Mary Jane Ward (née Martin; 6 June 1851 – 14 March 1933), known to her friends as "Minnie", was a Cambridge-based Irish suffragist, lecturer and writer.

[1] When she was fifteen the family moved to Royston in Hertfordshire, and Mary became a pupil-teacher for a year at a school in Hampstead, after which she continued to educate herself while working as a governess.

[1] During the early 1880s, Martin attended a series of lectures given by James Ward, a fellow of Trinity College (later to become Professor of Mental Philosophy and Logic) who was also a strong supporter of women's education.

[4] From 1890 until its dissolution in 1914 she was a member of the Ladies Dining Society,[5] an exclusive women's activist discussion group that had been established by Kathleen Lyttelton and Louise Creighton, both of whom were also wives of Cambridge academics.

[6] In April 1908 her two-act play Man and Woman was performed in a hall in Shepherd's Bush, London, the suffrage newspaper Votes for Women noting that it was "sometimes quite lively and amusing".

[7] It became popular over the next few years, a single 1911 performance making a profit of £10 for an organisation that Ward helped to found: the Eastern Counties Federation of the NUWSS.

[1] In 1918 Ward became honorary secretary to the Cambridge branch of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, the successor to the NUWSS, a position she held until 1923.

[1] There she wrote Memories of Kenneth Martin Ward to commemorate her son, professor of physics at University College, Rangoon, who had died in 1927 aged 39.