Starting a career following husband's unexpected death
MacLachlan discusses the difficulties she faced when she was faced with the necessity of going to work following her husband's death in 1959. Shortly before her husband passed, MacLachlan had begun to consider options of work and continued education; however, his sudden passing made the decisions she faced all the more difficult and imperative. Her comments are revealing of challenges women of that era faced with issues of work and family.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Emily S. MacLachlan, July 16, 1974. Interview G-0038. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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But your mother never thought of having a career and didn't
really encourage you to?
- EMILY S. MACHLACHLAN:
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Oh, no. In those days, if you had … she never encouraged me,
but I think that she would have been very, very happy to see me have
one. So, I never had a career until my husband died. I had never earned
my own living. And suddenly, I was called on to educate the two younger
sons. Only the eldest had been educated. I was fifty-one when my husband
died. I had never made a paycheck. And my income was drastically cut. I
had just recently taken a job at a little country school as a librarian,
I had gone back to the university's college of education to
get a teaching certificate, because no matter how many degrees you had,
you couldn't teach in a county school unless you had your
teaching certificate and I had been qualified to teachiin English,
social sciences and library, to run a school library. So, I was sent out
into the county just two weeks before my husband died. And he said,
"Well, you can try it out there and see how you like
it." And I wanted the money to put my middle son through a
private college. The other one had gone to the University and the second
son wanted to go to Millsap College, our old school back in Mississippi.
So, I was out there when he died and fortunately did have a job, but it
only paid $3200 and he had been
… his salary had gotten up to about $11,000, I
guess, which was high for 1959. It would be low for today. And my salary
today is about what his was when he died.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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You went back to school and got your PhD.?
- EMILY S. MACHLACHLAN:
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Well, I taught at the country school for a year, had charge of the
library and taught the senior social science students, there were only
twenty of them, commuted back and forth to this little town with a group
of girls. Then, I had to make a decision as to whether I should teach in
a country school for the rest of my life and maybe eventually hope to
get into the city schools, or whether I would try for college teaching.
I had had a little taste of college teaching, I ought to take this back,
I did get a paycheck while he was still living. Because one of his
former graduate students who headed the department of sociology at
Mississippi Southern, now part of the university system, called me in
desperation and said that he had lost one of his sociology professors
and needed somebody to be sent to fill the spring quarter. So, I said,
flipantly, "Well, if you can't find anybody,
I'll come." And he took me up on it and my husband
urged me to go. So, I came up to Mississippi Southern and taught that
spring quarter. And that was the first paycheck that I had made. That
was the spring before he died, '59, in September of
'59. But I had never expected to continue, it was just kind
of a lark, you know. But all the time I was teaching at the county
schools out in the country, I realized that I had done it at Mississippi
Southern and I could do it again. I remember that I used to sit up
almost all the night at Mississippi Southern in Hattiesburg working at
the lecture for the next day, because I had never done it before. And I
think that my mother's example of being a very independent
woman gave me the courage to do that. My husband would write to me and
every letter, he would say, "Dear Professor," you
know, he was very proud of that. So, he encouraged me and I
shouldn't have done it, because he was not well. I
didn't know that his health had
deteriorated that much. But he had emphysema from tobacco smoking and an
advanced case of it and it finally got him. But my three sons have
always been women's rights people, they read The
Feminine Mystique when it first came out, the two older ones,
the youngest was only eleven when his father died, and I still have him
as a graduate student at our university.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
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So, did you finish your degree or did you start teaching?
- EMILY S. MACHLACHLAN:
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I went back to college education and headed for an Ed. D. After I had
taught at the country school. And then, in the summer of '61,
the Sociology department was just falling apart. Not only had my husband
died, and another professor in the department had died, two or three had
left, and so Dr. Shaw Grigsby, the man that took it over temporarily
asked me to come and teach that summer. And he said, "I hate to
offer you the job, almost, because I know if I do, you probably
won't finish your doctorate in education." I did the
course work in '60 -'61 term … see, I
taught at the country school during the '59-'60
term, and then in the '60-'61 nine month term, I
went back to graduate school. In the summer of '61, my
husband's mother, who lived with us was dying of lung cancer
and I was nursing her, but Dr. Grigsby wanted me to teach at the
university. It was a very hard decision to make. I needed the money and
I wanted to get my foot in the door. So, I did. I taught the course in
marriage and family and I taught the course in rural sociology. I had
taught marriage and the family at Mississippi Southern, I had never
taught rural sociology before. So, by hook or by crook, somehow, I got
through that summer. And then, I decided that to finish the dissertation
and to get the Ed. D. didn't mean that much; what I really
needed was income and to get on with my university teaching and I still
had a lot of family responsibilities. I had a big
house to care of. So, twice, I didn't go all the way for the
PhD., you see. But it didn't seem to matter, because they
finally did give me tenure and I never could rise above assistant
professor, but it didn't make that much difference. I enjoyed
my teaching, did what I needed for the family budget and my colleagues
… I was the first woman to teach in the social sciences
department of the university college, for a long time, for about six
years, I was the only woman.