Snoop-Women with Notebooks: Naomi Mitchison, Mass Observation, and the Gender of Domestic Intelligence

Novelist Naomi Mitchison and Home Intelligence head Mary Adams were crucial supporters of Mass Observation's qualitative approach to public opinion collection, but their efforts were significantly curtailed when the public denounced observers as internal spies. This article traces the backlash against MO's methodology, both bureaucratically and publicly, uncovering that MO critics were partially fueled by the gendering of its unique methodology. While some considered interviews and surveys tantamount to domestic espionage, the subsequent turn towards quantitative data devalued women's experiences by favoring institutionalized patriarchal approaches to analyzing public opinion. Within this context, Mitchison's novel We Have Been Warned similarly presents a clash between these two gendered methods of understanding public opinion. Through its advocacy of subjective epistemology against the fetish for so-called objective data, Mitchison's interwar novel suggests the importance of gender to debates over data collection and polling.