The English social scientist Barbara Adam Wootton (1897-1988) began as an economist, progressing to a student of social policy and in particular the problems of welfare and social deviance. She was among the first "Life Peers" in Parliament and the first woman to chair that assembly by sitting on the Woolsack.

Barbara Wootton died in the summer of 1988 in her 92nd year. She was born in 1897 into an academic family in Cambridge, the daughter of James Adam, a classical scholar and senior tutor of Emmanuel College. Her mother taught at Girton, the college founded for women who were, until the 1920s, excluded from full membership of the university. Mrs. Adam taught her daughter at home until she was nearly 14, after which she went first to the Perse School in Cambridge and then to Girton. Her father died in 1907 when she was only 10 and the younger of her two...