Barbara Wootton, Baroness Wootton of Abinger
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Barbara Wootton, Baroness Wootton of Abinger (1897 – July 11, 1988) was a British sociologist and criminologist. She was one of the first four life peers appointed under the Life Peerages Act 1958.
Born Barbara Adam, she was educated at the Perse School for Girls. She studied Classics and Economics at Girton College, Cambridge from 1915 to 1919. In 1917, she married John (Jack) Wootton. He was wounded during World War I and died weeks after their marriage. She married, George Wright, in 1934. He died in 1964.
In the 1930s Wootton was a member of the Federal Union and represented it in a historic debate against Edgar Hardcastle of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which was later published as a pamphlet.
In 1948, she became a Professor at Bedford College of the University of London. In 1952, she received a Nuffield Foundation Research Fellowship.
She was an author of economic and sociological subjects. Her books included Lament for Economics (1938), End Social Inequality (1941), Freedom Under Planning (1945), Social Science and Social Pathology (1959), Crime and the Criminal Law (1964) and Incomes Policy (1974).
In 1969, she was made an Honorary Fellow of Girton College. In 1977, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour. In 1985, she was awarded honorary Doctorate from the University of Cambridge. In 1984, she was chosen as one of six women for the BBC 2 series 'Women of Our Century'.
She was created Baroness Wootton of Abinger, of Abinger Common in the County of Surrey on the advice of Harold Macmillan on July 11, 1958 and was the first woman to sit on the Woolsack as a Deputy Speaker. She was the chairperson of the Wootton Report.
She died in a nursing home in Surrey in 1988.
[edit] References
- Personal Papers of Barbara Wootton. Janus.
- "Edgar Richard Hardcastle ("Hardy"): Obituary". Socialist Studies № 17, pp. 17–20.
