Professor Miriam E David and Mavis Maclean CBE share their tributes to Dr Dulcie Groves. Among her many contributions, Dulcie was a founding member of the SPA (then Social Administration Association, SAA) and a former editor of the Journal of Social Policy.
A Tribute to Dr Dulcie Groves
Dr Dulcie Groves died about 3-4 months ago at her home in King’s College Court, Primrose Hill Road, NW3.
Personally, I knew Dulcie from 1973 when she interviewed me for a post at the then South Bank Polytechnic’s Social Sciences Department. She interviewed me at this flat. I did not take the post, being more attracted to a lectureship in social administration at the University of Bristol. Dulcie also left South Bank for a lectureship at Kingston Polytechnic. She later became a lecturer at the University of Lancaster. She remained an honorary lecturer there after she retired in 1984 on a special scheme.
As fate would have it, we continued to meet through the Social Administration Association (SAA), later to become the Social Policy Association (SPA). Dulcie had been a founder member of SAA in 1967. We also met through some of the women’s groups founded in the 1970s and 1980s. Dulcie was a committed feminist and strong believer in women’s rights. She researched and campaigned for women’s pension rights. She was careful, though, not to provide individual or personal advice.
She edited two books about these issues, one with Janet Finch A Labour of Love: Women, Work & Caring 1983 Routledge, Kegan Paul; the other with Mavis Maclean Women’s Issues in Social Policy 1991 Routledge & Kegan Paul. This latter book emanated from a conference in Oxford on the same topic in 1987.
In the early 1990s, Dulcie and I became members of the executive committee of SAA. In 1993 we agreed to edit the Journal of Social Policy jointly. This was probably a first for SPA, having both 2 women edit and the fact that we were co-editors. We took over from Professor Gilbert Smith. (He and I had been undergraduates in sociology together at the University of Leeds, graduating in 1966). We continued for 5+ years, initially usually in my office as head of department of Social Sciences at South Bank University, later at the London Institute an amalgam of 5 art colleges.
Dulcie and I had fun editing the journal and met many interesting colleagues in the process. After resigning our positions, we continued to meet regularly. Dulcie was a book squirrel and kept feeding me interesting bits of gossip or books themselves over the next 20 years or so.
She was extremely independent and private, deeply committed to her Welsh origins and her family. She developed a love of penguins. My husband and I gave her a penguin calendar every year, especially when Jeff started working at the Natural History Museum. She also fed me other memorabilia.
Dulcie will be sorely missed for her acid wit and knowledge of women’s history in both the UK and USA. She had spent several years at Bryn Maur in the 1960s as a Master’s student. She loved her time there but came home to a post at Nottingham University. She then moved to London.
Miriam E David, PhD, FRSA, AcSS
Professor Emerita of Sociology of Education,
UCL Institute of Education
—
I was fortunate to enjoy a long and productive friendship with Dulcie (see Womens Issues in Social Policy Eds Mavis Maclean and Dulcie Groves Routledge 1991 ) firstly working with her and then meeting her regularly in recent years as a friend and neighbour in Hampstead, bringing me copies of the JSP!
She inspired us all with her concerns for the role of women in the field of social policy. She will be much missed and long remembered with great affection and admiration.
Mavis Maclean CBE
Senior Fellow,
St Hildas College Oxford