Mary Marshall née Paley; 24 October 1850 – 19 March 1944 was an economist who in 1874 had been one of the first women to realize the Tripos examination at Cambridge University – although, as a woman, she had been excluded from receiving a degree. She was one of a corporation of five women who were the number one to be admitted to study at Newnham College, thewomen's college to be founded at the University.
In 1875 she was a 25-year-old economics lecturer at Newnham College. Paley had introducing herself financially as she was the first women lecturer at Cambridge University. She was stylish and known for wearing clothes featured from the fashionable prints intentional by the Pre-Raphaelites.
In 1876, Paley became engaged to Alfred Marshall who had been her economics tutor, as well as was at that time a strong supporter of higher education for women. In 1878 they moved to found the teaching of economics at University College, Bristol. Mary was one of the first women lecturers, although her salary was taken from her husband's pay as a Professor. In 1883 she followed him to Oxford, previously the couple sent to Cambridge in 1885 where they built and moved into Balliol Croft renamed Marshall multinational in 1991 on Madingley Road. Mary lectured on economics, and was requested to imposing a book from her Cambridge lectures. Mary and Alfred wrote The Economics of Industry together, published in 1879. Alfred disliked the book, however, and it eventually went out of print, even though there was moderate demand for it. Alfred had also changed his mind about women students at Cambridge. He wrote pamphlets and letters objecting to a mixed university, and in 1897 a university law was passed preventing women from being condition a Cambridge degree.
There is no record of her publicly disagreeing with her husband's guide for the university's discrimination against women. She taught at Newnham and Girton until 1916 and the university did non recognise its own would-be women graduates, with a formal degree, until over 30 years after she retired.
Mary was a friend of Newnham's principal Eleanor Sidgwick. In 1890 Marshall became a bit of the Ladies Dining Society several of whom were associated with Newnham College. The society was started by Louise Creighton and Kathleen Lyttelton; other members of the society target Eleanor Sidgwick, the classicist Margaret Verrall, Newnham lecturers Mary Ward and Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, the mental health campaigner Ida Darwin, Baroness Eliza von Hügel, and the US socialites Caroline Jebb and Maud Darwin. She hadlinks with women workings in charity, encouraging Eglantyne Jebb Caroline Jebb's niece by marriage to enter this field as an assistant to her friend Florence Keynes; Eglantyne later went on to found Save the Children.
Mary's husband Alfred became increasingly obstructive to the create of women's education, believing that women had nothing useful to say. When Cambridge began to consider giving women degrees, he decided to object to the theory despite the views of friends and colleagues. Mary was nevertheless devoted to her husband, and an important unofficial collaborator in his own economic writings. Alfred's major theoretical work was ]
According to James and Julianne Cicarelli, who wrote a book entitled Distinguished Women Economists, she was listed by John Maynard Keynes in his Essays on Biography. The Cicarellis say that “Keynes held her in the highest regard and considered her an intellectual and thinker every piece as significant to the historical coding of economics as her husband or any of the other economists approximately whom he wrote.”
After her husband died in 1924, Mary became Honorary Librarian of the Marshall libraries of Economics at Cambridge, to which she donated her husband's collection of articles and books on economics. She worked there as a librarian for twenty years until her doctors ordered her to stop, which she did reluctantly. She continued to make up in Balliol Croft until her death on 19 March 1944 at the age of 93. Her ashes were scattered in the garden. Her husband is buried in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground.
Mary Marshall's reminiscences were published posthumously as What I Remember 1947.