"I was a single parent and single wage-earner, and how in the world I could ever do a dissertation, I don't know."
Female graduate students 1945 - NC Collection
In addition to breaking away from traditional roles, women in academic and professional careers often faced very particular challenges and obstacles that men in their positions did not encounter. Just as women had been obliged to take up the typically male role of head of household during the World Wars, so too women in academia and the professional arena were responsible for supporting themselves (and occasionally their families as well) outside of the typical framework.
Mary Turner Lane was a widowed mother while she pursued her Ph.D. Her responsibilities as a single parent and a single wage-earner severely challenged her ability to complete her degree. The necessity of working in order to support herself and her child left her very little time to work on her dissertation.
Women and men were far from equal in the workplace in the early twentieth century. If a woman left her work, she did not necessarily have any assurance of job security. Bonnie Cone was a single woman whose teaching salary helped support herself and her parents. She describes her need for some assurance of job security from her employers before she could accept the exciting opportunity to teach at Duke during World War II.
The need to support family members was not limited to single women. Guion Griffis Johnson recalls how concern for her husband’s health galvanized her to continue her work as a social scientist and historian in order to be able to support her family and her children’s education should her husband’s health fail.
