The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (12 page)

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Waters was not alone. America experienced a spike in divorces after

World War II, jumping from approximately 16.7 percent in 1936 to 26.4

percent in 1946 (Day 1964, 511). Despite the Catholic prohibition against

divorce, these fi gures varied little between Catholics and Protestants, averag-

ing 21 and 25 percent, respectively (Robinson 2008). Divorce rates dropped

in the 1950s, when approximately 80 percent of Americans were married.

But it would be a mistake to infer that these statistics refl ect overall marital

satisfaction, for couples in those days separated much more often than they

divorced (Gerson 205–7), and there is enormous anecdotal evidence to sug-

gest countless unhappy marriages. Nor do these statistics suggest a general

acceptance of divorce among Catholics. Mary Gordon notes that her mother,

a legal secretary, explained that her boss did not “‘handle divorce.’ She said

this as if divorce were a particularly nasty, possibly toxic species of effl uvia,

which they very well knew better than to touch” (2007, 23).

Despite their Catholic upbringing, this sampling of midcentury Irish

American women writers greatly exceeded the national average of divorces

long before they became commonplace. Perhaps as a result, they also con-

formed with the fad of seeking psychoanalysis to understand themselves.

Caryl Rivers offers one explanation: “I would love to see the data on how

many female alcoholics and frigid wives evolved out of that crazy indoctrina-

tion” (1973, 185).

Work + Religion + Education = Assimilation

Regardless of their marital or psychological problems, Irish American

women writers at midcentury outperformed their unhyphenated peers. In

1959, while the average American woman was engaged at age seventeen,

married by twenty, and mother of four by twenty-four, Irish Catholic fami-

lies were encouraging their daughters to postpone marriage. Although the

proportion of women attending college dropped from 47 percent in 1920, to

35 percent in 1958—increasing numbers of Irish American women went to

college and worked throughout their lives (Woods 2005). “A century earlier,

women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a

husband” (Friedan 1973, 150). Not so with the Irish Americans.

Just as “Teaching ultimately allowed daughters . . . of immigrants to

leave the working class and enter the educated lower middle class” (Nolan

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2004, 137), education in the postwar years ensured that Irish American

women writers continued to move up. They went to college when other

women were dropping out; they were among the 15 percent who married

and kept working. They established careers that granted them membership

in the top tier of Catholic professionals, the 9 percent of Catholics in the

upper class (Schneider 1952). That they did so long before the advent of

second-wave feminism no doubt accounts for their above-average rates of

marriage, divorce, and psychoanalysis.

The works discussed here confi rm these statistics; more important, they

also relate aspects of Irish America that challenge its conventional portrayal

as a conformist patriarchy in which women were at most housekeepers or

nannies, their parents pious simpletons or atavistic ethnics. This picture of

Irish America not only offers a convincing response to the traditional mono-

lithic view; it also reveals how Irish American women laid the groundwork

for future generations.

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2

The 1960s

The Rise of Feminism

I am as dull as the picture I ripped out of the frame, dull as

the idea of a mirror over the couch. Impersonation of wife and

mother. I have begun to wonder what I am like in real life.

—Maureen Howard,
Facts of Life

The Eisenhower era provided a seedbed for American feminism. Whereas

the war years had encouraged married women to leave their homes

to support the war effort, the postwar years pushed them back. As chapter

1 outlined, a cultural and public relations blitz resulted in a “consolidated

attack on women’s new-found freedom.” Women were urged to stay home,

take advantage of all the new labor saving devices, and view their roles as

wife and mother as embodying “autonomy and responsibility” if not destiny

(Whelehan 1995, 7). Many succumbed. Across America, the average marriage

age fell to twenty, the lowest since the 1900s; overall 70 percent of young

women were married by age twenty-four. Worse, single women over twenty-

four were considered old maids (Davis 1991, 17). But although motherhood

is important it is hardly glamorous, and while vacuum cleaners and washing

machines made housework easier, they could not make it fun. Regardless of

age or ethnicity, many American women felt alienated and dehumanized by

housework (Whelehan 1995, 9). Thus it is not surprising that, apart from the

civil rights movement, the most important and enduring social phenomenon

of this decade was women’s liberation (Woods 2005, 363).

This chapter traces the growth of the women’s movement as portrayed

in Irish American women’s writing in the 1960s. Through their novels and

5 2

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short stories, these authors reminded readers that in love, marriage, work,

and religion, women were second-class citizens and they were not happy

about it—an attitude most often conveyed via satire to illustrate the “femi-

nine mystique.” The 1960s saw Irish American women’s novels lamenting

unhappy marriages, condescending husbands, and domestic abuse, themes

characterizing their status at home, at work, and at church.

Why such a consistent message? Because Irish American writers had an

advantage unavailable to their peers. Whereas many women found it diffi cult

to organize because they lived in different neighborhoods or lacked a central

organizing body and could not build the critical mass necessary to effect

political change (Woods 2005, 364), through the mid-sixties Irish Ameri-

cans were still bound by their religious beliefs and thus possessed a “collec-

tive consciousness” (Cochrane 2010, 2). Most important, as members of the

largest, most enduring, and most literate of American ethnic groups, Irish

American women not only had a long history of voicing displeasure through

their writing but they also anticipated the need for change.

