On a recent Saving Stories segment, WUKY's Alan Lytle and Dr. Doug Boyd, Director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, featured UK graduate Austin Page Lilly. https://www.wuky.org/term/saving-stories#stream/0
Entering UK in 1914, a friend influenced Austin Lilly to major in home economics, one of the fastest growing departments in the university, rather than chemistry. Still, her new major required that she complete four years of chemistry with the male students. She recalled that, "Some of us were better students than some of the men in chemistry. We weren't taking a back seat!" Austin thought that during her student days women were well on their way to equality within American society.
Austin Lilly remained single and spent her career teaching at the high school and college level. When asked on a 1938 Alumni Questionnaire to give the full name of her husband or wife, Lilly wrote in large letters across the page, “neither-nor.”
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