OUTHERN ISTORICAL OLLECTION
SHC
THECHAPEL HILLWEEKLY
Letterhead from the
Manila Hotel, where she lived in
1951-52; one of her classes in the Philippines; and
with Miaw, the cat she later shipped home from Vietnam.
son County, Ala. “I guess I was prouder of
that job than any other I ever had. My stu-
dents were so poor then … no coats … and
clothes so badly patched that I remember
one girl’s remarking, ‘mama has made over
everything that has already been made over,
and now there’s nothing left to make over.’
“When all were so needy, you feared
showing favoritism, but I did give away
coats and anything else I could spare,
which wasn’t much, since I was paid about
$490 a year from 1932 to 1936.”
Carmichael went after her advanced
degrees because she wanted to teach col-
lege. She would teach 19th-century English
literature throughout her time as dean at
UNC. Only, not Henry David Thoreau. “I
have preferred not to teach Thoreau to my
classes for several years now,” she told The
DTH in 1975. “I don’t have much sympa-
thy with his retreat to Walden Pond. Oh, I
know that he is very big with your genera-
tion, but I don’t believe in dodging respon-
sibilities. I feel that everybody has a respon-
sibility to the social framework.”
Shortly after retiring, she was in Turkey,
teaching with the Istanbul Language and
Cultural Association. Wracked by arthritis
in her later years, she still taught Shake-
speare and Chaucer in a community col-
lege in Cape Coral, Fla.
Her correspondence while in the Philippines and Vietnam fill several folders in the
UNC archives. Nowhere is there any indication that the initiative to see and serve the
world unaccompanied was anything other
than her own.
Carmichael forwarded her Reader’s
Digest subscription to Manila, where she
taught English in a secondary school, plus a
college-level course in English Romantic
poetry. She volunteered to take on a freshman English course when she saw the
need; in reports to her superiors she spared
no words on the inadequacies of the educational system and how it ought to be fixed.
“For the first time in many years I have
leisure sufficient to be nice to people,” she
wrote to her family.
Years later she told The DTH, “I asked
to be sent to the Far East because I felt at
the time that that area of our world would
be very important in the years to come.”
In 1952, the summer following her stint
in the Philippines, she visited Rotterdam,
Edinburgh, London, Paris, Zurich, Vienna,
Naples, Florence, Brussels, Antwerp, Ams-
terdam, Copenhagen and Rome before she
came home. She went around the world in
1967. She generally traveled alone, except
when she took her mother to the
Caribbean.
