Garrick row shows up the dinosaurs desperate to shut women out

Last week, the woman likely to become Britain's first female chancellor was invited to give a lecture at the heart of the economic establishment.

- Gaby Hinsliff

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.

Staggeringly, it was 1948 before Cambridge began formally awarding degrees to women and 1988 before its last all-male college, Magdalene, grudgingly voted to admit them. And even then, some students paraded around in black armbands as if something important had died. But it was the Oxford and Cambridge Club that held out longest; women with Oxbridge degrees could not become full members of a club that exists only for Oxbridge degree holders until 1996. Until then, men who scraped thirds were favoured over women with firsts.