Eva Maria Cox (née Hauser; born 21 February 1938) is an Austrian-born Australian writer, feminist, sociologist, social commentator and activist. She has been an active advocate for creating a "more civil" society. She was a long-term member of the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL), and is still pursuing feminist change by putting revaluing social contributions and wellbeing onto political agendas, as well as recognising the common ground between Australia's First Nations and feminist values of the importance of the social. Early life Eva Maria Hauser was born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1938, less than three weeks before the Anschluss (12 March 1938) that left her and her family stateless. The following year, she traveled with her mother Ruth, a final-year medical student, to England, UK; she spent the war—technically as an enemy alien in Surrey. Her father, Richard Hauser, joined the British Army in Palestine, and her grandparents and other relatives sought refuge in Sydney. After the war, her father worked for the United Nations Refugee Association in Rome, Italy, where Cox continued her schooling for two years. In 1948 she joined her mother's extended family in Sydney. In Sydney she attended Sydney Girls' High School. Two years after arrival, her father began a relationship with the pianist Hephzibah Menuhin, who was at that time married to an Australian grazier, Lindsay Nicholas, and living in western Victoria. Hauser and Menuhin divorced their respective spouses to marry, and Menuhin became Cox's stepmother. Cox attended the University of Sydney from 1956 to 1957, where she met Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes and became associated with the Sydney Push. However, she chose to leave university to travel throughout Europe, where she met John Cox. They married on return to Sydney, and in 1964, they became parents of a daughter, named Rebecca. Rebecca was conceived in Hughenden, Queensland, where Eva Cox had gone to reunite with her husband after they had separated. In 1969 they separated again. Career Cox returned to study as a single mother in the early 1970s, graduating with an Honours degree in Sociology from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 1974, and became a tutor and research consultant in that department. In the 1970s, Cox became a spokeswoman for the WEL and she later helped to found the Women's Economic Think Tank. Cox was director of the New South Wales Council for Social Service (NCOSS) from