Hannah Gavron

Ann "Hannah" Gavron (; ; 19 August 1936 – 14 December 1965) was a British sociologist and writer, known for her posthumous 1966 work The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers.

Early life and family Gavron was born Ann Fyvel on 19 August 1936 in Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine to T. R. Fyvel, a writer, left-wing Zionist and literary editor of the Tribune, and Mary Fyvel (née Kirschner). Fyvel's father was born in Germany to Jewish immigrant parents, whilst her mother was born in present-day South Africa. In 1948, Fyvel enrolled at Frensham Heights School as a border. 17 years old at the time of her engagement, and six years Gavron's junior, Fyvel's parents made her wait till she was 18 to marry. Becoming pregnant with her second son shortly after starting her doctoral research, Gavron's thesis was entitled The position and opportunities of young mothers – Progress or retrogression. (A study of the difficulties confronting young mothers in the contemporary family based on a comparative study of working class and middle class families). Gavron struggled to have doctoral research topic approved due to its subject matter and her desire to use the emerging technique of semi-structured interviewing. Gavron attempted to procure a permanent lectureship at the London School of Economics but was rejected twice. She argued that women tended to leave paid work after childbirth and that motherhood stripped women of independence, bringing their values and aspirations as 'New' women into conflict with the traditional role they were having to play as mothers. In the view of Helen McCarthy, this study meant that Fyvel (Gavron) was one of a number of researchers in the 1950s and early 1960s (such as Nancy Seear, Viola Klein, Ferdynand Zweig, Judith Hubback and Pearl Jephcott) 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."

In 2015, Gavron's son Jeremy published his memoirs of her, A Woman on The Edge of Time,