Susan Sutherland Fairhurst Isaacs (1885–1948)

Susan Sutherland Isaacs, née Fairhurst, was born in Turton, Lancashire, one of eight children in a working class family. Her parents were William Fairhurst, a saddler, local journalist and Methodist lay preacher, and his wife Miriam Sutherland. Her mother died when she was six years old. At age 15, she was forced to leave school by her father. After that she adopted her mother's surname of Sutherland. She was apprenticed to a photographer and then worked as a governess. In 1907, she began training as a teacher of young children at the University of Manchester, then transferred to studies in philosophy and graduated with first class honors. She won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she did research at the Psychological Laboratory and earned a master's degree in 1913. The study of the intellectual and social development of children and the improvement of infant and young education became her life's work. In 1914, she married William Brierley, a botanist, and moved with him to London. After the marriage ended in 1918, she traveled to Vienna in the hopes of psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud; but instead had three months of analysis with Otto Rank. On her return to London, she began attending meetings of the newly-formed British Psychoanalytical Society. In 1921, she published her first book, An Introduction to Psychology. She remarried to Nathan Isaacs, a metallurgist, the following year. She opened her own practice for adult and child patients in 1923. Between 1924 and 1927, she was the head of Malting House School in Cambridge, an experimental school that fostered individual development and gave children greater freedom than the era allowed. Her work on the play of children had a great influence on the teaching profession and early education. Between 1929 and 1940, she wrote an advice column under the pseudonym Ursula Wise, replying to readers' problems in several child care journals, such as The Nursery World and Home and School. In 1933, she became the first Head of the Child Development Department at the Institute of Education, University of London. She developed breast cancer in 1935 and struggled with pain and ill health for the rest of her life. Nevertheless, she undertook a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1937, and then moved to Cambridge, where she conducted the Cambridge Evacuation Survey. She was awarded the CBE in 1948 and published her last books, Childhood and After: Children and Parents – their Problems and Difficulties, and a collection of her Ursula Wise columns. She died that year at age 63.