"[6][4][5] It was in her first year at LSE that Davidoff met David Lockwood, then a PhD student in sociology, who would go on to do significant research on the nature of class in Britain.

While a lifelong and "remarkable" marriage, Lockwood and she "did not forge an intellectual partnership": he continued to centre his work on issues of class, and did not pay attention to gender as a critical social dimension.

[1] When Lockwood moved to the University of Essex in 1968, as a professor in sociology, Davidoff began working there as a research officer.

[1] As the sociologist and oral historian Paul Thompson stated: "[I]t is a brilliant demonstration of the new insights which gender perspectives can yield.

"[3] Using case studies of middle-class family and business relationships in urban Birmingham and rural East Anglia, Davidoff and Hall traced the evolution of capitalist enterprise in England at the end of the 18th century.

[1][3][5] Davidoff and Hall described Family Fortunes as "... a book about the ideologies, institutions and practices of the English middle class from the end of the eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries.