Paul Samuelson’s first wife (they were married in Cambridge in 1938) and mother of their six children, Marion Estelle Crawford (b. 1915, d. 1978) graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe in 1937, with an A.B. summa cum laude in economics. For graduate study she was awarded a Harvard Annex Fellowship in 1937-38. In 1938-39 she received an Augustus Anson Whitney and Benjamin White Whitney Fellowship. She was awarded an A.M. in economics in 1940. Her sole publication was “The Australian Case for Protection Reexamined” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1939). Her New York Times obituary closed with the sentence “She retired when her first child was born in 1946.” It was still a time when motherhood was an absorbing state.
_________________________
High-School Honours
Source: Berlin High School (Wisconsin) 1933 Yearbook Mascoutin, pp. 16-17.
_________________________
Senior Yearbook Picture
Radcliffe, 1937
Source; The Radcliffe 30 and 7, p. 48.
_________________________
Copy of Joseph Schumpeter’s letter supporting Marion Crawford’s application for a fellowship
February 11, 1937
Dr. Bernice Cronkhite, Dean
Radcliffe College
Cambridge, Massachusetts
This is to support Miss Marion Crawford’s application for a fellowship for the next academic year. There cannot be any doubt but that she is one of our best students and that every effort should be made to make her further study financially possible. She proves her ability by the fact that, being a senior, she takes graduate courses with the utmost ease, and in fact much better than most of the graduates, whether male or female. Her equipment should prove particularly useful in the present state of economics, and I feel confident that her work will do credit to her and to Radcliffe.
Very sincerely yours,
J. A. Schumpeter
Source: Harvard University Archives. Department of Economics, Correspondence and Papers, 1930-1961. Box 21, Folder “Joseph A. Schumpeter 1933-1942”.
Image Source: Detail from a black-and-white photo of Marion Crawford and Paul Samuelson from the slideshow at the M.I.T. Memorial Service for Paul Samuelson (April 10, 2010). Colorized by Economics in the Rear-view Mirror.