In legal discourse, the Marshall cases (C-152/84 and C-271/91) have become known as landmark judgements for gender equality. Yet for historians, Helen Marshall’s legal journey is an invitation to make a broader claim of how to approach a landmark case in the history of European law ‘from below’, moving away from a binary analysis of European institutions on the one hand and national structures on the other. Based on original research using a wide range of newspaper articles, published documents from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and archival documents, this article follows Helen Marshall’s legal journey from 1978 to 1993. Using Marshall’s individual role as a ‘heuristic tool’, the article argues that Marshall was a ‘legal entrepreneur’ of her own cause with her actions reflecting the British zeitgeist through the medium of European law. It demonstrates that the legal construction of the Community was by no means a project driven solely by elites. The article further nuances the notion of Britain, as a nation, as an ‘awkward partner’ by highlighting that Marshall, a British citizen, actively contributed to European integration within a complex of other actors.