Barbara Wootton, Baroness Wootton of Abinger

Barbara Wootton, Baroness Wootton of Abinger CH (14 April 1897 – 11 July 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 in Cambridge, 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 the Union in a historic debate against Edgar Hardcastle of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which was later published as a pamphlet. In the Second World War she considered herself as a conscientious objector, although she was never liable for military service. She was, however, required, under the Registration for Employment Order 1941, to be interviewed in 1943 by a National Service Officer of the Ministry of Labour and National Service, who deemed her service as an unpaid magistrate to be of sufficient value as not to require direction to any employment. With her agreement, her husband, George Wright, registered as a conscientious objector in 1941, and did farm work and later civil defence work.

In 1948 she became a Professor at Bedford College of the University of London. In 1952 she received a Nuffield Foundation Research Fellowship.

She wrote several books on economic and sociological subjects, including 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 an 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 11 July 1958 and was thereby one of the first women ever to sit in the House of Lords; she also became 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 aged 91.

References

• "Personal Papers of Barbara Wootton". Janus. http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0271%2FGCPP%20Wootton. 
• "Edgar Richard Hardcastle ("Hardy"): Obituary". Socialist Studies № 17, pp. 17–20.