Carolina Alumni Review - September/October 2011

KATHERINE CARMICHAEL NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION

something to fuss at during the bombing,
she was something to laugh at during the
raid — indeed, she saved the occasion dur-
ing the raid, because we were all laughing
at her — armed police and all.”
She put the pregnant cat on a plane and
had a friend fetch it at Raleigh-Durham
Airport.

missed curfews, or drinks, and one could find herself packing for home.

“One of the big things about rush was to smoke,” Sharon Mujica ’ 61 said in an oral history interview in 1991. “So I think a lot of women smoked and we just thought it was ridiculous. And probably, though, we didn’t do it. You know, because you always had this feeling that Katherine Carmichael might be watching you. And she would reprimand people she saw on the street.

“I do remember standing
and talking to her, I guess, in
front of South Building … and
her reprimanding students as
they walked along.” Mujica was
a Campus Y leader and a mem-
ber of Valkyries — Carmichael
later would try to hire her as
one of her assistants; still later she visited
Mujica several times while Mujica was liv-
ing in Mexico City.
The first “adviser to women,” Clara Lin-
gle, wrote shortly after her appointment in
1917, “I had no precedent to
follow, and the duties were but
vaguely defined to me.” That had
been thoroughly cleared up by
Carmichael’s second year as dean
— Carolina had a student hand-
book and a women’s handbook.
The detailed rules weren’t of her
hand — they were more like a
collaboration — but they fit her
idea of how to get an education
and be a proper Southern lady at
the same time, and she was
adamant that they be followed.

Priscilla Wyrick ’ 62 said that her entering class in 1958 was brought in as the “first organ-

Carmichael enjoyed center stage at a campus watermelon eating contest, about 1957.

∑

She was
very, very
Southern, very
old-fashioned;

no, that’s not the
right word —
she was prudish.
Her standards
with the 1960s.’
Karen Parker ’ 65

Rules are rules

Just as the trombone becomes a tuba in many retellings of the Philippines cruise tale, some women recall having to wear raincoats over their gym clothes to cross the campus, and others say they had to change at the gym. Some say the dean stopped them on campus and personally dressed them down for unladylike behavior; others insist she never would have unloaded in public.