My mother, Joan Maizels, who has died aged 97, was a lifelong socialist and feminist, and a passionate champion of the disadvantaged; she was one of the few radical independent female social scientists in the postwar period.
The youngest of six children, she was born in Battersea, south-west London, to George Sidey, a civil servant, and Nellie (nee McNicol). She left school at 16, and voyaged alone on a tramp steamer from Tilbury to Aberdeen, where she stayed with family friends who encouraged her to go back to education. Joan was determined to live an independent life and to break away from expectations of women being wives and mothers and little else.
She returned to London and completed her school certificate at night school while working at the Metal Box factory as a personnel officer. There she met Winifred R Moss, also working in personnel, who became a lifelong friend, urged her to go to university and introduced her to her circle of radical women thinkers and activists, including Elinor Goldschmied, Margot Jefferys and Eileen Daffern.
She went to the London School of Economics to study social sciences, and there met Alfred Maizels, who was studying economics. They married in 1942. After the war, Joan worked at the Tavistock Institute, setting up a home-based nursery for her children and those of her friends, with advice from Anna Freud.
During her long research career, Joan challenged establishment opinions on the difficulties facing women, adolescents, young children and immigrants in society, and on the socioeconomics of health inequalities, leading to a number of groundbreaking papers and books. In 1968 she became honorary research fellow in the sociology department of Bedford College, London.
Her research led her to denounce prevailing negative attitudes to newly arriving West Indian immigrants, while her study of children living in high-rise flats powerfully demonstrated how planners had neglected to consider how children could play safely outside, beyond their mother’s gaze. With Nan Berger, she published the pioneering feminist treatise Woman – Fancy or Free? in 1962, travelling to Paris to discuss ideas with Simone de Beauvoir.
Her other books included Adolescent Needs and the Transition from School to Work (1970), Social Workers and Volunteers (with Anthea Holme, 1978) and Stepping Gently: Poems by Joan Maizels (1998). Joan was also active in CND, the anti-apartheid movement, the Council for Children’s Welfare, the British Association of Social Workers and Age Concern.
An accomplished pianist, on retirement Joan returned to the piano after a 30-year gap, and also immersed herself in writing poetry, winning medals at the Cheltenham literary festival. She obtained an Open University arts degree when aged 71, and an MA in women’s studies at the age of 77, based on her research into the English writer Eliot Bliss.
Alf died in 2006. Joan is survived by three children, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
