In this interview, Ingrid Ellen Winther begins by discussing her childhood and early education. She reflects on her memories of the first day at Pembroke College, her active social life, and her academics, pausing to note the lack of female role models at Pembroke. She felt that women were being educated to be good mothers and good wives, and while women felt that they could work and get a decent job, they were ultimately going to be married and be homemakers.

Winther moves on to discuss her life after graduation with emphasis on her graduate work, meeting her first husband, and raising children while moving according to her husband’s teaching positions. She considers the struggle of making a name for herself as a woman historian, especially as the daughter of a famous historian and the wife of an even more renowned scholar. She speaks on the difficulty of being a woman in academia while raising four children and the lack of support for her choices.

Winther remembers not wanting to be Mrs. James Scobie after the death of her husband, and pursuing validation for her tremendous potential independent of her brilliant husband and brilliant father. She discusses teaching at a women’s college, and considers the difficulty of keeping her personal life separate from her professional life. She speaks on discrimination within her academic professional life, and learning to retort at sexist comments.

Winther contemplates how gender expectations learned from her parents shaped her career, discussing the difficulty of overcoming the expectation that her husband’s career came first and the imperative of valorizing her intellectual self-esteem outside relationships with men. Winther ends her interview by considering the intellectual stimulation she found at Pembroke, and her interest in art as an escape from the tension in her personal and professional lives.