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Eläis Judith Williams was born on 23 February 1917, the third of four daughters; her father was an international lawyer, and, in her words, a great thinker; her mother was an accomplished artist. Judith spent ten years of her childhood in Paris and learned to speak French fluently. She subsequently read history at Cambridge, where she gained First Class Honours. It was at Cambridge that she met David Hubback, whom she married in 1939.
From her father Judith inherited a political intelligence; her keen interest in current and international affairs persisted up to her death. Her mother introduced her to poetry, and this became a lifelong love, both reading it and writing it. For Judith however the relationship with her mother lacked warmth; finding little space in the family for acknowledging feelings, she became a keen observer of people. She and her younger sister were ‘meant to have been’ boys. There was a strong emphasis in her upbringing on intellectual values and moral principles, unselfishness and honesty being the prime virtues. Judith's interest in psychology, beginning here in her early childhood, was stimulated further by her experiences in the Second World War. Bringing up the eldest of her three children while separated from her husband, and struggling alongside other women in similar circumstances, led her to reflect further both sociologically and psychologically on her own situation and on wider feminist issues. In 1953 she undertook a research project into the lives of women graduates who had married, resulting in her book Wives Who Went to College .
This research, which was considerably ahead of its time, was an attempt by Judith to deal with some of her own frustrations. She had taught history in schools, despite the problems met then by married women who wanted to teach; she found absorbing and successful freelance work in journalism, broadcasting, and lecturing; but she was unsatisfied and often depressed, knowing that a substantial part of herself