In a family and community that valued education, mathematical ability was recognized and encouraged rather than treated as unusual or inappropriate.

She graduated from Northeastern State with a degree in mathematics in 1928.

She was twenty years old.

She began teaching.

What Teaching Looked Like, And Why It Was Not Enough

For much of the 1930s, Mary Ross taught mathematics and science at schools in Oklahoma.

Teaching was one of the very few professional options available to women with academic ability in this period — particularly to women from communities outside the mainstream of white American professional life.

The legal and social barriers that confined women to a narrow range of occupations were real and largely unremarked upon, regarded as natural rather than constructed.