Mary Turner Lane:
My mother was a college graduate.  Her family had sent her to Salem College, which at that time was a very fine boarding school for young women in North Carolina and in the South.  She graduated from Salem in the class of 1914, with a major in music, which was also traditional for young women of that time.  In the research that I’ve done on Salem College at the time that she was there, and even in the research I’ve done on Salem College when I was there, there was a strong feeling that education was appropriate for women, because—quote—when you’ve educated a woman, you’ve educated a home—unquote.  So education for women was justified in the early part of this century.  There was no emphasis on vocational education, except as you might become a music teacher or a teacher.  There were, of course, places where you could be trained as a nurse, but if you look at the liberal arts colleges, then you could either become a teacher, or could be a musician, or teach music from those.

- Mary Turner Lane, scholar and first director of the women's studies program at UNC

Interview with Mary Turner Lane by Pamela Dean, September 9 and 16, 1986; May 21, 1987; October 1 and 28, 1987, Interview L-0039, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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