Elizabeth Spillius

Elizabeth Spillius (née Bott (March 3, 1924 – July 4, 2016)[1][2] was a Canadian-English anthropologist, sociologist, and Kleinian psychoanalyst.

[4] Often regarded as a member of the Manchester Group of anthropologists,[5] her best-known work was Family and Social Network (1957), based on her 1956 PhD with working-class families in East London, in which she formulated what was subsequently labelled the Bott Hypothesis: that the density of a husband and wife's separate social networks was positively associated with marital role segregation.

The first results of her seminal work have been presented in front of a UNESCO seminar under the title Urban Families: Conjugal roles and social networks (1954) and subsequently have been published in 1955 and 1957.

[6] Therein she has also conceptualized different aspects of labour and task-division between couples and examined the supporting function of the environment relevant to current co-parenting research.

In 1956, she began training analysis as a Kleinian psychoanalyst with Lois Munro.