about Cary, Winnie Davin would burst into tears; it was so inhibiting that when I had the opportunity to go to Leeds I took it; Winnie Davin was outside the University but was Cary's literary executor; very proud to get such a job at twenty-one

39:23:21 I had grown up in a left-wing but also anarchist environment; Burgess Hill had been dominantly anarchist and we kept in touch when we moved; also had anarchist living above us whom I was very fond of; Philip [Sansom] ran 'Freedom Press' and 'Freedom Newspaper' and took me to watch the boat race on the Freedom barge; go to the Malatesta Club and shop for olive oil and spaghetti in Soho; I used to paint; at school had wonderful art teachers; still, when I want to start writing I go to an art exhibition, and also when I finish a book; after finishing ‘Mad Men and Medusa' at about four in the morning, I managed to see both an El Lissitzky and a Monet exhibition; on politics: we had elections at school; Raphael Samuel and the New Left Review; CND demonstration after having tonsils out at eighteen with mother who had just had a hysterectomy; Suez demonstrations; steeped in politics

45:20:08 On religion, my mother sent me to King Alfred because she was against corporal punishment and compulsory religion; at thirteen my adored present was 'The Bible as Literature' etc. but I was educated without any form of religion whatsoever; my mother had been to church two or three times a day as a child; my grandfather died when I was seven, but would take me to churches where he was working; I adore church bells; at twelve I became a serious Quaker and took my reluctant brother with me to meetings; I was on lots of junior Quaker committees from about twelve to sixteen; when my mother died ten years ago I had a memorial in a Quaker meeting house; my stepfather was an anthroposophist which was a formative influence on me; he was a proselytiser and took me to Goethe's 'Faust' at twelve; I liked the herbal remedies and the paraphernalia around it but was very opposed to the actual Rudolph Steiner doctrine; hated the goodness associated with it and found it worrying; may have had an influence on my becoming a psychoanalyst; I hated the religious side and their art, though recently found myself speaking on a platform with a man who was studying a Goetheanum, a Rudolph Steiner centre; I could see that architecturally it was an interesting building, but can't stand their passive water washes based on religious themes; I drifted out of Quakerism and intellectually became an atheist; my daughter went to a convent at one point and I remember subsequently talking to her about religion and she said that I had always given her the feeling that I had a sort of belief, but never what the belief was; can remember talking seriously with her about god; I have got into trouble for my tolerance of religion; do believe that there are more things than we know about; both my parents were scientists which relates to this rather than a religious position, but it joins them; working as a group on psychoanalytic training recently, stunned by the telepathetic communication between us

55:53:24 First job was at Leeds; there was an emotional strain as just about the time I got the job Perry Anderson and I got married; he was working at New Left Review in London; Edward Thompson was in Halifax, Peter Worsley, in Hull, and there were people in Birmingham; the old guard were very important to me; having not grown up within rigid age bands I found it easy to communicate; I had not realized that working in Leeds and living in London would be stressful, and it was; I hadn't realized how rooted Perry was to London; I went down every weekend and returned on the early train on Tuesday morning; at first we felt the physical separation was very hard; then I got to like Leeds and made friends - Hide Ishiguro, Arnold Kettle, and others; Terry Lovell, a mature student, had married one of the New Left in London, Alan Lovell of the British Film Institute; Terry and I used to go down in her bubble car quite often; however it didn't work out and I left Leeds after a year with considerable regret; the job was tough but the students were lively and critical; learnt a lot from them about how to teach and lecture; by that point I was very active in New Left so there were benefits; I didn't want a job in London University but got a doctoral studentship at Reading to which I could commute; Perry also got a research post there under Andreski and wondered whether to move, but we stayed in London; in my second year at Reading I got a lectureship in the English Department which was an excellent department; it specialized in Yeats

Second Part

0:09:07 Memories of 'New Left Review'; Edward Thompson's lectures on Blake and Wordsworth at Reading; quarrels between Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson with Thompson on what was meant by 'Left'; Raphael Samuel and Stuart Hall were in an interim position, Perry and his group in the 'young' position, Edward, John Savill, Raymond Williams, John Rex and Peter Worsley, the 'older'; the conflict between Edward and Perry and Tom did have an element of hostility in it; the older group based itself in the British working class while the young were looking to Europe, in particular, France - Simone de Beavoir, Sartre et al. - so there was a changing regime from Britain to Franco-Europe and from empirical-theoretical work to a superstructural theory coming from the French school that caused the conflict; for us ex-colonial struggles rather than British working class were the important topics

8:44:17 Perry is a hugely erudite man; a very good linguist; his father was in the British police in Shanghai; his mother came back for his birth but took him to China aged one where he was looked after by a French-speaking 'ayah', so French was probably his first language; he always learnt the language of the place he was studying; Perry has enormous details of knowledge as well as depth; when he wrote 'Origins of the Present Crisis' when I'd come back from Leeds, I just couldn't believe how he could master 400 years of history for an article; he has an incredible filing system and when we married he bought me a filing cabinet and taught me how to use it

12:58:00 Never knew Peter Worsley well; Raymond Williams was lovely; remember Perry and I reading 'Second Generation' and were very impressed by the serious discussion within it; read it in preparation for meeting him in Cambridge where we spent a day with him; he never entered into the New Left argument but had space for both sides within him; I spoke about him at a memorial in the Festival Hall; he has always been an important writer for me

