Carolyn Bell, 85; Professor Inspired Women to Aim High in Business Jobs

Carolyn Shaw Bell, an economics professor who inspired generations of female students to aim for the top in the male-dominated fields of business and finance, has died. She was 85.

Bell, who taught at Wellesley College for almost 40 years, died of a degenerative neurological illness May 13 at her home in Arlington, Va., the university announced.

For the last decade -- and many years before that -- economics has been the top major at Wellesley College, a phenomenon considered unusual for an all-women’s school. Even though Bell retired in 1989, the suburban Boston university and former students credit her dynamic teaching style for the popularity of the major and her relentless promotion of graduates for helping them achieve.

“She made economics really relevant, and she really sent this message across: Take yourself seriously. You can do anything. Go out there and show them,” said Alicia Munnell, a former student and Boston College professor who was assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Clinton administration.

“She would follow you wherever your life led,” Munnell said. “If you did anything good, she’d write you a note saying, ‘That’s terrific.’ You’d get this feeling of, ‘How could she know?’ ”

A proponent of networking before it was a trend, Bell started a newsletter devoted to the triumphs of Wellesley women in economics, business and finance that she sent to the graduates she proudly called FEMS for “former economics majors.”

Among those on the extensive mailing list were Ellen Marram, who was chief executive of fruit juice company Tropicana in the late 1990s; Helen “Sunny” Ladd, a professor of economics and public policy at Duke University; and Lois Juliber, a former chief operating officer of Colgate-Palmolive.

“She gave you permission to believe in yourself,” Juliber said. “She put economics in context, whether it had to do with politics or corporate issues from an accounting perspective. You realized it could be part of your life.”

No student was too far removed from the classroom to be beyond Bell’s reach. After Juliber’s company was acquired in the late 1980s, she got a letter from Bell offering to help her figure out what to do next. Juliber had graduated in 1971.

Carolyn Shaw was born June 21, 1920, in Framingham, Mass. At Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass., she switched her major from philosophy to economics, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1941.

“Economics raises a reaction in me,” Bell said several years ago in a Wellesley publication. “I’m a data freak; I like to look at raw data and see the relationships between things.”

This affection for the abstruse followed her to the London School of Economics, where she earned a doctorate in 1949. In London, she also gave birth to her only child. Her daughter, Tova Maria Solo, and a grandson survive her.

Within a couple of years she was divorced and looking for a job.

When Bell arrived at Wellesley in 1950, she had already spent four years helping economist John Kenneth Galbraith run the federal Office of Price Administration, which was established during World War II to fight inflation.

In the 1970s, she advised the presidential campaign of Jimmy Carter and helped found the American Economic Assn.’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.

She wrote two books: “Consumer Choice in the American Economy” (1967) and “The Economics of the Ghetto” (1970).

For much of her life, Bell was hard of hearing and used a dog trained to help her overcome that obstacle.

In 1953, she married Nelson Sibly Bell, who owned a music box store in Wellesley. He died in 1991.

They were known for frequently entertaining Wellesley students and serving a proper Anglophile’s dinner -- roast beef and Yorkshire pudding -- while showing tomorrow’s high-achieving women how family and a career in economics could be combined.