Barbara Ward - International Influence, and Marriage

International Influence, and Marriage

In 1950, Barbara Ward married Australian Commander Robert Jackson, an administrator for the United Nations. Their son Robert was born in 1956, the same year that his father was knighted. Ward continued to use her own name professionally and was not widely known as Lady Jackson. 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. For the next two decades both husband and wife travelled a great deal, and eventually their marriage suffered from this. A legal separation was arranged in the early 1970s though Ward, as a Catholic, did not want divorce. In 1976 when she was given a life peerage she used her estranged husband's surname for her title as Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth.

Ward had been a frequent public speaker since leaving university, and by the 1960s her lectures attracted international respect; several lecture series, including some presented in Canada, Ghana and India, were published in book form. Ward spent increasing amounts of time in the US, much of her work there funded by the Carnegie Foundation. 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. 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 also influenced James Wolfensohn's thinking on development questions. 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'. This was a practical as well as an ethical concern: Ward believed such policies would encourage stability and peace. She is sometimes called a "distributist".