ast 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.