In this they consistently pre-dated their closest literary rivals, Jewish

American women. Whereas Ruth Herschberger’s
Adam’s Rib
(1948), Alva

Myrdal and Viola Klein’s
Women’s Two Roles
(1956), Rona Jaffe’s
The Best of

Everything
(1958), and Alix Kate Shulman’s
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

(1971) have been cited as the earliest twentieth-century feminist novels

(Brownmiller 1999, 40, 45), Irish American women were actually the fi rst

to raise these issues. Mary McCarthy published
The Company She Keeps
in

1942 and Maeve Brennan’s “Talk of the Town” had been satirizing male

vanity since 1949. During the 1960s, Helen Gurley Brown gained fame for

Sex and the Single Girl
(1962); Maureen Howard put a satirical, feminist spin

on the message in
Bridgeport Bus
(1963); Elizabeth Cullinan criticized the

infl uence of the Catholic Church in her 1960s
New Yorker
stories; and Mary

Daly blew them all away by arguing for women’s equality in
The Church

and the Second Sex
(1968). Given their history, it is not surprising that Irish

American women were ready for the women’s movement, for they had been

fi ghting this battle throughout their adult lives.

During the 1960s, Women’s Liberation movements sprang up all over

the country, among them the New York Radicals, the Chicago Women’s

Liberation Union, and Boston’s Cell 16 of Female Liberation. After the

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54 | T H E B A N S H E E S

New York Radicals grew too unwieldy, the Redstockings formed as a splin-

ter group. WITCH—known variously as Women’s International Terrorist

Conspiracy from Hell, Women Inspired to Tell Their Collective History, or

Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays—was formed to move

from raising consciousness to raising hell, with factions in New York, Wash-

ington, DC, and elsewhere. Angered by Jewish feminists’ assumptions that

their Catholic counterparts were “intellectually inferior” because of their

working-class backgrounds, the Irish American Redstocking Sheila Cro-

nan formed a separate group—the Class Workshop—to discuss how their

upbringing had affected Catholic women’s confi dence and political rheto-

ric (Brownmiller 1999, 65). A radical feminist, Cronan instigated the plan

to hang a banner from the Statue of Liberty reading “Free Abortion on

Demand,” an idea unfortunately scuttled; she was also one of the fi rst to

argue that marriage enslaved women and that to achieve equality, it should

be abolished (Echols 1989, 142).

Irish Jewish friction was clearly a by-product of World War II. Prior to

the war, Irish American women dominated the female sphere of the publish-

ing world, representing the major female ethnic group among the literati.

But after the war, thanks to the infl ux of Jewish immigrants and Americans’

response to the Holocaust, anti-Semitism faded in the face of postwar pros-

perity, necessitating an expanded workforce; consequently, Jews became a

part of the mainstream, entering the white-collar echelons and moving to

the suburbs. Whereas the best-known female Jewish writers (surrounded by

uber males Alfred Kazin, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow) had been Ayn Rand,

Anzia Yezierska, and Gertrude Stein, the postwar era saw the emergence of

Hannah Arendt, Jane Bowles, Martha Gellhorn, Diana Trilling, Fay Kanin,

Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, and Susan Sontag, to name just a few. And

whereas prewar fi ction by Jewish writers had centered around typical immi-

grant themes, postwar fi ction became generically Jewish. Moreover, to main-

tain their identity, Jewish literature often featured the Jewish intellectual

(Hoberek 2005, 71).

This attitude stood in sharp contrast to that of Irish American writ-

ers, who had been raised with the desire to assimilate. Unlike the Jewish

populace, Irish Americans were often ashamed of overt intellectualism. As

Daniel Patrick Moynihan explained, “Derision of the hifalutin all too easily

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shaded into contempt for intelligence and learning, particularly on the lace-

curtain fringe” (quoted in Dezell 2001, 30). This view was not held by Irish

American women writers, however: highly educated, they wrote to protest

infringement on women’s rights. They did not need to preserve their ethnic-

ity, for Irish American traits were simply a part of their cultural inheritance.

Further evidence of Jewish-Catholic intellectual rivalry was evidenced

in 1963, when the two most popular publications to explore feminist issues

were Mary McCarthy’s novel,
The Group
, and Betty Friedan’s investigative

study,
The Feminine Mystique
.
The Group
spent almost two years atop the

New York Times
best-seller fi ction list and made McCarthy an international

fi gure, selling over 370,000 copies during 1964 and over 5.2 million by

1991 (Brightman 1992, 480, 484, 486). At the same time,
The Feminine

Mystique
spent six weeks at number 1 on the nonfi ction list, selling over 3

million copies in just fi ve years (Menand 2011). Both authors illustrate the

push-pull of feminism for women of their generation who had “made it”

without the benefi t of second-wave feminism (Howard 1997).

Although McCarthy graduated from Vassar and Friedan from Smith,

themselves seedbeds of feminism, both women conveyed mixed messages on

the subject. McCarthy’s motto was taken from Chaucer’s Criseyde—“I am

myn owene woman, wel at ease” (“Brooks Brothers,” 104). Nevertheless, she

was often quoted as saying that feminism “is bad for women. . . . [I]t induces

a very bad emotional state,” fomenting emotions such as “self-pity, covet-

ousness, and greed” by indicting “self-dependency” and emphasizing “male

privilege.” Still, McCarthy admitted she was “sort of an Uncle Tom from