An entry in the Women Medievalists and the Academy collection, this brief biography presents Cambridge historian Mary Bateson, scholar and suffragist, who lived on the cusp of the opportunity for academic professionalization for women. Her life illustrates an inspiring blend of serious scholarship, accessible publication, and devoted political activism. Her achievements can remind twenty-first-century women medievalists in the academy of the occasional necessity to move our work out of the enclosed enclaves of the university library and the professional conference and into the more immediate spheres of politics and popular publication.