This week, the woman likely to become Britain’s first female chancellor was invited to give a lecture at the heart of the economic establishment. And in it, Rachel Reeves briefly paid credit to a woman who went before her. Not Margaret Thatcher – Reeves came more to bury than to praise her – but Mary Paley Marshall, the pioneering economist who in 1874 became one of the first two women allowed to sit her finals at Newnham College, Cambridge, in what was then called moral sciences.
Though Marshall passed with flying colours and went on to lecture in economics at Cambridge, she was never awarded a degree, because those were only for men. So jealously was this privilege guarded that almost two decades later, proposals to award degrees to women sparked a riot. A hostile mob of male students threw eggs, let off fireworks, started a bonfire in the street and marched on the all-female Newnham College.