16:49:16 Interest in feminism started when I was a student at Oxford; we were developing new left-wing journals such as 'New Departures' and I reviewed Doris Lessing's 'Golden Notebooks'; there was a contradiction between the extremely egalitarian childhood that I had had to the segregated society of Oxford; told that on the whole, women got seconds and thirds while men got firsts and fourths; experience of trying to buy 'The Second Sex' at Oban in 1958; became involved with New Left, met Perry and started a book on the position of women in England; very difficult to find anything about education for women; the Newsom and Robbins reports did not cover gender so had to read the Parliamentary 'Blue Books' to find out that the 11+ had a gender adjustment - girls did better in it than boys but there was an adjustment so that as many boys as girls went to grammar schools; got very interested and wrote chapters on education and suffragette history; went with Perry to France to write, and then went to see friends involved in Lelio Basso's 'International Socialist Journal' - John Halliday, Peter Wollen; suitcases stolen in Genoa with all our manuscripts; I felt gutted by the experience so I left it; must have been 1962-3; two years later needed to write articles for 'New Left Review' so chose to write on women; wrote 'Women: The Longest Revolution'; Perry was extremely helpful and influential on the way I wrote it; it was published in 1966 and picked up by the emerging women's movement and was pirated all over the world as a booklet; later rewrote it as 'Women's Estate' which was published by Penguin; the argument in the 1966 article was that the family, but not women, was a category; if you wanted to look at women you had to look at the family, but for work and education you couldn't find them; looked at women in terms of four structures: reproduction, sexuality, care and education (within the family) and the world of work outside, which determines the others; the argument was that what was happening in the 1960's in Europe was that sexuality was really changing and was the weak structure that would change gender relations; this article was there at the beginning when Betty Friedan started NOW (National Organization for Women) in the U.S., hence the fame or notoriety

29:10:08 We read a lot of Althusser and one of the things we published in 'New Left Review' at that time was an article on Freud and Lacan; looking at the relationship between changes made in Marxism that would meet in changes made in psychoanalysis; had felt that psychic structures - how we live in our heads - was missing in 'Women: The Longest Revolution'; went to the British Library at the beginning of the long vacation to read a few articles by Freud on femininity, female sexuality etc. and came out at the end having read all twenty-three volumes of Freud; wrote 'Psychoanalysis and Feminism' on the advance given me by an American publisher and left teaching; trained as a psychoanalyst and only qualified in 1978 after having left Reading in 1970; came back into academic teaching in 1996 and until then worked free lance; my Ph.D. which I had started at Reading and not finished but published chapters on, was about childhood in nineteenth century English novels; for that I had got very involved with the Laing group at Kingsley Hall; we were the first people to publish anything after Laing's 'Divided self' in 'New Left Review'; it was against Freud, in a way, as it was phenomenological psychoanalysis; this type of psychoanalysis was what I used for my Ph.D. writings on childhood; personally, aged twelve, I was a Saturday girl looking after three year old twins and an eighteenth month old baby, for Susanna Isaacs who was Winnicott's successor at the Paddington Green Hospital and doing her analytic training; not a conscious link to my later interest, but a thread; started training in 1974 and finished just after the birth of my daughter in 1978; I had to pay for my training so I did visiting professorships in the U.S. which paid well, also television and journalism; also had to do some clinical work, working at night at 3/4d an hour; have never regretted doing it; kept it up when I came to Cambridge; Jesus gave me wonderful terms in the College so that I could continue to see patients as my research base and I had not other requirements; went down to London for the first three to four years from Thursday afternoon to Monday morning and saw patients, then taught from Monday afternoon; rather stressful so eventually stopped; since then I have had a session in Addenbrookes on psychological treatments, for senior registrars training; also other training sessions, consultations and supervisions; I don't take patients any more; met Jack Goody at Yale in the early nineties; met again at Edward Thompson's memorial and went back to Barnes together where I was living and he was staying with Gilbert Lewis; invited in to meet them; an introduction into anthropology, which my daughter intended to read at Cambridge; became interested through her because it had been a strand that I might have taken up had I not been accepted for training as a psychoanalysis; I had been to hear Margaret Mead in Utrecht when I was twelve because I was so keen; I had been invited to give one of the Darwin Lectures in Cambridge and so had Jack, so we met again there; began to feel a need to get a wider perspective on psychoanalysis and decided that the best way was to go back into teaching; I was offered a job at Oxford Brookes and at Essex University at new centre on psychoanalysis; decided to take the first lectureship in Social and Political Science in Cambridge in gender studies

47:07:14 Cambridge students are outstanding; it would be a tragedy if we don't guard our undergraduate status; now I just have a term to go and I feel a sense of freedom; I have always liked my college, Jesus, and it has been a wonderful supportive environment; I think the college system is brilliant because you have an organic multidisciplinary situation; once needed to know the crystallography of snowflakes; looked at Wikipedia and elsewhere and then went into lunch; when I came out I knew all I needed; I tend to go into lunch with the old men; the knowledge and range of thinking is just wonderful; don't go down the route of University - Graduates, Colleges - Undergraduates; that would be mad; have found it an enormously important and positive experience

50:28:01 Found it impossible to do gender studies in SPS and was offered the Chair of Women's Studies in Princeton; decided to stay here for a number of reasons, one of which was Jack, and thought, with friends, about doing gender studies in the University rather than the faculty; this has been very successfully achieved with the help of the College, and I run gender studies across the University; I did this voluntarily which I calculate as twenty seven hours on top of my job; for it to continue we have raised a post and gone into Human Geography with Richard Smith, Peter Laslett's successor; it is heaven on earth, we are so happy; now we have to raise £12,000,000 to create a full centre; the culmination of really hard work with a group of young people whom I am deeply fond of; intellectually it has been extremely challenging and interesting; hadn't mentioned siblings, the subject of my last two books, and am planning a third which actually brings gender and psychoanalysis together