Barbara Mary Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth, DBE (23 May 1914 – 31 May 1981) was a British economist and writer interested in the problems of developing countries.
Though she had once planned to study modern languages, her interest in public affairs led to a degree course in politics, philosophy, and economics at Somerville College, Oxford University, from which she graduated in 1935.
After witnessing antisemitism there and in Nazi Germany she began to help Jewish refugees, and mobilise Roman Catholic support for any forthcoming UK war effort, although she had initially been "sympathetic to Hitler".
[2] With Christopher Dawson, the historian, as leader and Ward as secretary, the Sword of the Spirit was established as an organisation to bring together Catholics and Anglicans opposing Nazism.
As well as writings on economic and foreign policy, her broadcasts on Christian values in wartime were published as The Defence of the West by Sword of the Spirit.
During this time she was also president of the Catholic Women's League and a popular panel member of the BBC programme The Brains Trust which answered listeners' questions.
Over the next few years they lived in West Africa and made various visits to India, and these experiences helped form Ward's views on the need for Western nations to contribute to the economic development of poorer countries.
[5] In 1957 Harvard University gave her an honorary LittD and until 1968 she was a Carnegie fellow there, living for part of each year in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[6] She got to know Adlai Stevenson and John F Kennedy and acted as adviser to various influential policy makers, including Robert McNamara at the World Bank and Lyndon B Johnson, who welcomed her thoughts on his Great Society projects despite her opposition to the Vietnam War.
She had influence in the Vatican, helped set up a pontifical commission for justice and peace, and in 1971 was the first woman ever to address a synod of Roman Catholic bishops.
One of her proposals was that richer countries should commit a certain proportion of their GNP in aid to the developing world, and she also spoke of the need for institutions to enable and manage both 'aid and trade'.
For those Concerned about international development (addressing poverty and social justice), Barbara Ward was perhaps their best-known author in the early 1940s to her death in 1981.
[9] Barbara's professorship at Columbia University in New York allowed her to work closely with the UN secretariat set up to organize the Stockholm Conference.
"… the careful husbandry of the Earth is sine qua non for the survival of the human species, and for the creation of decent ways of life for all the people of the world.
She wrote her last book, Progress for a Small Planet, despite her deteriorating health, discussing the "planetary community", dwindling resources used up too fast by wealthy countries, and the needs of poorer parts of the world.
Her brother, John Ward, was a noted civil engineer who, after his work on the M4 motorway in the 1960s, was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.