Ruth Adam

Ruth Augusta Adam (1907-1977) was born Ruth King in Nottinghamshire. In early adult life she taught for five years in poverty-stricken Nottinghamshire elementary schools. In 1932 she married Kenneth Adam, a journalist on the Manchester Guardian who later became the first director of BBC television.

Between 1937 and 1947 Ruth Adam had four children and worked for the Ministry of Information during the war. She wrote several novels of social reportage, as well as non-fiction titles, radio scripts, and journalism: the latter in part a platform for her Christian socialist feminist views.

In 1955 Ruth Adam, with her friend Peggy Jay, co-founded the Fisher Group, a think-tank on social policy and family matters. Arising out of this concern she wrote her novels Fetch Her Away (1954) and Look Who’s Talking (1960) about girls in care. In contrast is her novel A House in the Country (1957), a comic account of her family’s attempt at living in a commune. At the end of her life came A Woman’s Place, 1910–1975, a succinct, witty, and trenchant social history of British women in the twentieth century.

Ruth Adam died at the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, Marylebone, London, in 1977.

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