Ruth Glass

Who is Ruth Glass?

Ruth Glass was a German-born British sociologist.

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, the text of what would have been her major work, the Third London Survey, 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.