Barbara Ward (1) (1914–1981)

Barbara Mary Ward was born in Yorkshire, England. She attended a Catholic convent school before studying at a lycée in Paris and the Sorbonne. She went to Oxford University, where she read politics, philosophy, and economics and graduated in 1935. During postgraduate work in Vienna, she witnessed Nazi persecution of Jews and became active in the Sword of the Spirit movement to oppose Nazism, and groups to assist Jewish refugees. She published her first book in 1938, The International Share-out, which led to a job with The Economist, where she rose to become foreign editor. In 1950, she married Robert Jackson (later Sir Robert), a United Nations administrator, with whom she had a son. She wrote many articles and books on the problem of sustainability and the global threat of poverty, including The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations (1962), Spaceship Earth (1966), Only One Earth (with René Dubos, 1972), and Progress for a Small Planet (1980). She was a frequent public speaker and an influential adviser to the Vatican, the UN, and the World Bank. She was appointing Schweitzer Professor of Economic Development at Columbia University, and retired in 1973. The next year she was made a DBE, and in 1976 a life peer as Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth.