Carol Wolkowitz obituary
My friend and colleague Carol Wolkowitz, who has died aged 77, is best known as a feminist sociologist whose highly influential book, Bodies at Work (2006), has been a key source for those interested in how gender and embodiment shape our working lives.
Most of Carol's academic life was spent as a sociology lecturer at the University of Warwick, which she joined in 1986. There she continued an earlier research interest in homeworking and published, with Annie Phizacklea, Homeworking Women: Gender, Racism and Class at Work (1995).
Born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the elder twin daughter of Elaine (nee Flur), a teacher, and William Wolkowitz, a scientist who had been seconded to the Manhattan Project and later worked for the US Atomic Energy Commission, Carol's origin as an 'atom bomb baby' informed much of her later work.
She went to school at Valley Stream Central high school, Long Island, when the family moved there for William's work at Grumman Aerospace. After her first degree at Smith College, Massachusetts, she crossed the Atlantic to research gender and politics in India for a doctorate at Sussex University, being supervised by the Marxist sociologist Thomas Bottomore and subsequently by Ann Whitehead.
While she was at Sussex she met Martyn Partridge in a house-share near Brighton; they moved to London for Martyn's career as a graphic designer and married in 1982. With her baby son, Tim, Carol's working life began with long-distance commuting between London and Bradford, where she was researching homeworking with Sheila Allen, a professor of sociology at the university. In 1987 they published Homeworking: Myths and Realities, which was important in drawing attention to homeworking's hidden and exploitative nature.
Carol did not separate her work and life. As a feminist and as a mother, her understanding of 'the working day' challenged the conceptions that place boundaries between paid and unpaid work and which, at the time, did not regard women's unpaid domestic labour as 'work'.
She was a founder member of the Warwick Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, and is remembered by her students as an inspirational teacher. She co-edited The Glossary of Feminist Theory in 2000 and was on the editorial boards of the journals Work, Employment and Society, and Gender, Work and Organization, for many years. She formally retired in 2017, but continued to supervise PhD students and undertake research until her death. She also enjoyed cooking, travelling and playing with her grandchildren. Carol's principal leisure activity was reading crime fiction.
She is survived by Martyn, Tim, two grandchildren, Emily and Benjy, her twin, Barbara, her brother, Richard, and two step-sisters, Judy and Julia.
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