Ruth Glass

Ruth Glass (born Ruth Adele Lazarus, 1912–1990) was a German-born British sociologist.

Contents

• Women to Women EP235 Ruth Glass 080513
• Tyler Sonnichsen MicNite Fall 2018
• Selected publications
• References

Glass's work reflected her belief "that the purpose of sociological research was to influence government policy and bring about social change". A lasting legacy is her coining of the term 'gentrification', which she created to describe the processes by which the poor were squeezed out of parts of London as upper-class ghettos were created.

A key figure in urban sociology, Ruth Glass made a significant contribution to the institutionalisation of British sociology as an academic discipline in the 1950s. Her reputation in this field was established from the late 1930s by studies of housing developments and planning in Watling and Middlesbrough, and later by pioneer work on black immigration. However, as Eric Hobsbawm acknowledged in his obituary of Glass, the text of what would have been her major work, the Third London Survey (successor to the surveys of Booth and Llewellyn Smith), was never quite completed.

Between 1935 and 1941 she was married to Henry William Durant, the statistician and pioneer in the field of public opinion polling. She married David Victor Glass, a sociologist and demographer, in 1942.

Selected publications

Glass, Ruth Lazarus (1939). Watling: a survey of social life on a new housing estate. London: P S King. 

Glass, R. (ed) (1948) The Social Background of a Plan: a Study of Middlesbrough, Preface by Max Lock, London : Routledge & Kegan Paul

Glass, R. (1955) Urban Sociology in Great Britain: a trend report, Current Sociology, IV, 4: 8-35.

Glass, Ruth Lazarus (1960). London's Newcomers: The West Indians in London. London: Centre for Urban Studies, University College. 

Glass, Ruth Lazarus; Westergaard, John (1965). London's housing needs: statement of evidence to the Committee on Housing in Greater London. London: Centre for Urban Studies, University College.