Judith Hubback

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 Helen McCarthy, 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]

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 Journal of Analytical Psychology (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]

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]