Eva Cox

Eva Maria Cox (; born 21 February 1938) is an Austrian-born Australian writer, feminist, sociologist, social commentator and activist. She has been an active advocate for creating a "more civil" society. She was a long-term member of the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL), and is still pursuing feminist change by putting revaluing social contributions and wellbeing onto political agendas, as well as recognising the common ground between Australia's First Nations and feminist values of the importance of the social.

Early life Eva Maria Hauser was born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1938, less than three weeks before the Anschluss (12 March 1938) that left her and her family stateless. The following year, she traveled with her mother Ruth, a final-year medical student, to England, UK; she spent the war—technically as an enemy alien in Surrey. Her father, Richard Hauser, joined the British Army in Palestine, and her grandparents and other relatives sought refuge in Sydney. After the war, her father worked for the United Nations Refugee Association in Rome, Italy, where Cox continued her schooling for two years. In 1948 she joined her mother's extended family in Sydney.

In Sydney she attended Sydney Girls' High School. Cox attended the University of Sydney from 1956 to 1957, where she met Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes and became associated with the Sydney Push.

From 2007 to 2015, Cox was a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development. From 2007 she has been a professorial fellow at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at UTS—Cox works with the latter on evidence bases for social policy. Cox continues as the director of Distaff Associates and is convenor of the Women's Equity Think Tank (WETTANK), a further development of the Women's Economic Think Tank. In March 2014, Cox joined former Australian High Court judge Michael Kirby, among others, to become a patron of Touching Base, a New South Wales-based organisation that provides information, education and support for disabled clients, sex workers and disability service providers. In 2015, following in the footsteps of Jack Mundey who was prominent in the Green Bans movement, she became a patron of the campaign to save the public housing of Millers Point from further development.

Honours Cox was appointed as an Officer (AO) of the Order of Australia in 1995 for her services to women's welfare and was named Humanist of the Year in 1997 by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies.

In 2011, she received an Australia Post Legends Award and her face appeared on a postage stamp as part of a series of four stamps honouring women who have advanced the cause of gender equality—the other three women were Germaine Greer, Elizabeth Evatt and Anne Summers.

Personal life It was only after settling in Australia that Cox started to become aware of her Jewish identity and the Jewish community. She is agnostic and a humanist. According to her Twitter profile in March 2014, Cox is based in Sydney, Australia and seeks to "make the societies we live in more civil, with feminism, fairness and equity, with less emphasis on economic materialism".

On her personal website, she refers to herself as a "political junkie" and explains her passion for activism by suggesting, "My father used to embarrass me and adolescent friends by asking what we had done to save the world that day, so maybe it's genetic to feel that if something is wrong, I should try to fix it."