Judith Hubback

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Judith Hubback (born Eläis Judith Fischer Williams; 23 February 1917 – 6 January 2006) was a British analytical psychologist and sociologist noted for her early studies into women and work.

Early life and family[]

Eläis Judith Fischer Williams was born on 23 February 1917, the third daughter of the international lawyer Sir , CBE, KC (1870–1947) and his wife, the artist Eleanor Marjorie Hay Murray (1880–1961).[1][2][3] Her elder sister was the historian and civil servant Jenifer Margaret Hart (also the wife of H. L. A. Hart).[4] Judith grew up in Paris and learnt to speak French fluently. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1936 with a first-class honours degree (BA) in history.[1][2] While there, she met David Hubback (died 1991), the son of Eva Hubback, and they married in 1939; the couple went on to have one son and two daughters.[5]

Career[]

Teaching, married life and social studies[]

Hubback was a teacher until her first child was born;[2] even then she had faced discrimination while applying for teaching posts as a married woman,[5] and she was frustrated that she could not even indulge in details of her husband's work (he was a civil servant and could not talk about his confidential work with her).[6] With the end of the Second World War, employment opportunities for women (which had been substantially expanded to meet wartime demands) contracted; the social expectations that women would become full-time mothers once they had children also acted as a cultural barrier to employment.[5] In the late 1940s, Judith Hubback became aware of her mother-in-law, Eva Hubback's, social studies on working-class housewives and took an interest in replies to her surveys.[7] She became increasingly interested in women's attitudes towards work and self-funded her own postal surveys as part of a project to explore the lives of highly educated, married women in Britain.[7] She published the results of her surveys in 1954 as a pamphlet, Graduate Wives, which attracted coverage in national newspapers.[5] She followed it up in 1957 with a much more substantial book: Wives Who Went to College, described by The Guardian as "considerably ahead of its time".[6]

In the words of the historian , Hubback was one of a number of researchers in the 1950s (such as Viola Klein, Pearl Jephcott, Ferdynand Zweig, Nancy Seear and Hannah Gavron) who "helped to entrench new understandings of married women’s employment as a fundamental feature of advanced industrial societies, and one that solved the dilemmas of ‘modern’ woman across social classes."[8] She reported the frustrations of highly qualified women who felt constrained to stop working once they married or to care for their children; she concluded that women who sacrificed themselves and their capacity for self-actualisation to become full-time mothers and wives instead were "often too self-sacrificing in the sense that they let themselves drift into a state of mind in which their daily lives gradually destroy them as individuals".[9] Hubback argued that women could balance motherhood, marriage and work only through the full support of their husbands.[10] Wives Who Went to College was the subject of much discussion: it received 87 reviews in published material and was the subject of leading articles in The Times and The Economist.[11]

Analytical psychology and later life[]

Despite her work (which included freelance broadcasting and journalism), she continued to feel deeply unsatisfied with aspects of her life: "she was unsatisfied and sometimes depressed, knowing that she had unrealised potential."[6] She visited Robert Hobson,[1] a Jungian psychoanalyst, and became sufficiently interested in the subject that she qualified with the Society of Analytical Psychology in 1964; she was heavily involved with the Society, serving as its Honorary Secretary for a time, as co-editor of the (1976–85) and as the Society's representative on the committee of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (1986–92).[6]

Judith Hubback died on 6 February 2006, her husband having predeceased her, and was survived by her three children.[6] She donated her papers to the Women's Library Archive at the London School of Economics in 1997 (they are catalogued as GB 106 7JUH).[2]

BBC TV appearance[]

Judith Hubback was a contributor to a BBC-TV programme, entitled "The Meaning of Dreams", presented by comedian and naturalist Bill Oddie, which aired on 16 April 1986.[12]

Publications[]

Hubback published her professional papers in 1988 as:

  • People Who Do Things to Each Other

Her literary output includes:

  • Islands and People (1964), containing poetry
  • The Sea Has Many Voices (1990), a novel which received the Society of Authors' Sagittarius prize in 1991.
  • From Dawn to Dusk (2003), an autobiography

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c Barbara Wharton, "Obituaries: Judith Hubback", Journal of Analytical Psychology, vol. 51, no. 2 (2006), pp. 321–324.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b c d "Papers of Judith Hubback: Background and administrative history", ArchivesHub. Retrieved 29 January 2018.
  3. ^ Burke's Peerage (1999), vol. 1, p. 135.
  4. ^ "Hart, Jenifer Margaret [née Williams] (1914–2005)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition, Oxford University Press, 2004). Retrieved 29 January 2018.
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b c d "Judith Hubback", The Independent, 10 March 2006. Retrieved 29 January 2018.
  6. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e Barbara Wharton and Jan Wiener, "Judith Hubback", The Guardian, 7 February 2006. Retrieved 29 January 2018.
  7. ^ Jump up to: a b Helen McCarthy, "Social Science and Married Women's Employment in Post-War Britain", Past and Present, vol. 233, no. 1 (2016), p. 280.
  8. ^ McCarthy, p. 270.
  9. ^ Judith Hubback, Wives Who Went to College (1957), pp. 150–1, cited in McCarthy, p. 284.
  10. ^ Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (ed.), Women in Twentieth-Century Britain: Social, Cultural and Political Change (Longman, 2001), p. 126.
  11. ^ McCarthy, p. 288.
  12. ^ The Times Internet Archive 16 April 1986
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