Ruth Hope Crow (née Miller) AM (14 September 1916 – 9 April 1999) was an Australian political activist,[1] social worker, writer, and long serving member of the Communist Party of Australia.
Her father was a dentist who sometimes helped Crow's uncle, Matthew Baird, a conservative Member of Parliament, to write his speeches.
From 1934 to 1936 she attended Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy and gained a Diploma of Institutional Management and Dietetics, graduating with distinction.
However, she was unable to gain the qualification of 'dietician' because it required a further year of unpaid hospital work and self-funding of expenses such as a uniform.
This was a special one-year course in Group Work Techniques, Youth Leadership, as preparation for the post-war expansion of social services.
Crow said that her views changed greatly from 1933, when she was one of thousands of Australians greeting the visiting German battleship Koln because it flew the Nazi flag, to 1936 when she joined the Communist Party.
In 1938 she was involved in research on the topic of food health and income in Victoria, with the results published in a booklet edited by Marjorie Coppel in 1939.
[8] From 1949 to 1954 Crow was involved with organisations which offered leisure time activities for children such as dance, drama, sports, and music.
[4] In the late 1970s Crow was made a Life Member of Community Child Care in recognition of her contribution to establishing the organisation.
[4] In 1993 Crow was made a Member of the Order of Australia for 'service to the community through the promotion of participative environmental and social planning'.
The Crow Collection has been extended by donations from Mannie Biederberg, Alvie Booth, Jack Cotter, Bert Davies, Lloyd Edmonds, Ken Gott, Rivkah Mathews, Joyce Nicholson, John Reeves, Percy Rogers, and Colin Watson.
In 1996 the Crow Collection Association was involved in the Ideas Exchange Project which took up the theme of the 1995 Senate Inquiry, 'What Sort of Society Do You Want Australia To Be?'
The Library was entrusted to use these funds to promote research in the subject areas that were of interest to Ruth and Maurie Crow.
In 2011 Federal Government funding under the ASHER program was granted to VU Library to undertake a digitisation project of significant unpublished and out of print material from the Crow Papers.