Mary Paley Marshall

Who was Mary Paley Marshall?

Mary Paley Marshall, born Mary Paley, was an economist and one of the first women to study at Cambridge University.

She was born in Lincolnshire, England, a daughter of Rev. Thomas Paley, Rector of Ufford, and a great-granddaughter of the eighteenth-century theologian and philosopher William Paley. She was educated at home, excelling in languages: in 1871, after performing well in rigorous entrance exams, she earned a scholarship to become one of the first five students at the recently founded Newnham College in Cambridge. She took the Moral Sciences Tripos in 1874, and was classed between a first and second-class, though as a woman she was debarred from graduation. From 1875 to 1876 she was a Lecturer at Newnham.

In 1876, she became engaged to her economics teacher, Alfred Marshall: in 1878 she moved with him to found the teaching of economics at University College, Bristol. In 1883 she followed him to Oxford, before the couple returned to Cambridge in 1885 where they built and moved into Balliol Croft, renamed Marshall House in 1991. Mary lectured on economics herself, and was asked to develop 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 with moderate demand for it.