Born: 1936, United Kingdom
Died: NA
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Sheila Jackson, Sheila Mannion
This biography is shared with permission from the Academics’ Wives project, created by Rosalind Edward and Val Gillies and supported by the British Academy / Leverhulme.
SHEILA JACKSON/ABRAMS (1936 -)
Sheila grew up in a working-class household in Huddersfield in the North of England. Her father worked as a labourer at the nearly gas works and her mother ran the household and looked after their seven children. Sheila left school at 15 to start work and contribute financially to the household. She met her first husband Brian Jackson when they were both teenagers in a jazz club in Huddersfield. Brian, also from a working class Huddersfield family, went to the local grammar school, and then later to the University of Cambridge. After Brian graduated, they married and moved to Cambridge.
In the late 1950s Brian and Dennis Marsden began researching and writing a book about the impact of universal state education on working class children, under the auspices of the Institute of Community Studies founded by Michael Young. The work was subsequently published as Education and the Working Class. Sheila contributed to the interviews and helped with the field work. Brian and Dennis Marsden followed this with a study of working class communities in Huddersfield. Sheila contributed to the interviews and to the writing for the book Working Class Community: Some General Notions Raised by a Series of Studies in Northern England, which was eventually published by Jackson in 1968. In the acknowledgements Brian stated ‘I don’t suppose I would have stuck at the project at all had I not only had the initial help from Sheila Jackson with the fieldwork and writing up, but generous and selfless encouragement all the way through’. Sheila’s marriage to Brian ended shortly after the book was published. However, she continued to work, conducting interviews and doing fieldwork for Michael Mann on displaced workers in Peterborough.
By the early 1970s Sheila had remarried another eminent sociologist, Philip Abrams and they moved to Durham in the North of England where Philip was appointed Professor of Sociology at the University. She became actively involved in designing a new research agenda, coming up with the idea of studying communes and the commune movement. Philip secured a grant to pursue the research and Sheila took a substantial role in conducting the fieldwork, staying in the communes and conducting interviews. She also took a significant role in the analysis and writing up of the research. The subsequent book, Communes, Sociology and Society was published in 1976. Phillip Abrams and the other male researcher, Andrew McCulloch took lead authorship, while Shelia and Pat Gore, the other female researchers’ efforts were marked through the term ‘with’ rather than ‘by’ to indicate the perceived lower status of their involvement. Nevertheless, it was acknowledged in the preface that Sheila had the idea for the research in the first place, analysed the questionnaire responses, and kept track of the organisation of the Commune Movement: ‘… it would have been very difficult for us to understand the groups we have written about in this book without this further work on the wider alternative society movements’. Sheila also was formative in Abrams’ posthumously published work on neighbours, written up by Martin Bulmer in 1985. Bulmer noted Sheila’s influence in his introduction, acknowledging her extensive intellectual and fieldwork input.
After Philip Abrams death, Sheila continued to do sociological field work, collaborating with Dennis Marsden on a study of married daughters caring for their elderly mothers who live with them. In this work she is (finally) acknowledged as a co-author.
Papers relating to the some of the studies Sheila worked on can be found in the Brian Jackson Collection at the University of Essex Special Collections and the Dennis Marsden collection at the University of Essex Special Collections.