The Lectures to Women given by Alfred Marshall at Cambridge in 1873, which focus on the effects of working conditions on man's character and prospects, are unique in their content and purpose. They offer insight into a radical period in Marshall's life of which relatively little is known.This new critical edition makes the Lectures, which have sometimes been referred to by Marshallian scholars, available to a wider body of historians of economic thought. Based on Mary Paley Marshall's original notes, corrected by Marshall himself, the Lectures are supplemented by Marshall's lecture outlines. Some contemporary and related texts are also published here including a paper on the future of the working classes from the same year and Marshall's exchange of articles with the trade unionist John Holmes in 1874 known as the Bee-Hive debate.

A contextualised commentary on the lectures is provided by Rita McWilliams Tullberg, Ernesto Biagini and Tiziano Raffaelli who adopt three lines of enquiry respectively: the lectures as part of the movement for higher education for women in the Victorian era, the lectures as indicative of Marshall's stand vis-a-vis the political-ideological framework of the time and the lectures as an indicator of Marshall's methodological tendencies concerning the study of social phenomena.