Under Ross' tutelage, her daughter Sarah became one of the first women to join the Oxford Union as a student and to speak in the Oxford Union's Debating Chamber. She later taught law at Oxford, became a senior executive at Lloyds Bank and later became a celebrated author of detective novels. While Sarah was at Oxford, Ross continued to engage in political activities ranging from protesting nuclear weapons to boycotting apartheid South Africa to opposing the Vietnam War. Even at an advanced age, she continued to make daily rounds to neighbouring houses to sell copies of "The Daily Worker" and participated in raising awareness regarding ongoing political campaigns. Acquaintances who met Ross during the later decades of her life noted that various hardships and impoverished economic circumstances had taken its toll on her. "She seemed burned out," Sommerfield recalled, "with bruise marks under her eyes and lines of discontent round her mouth; her once beautiful black hair looked dead, and she wore too much make-up, carelessly applied. Only her voice was the same, a rapid, confiding drawl full of italics. She was still using the slang and political cliches of her youth, and trying to shock with a freedom of speech that now was taken for granted." By this time, she had few clothes and very little money. Ross and writer Isherwood met a final time shortly before her death. In a diary entry for 24 April 1970, Isherwood recounted their final reunion in London in a diary entry:  Three years later, on 27 April 1973, Ross died at her home in Richmond on Thames, Surrey, aged 61, from cervical cancer. She was cremated at East Sheen. According to Ross' daughter Sarah Caudwell, her mother detested her popular identification with the vacuous character of Sally Bowles. She believed the political indifference of the character more closely resembled Isherwood himself or his hedonistic friends, many of whom "fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the Stormtroopers looked in their uniforms." Ross' opinion of Isherwood's own beliefs is partly confirmed by Isherwood biographer Peter Parker who wrote that Isherwood was "the least political" of W. H. Auden's social circle in Weimar Berlin, and Auden himself noted the young Isherwood "held no [political] opinions whatever about anything." According to her daughter, Ross further disliked the character of Sally Bowles as the character offended her feminist convictions: Isherwood's fictionalized depiction of Ross employed a literary convention which necessitated "that a woman must be either virtuous (in the sexual sense) or a tart.