Judith Hubback

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 John Fischer Williams, CBE, KC (1870–1947) and his wife, the artist Eleanor Marjorie Hay Murray (1880–1961). Her elder sister was the historian and civil servant Jenifer Margaret Hart, the wife of H. L. A. Hart). Hubback grew up in Paris and learned to speak French fluently. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1936 with a first-class honours degree in history.

Career Teaching, married life and social studies Hubback was a teacher until her first child was born; 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. She became increasingly interested in women's attitudes toward work and self-funded postal surveys as part of a project to explore the lives of highly educated, married women in the UK. 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". Hubback argued that women could balance motherhood, marriage and work only through the full support of their husbands. 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.

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."

Hubback died on 6 February 2006 and was survived by her three children. Her husband predeceased her.

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