Read The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Online
Authors: Sally Barr Ebest
Tags: #Social Science, #Literary Criticism, #English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, #Feminism & Feminist Theory, #European
roses into the trash.
The following story, “An Accident,” reveals that the affair has contin-
ued. Although it is set in the liberal 1970s, the church remains a bulwark
against divorce and remarriage. Louise realizes that while the affair could
go on, it will lead to nothing because of her religious beliefs. In “A Fore-
gone Conclusion,” these feelings gradually build. After Charlie gives her his
grandmother’s ring, Louise dismisses it as inappropriate: “Rings belonged to
explicit loves, loves with a context and a direction, but theirs, for all its dura-
bility, was an inconclusive affair. That they should go on indefi nitely the way
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they were seemed unlikely, but that they should part seemed unnecessary,
and anything else was out of the question since Louise was Catholic” (Cul-
linan 1977, 90). Looking at the ring, she thinks, “there was no way of recon-
ciling this ring with what rings were meant to stand for,” and surreptitiously
slips it into Charlie’s pocket as they prepare to leave. As the story concludes,
“Though it seemed an irrational act, a senseless thing to have to say,” her last
words are “Goodbye, Charlie” (98). Cullinan’s stories “bring the fresh air of
considered moral perspective to Irish American life” (Fanning 2001, 334).
Although neither feminists nor Catholics have been associated with
humor, comedy allowed them to raise questions without fear of punish-
ment (Del Rosso 2005, 149). Always ahead of her time, Mary McCarthy’s
apostasy came well before the 1960s period marking the large-scale shift
from the unquestioning piety of the “immigrant church” toward a period of
growing intellectualism (Gandolfo 1992). McCarthy also moved away from
feminist themes long before the post-feminist era. But regardless of topic
(and sometimes despite her best efforts) McCarthy maintained her satiric
voice. During and after the Vietnam War, she continued her satirical political
analyses in
Birds of America
(1971) and
Cannibals and Missionaries
(1979),
even though these works have been relegated “to a limbo in American let-
ters” (Brightman 1992, 555).
Caryl Rivers’s memoir,
Aphrodite at Mid-Century: Growing Up Female
and Catholic in Postwar America
(1973), has been similarly consigned to
limbo; nevertheless it represents a good example of how to “use humor to
subvert the sexism” of the church. Rivers’s humor is all the more potent
because it is combined with feminism, “which is activist in nature . . . a
call for change, for resistance, for revolution” (Del Rosso 2005, 154–55).
In this she refl ects the strategies introduced by McCarthy in
Memories of
a Catholic Girlhood
: defi ance, criticism, and commentary regarding the
effects of the church on her personality (Evasdaughter 1996). This message
is evident throughout: whether Rivers is discussing movies, sports, saints,
or marriage, she laments sexism and the lack of female role models. At the
same time, she gives the church its due, recalling the “changeless truth
[and] simple moral choices.”
Rivers’s critical strategies come to the fore when she moves out of child-
hood. In her teens she realizes the church’s insularity as she and her friends
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are warned against mixing with those outside the faith: “The nuns made
it clear that prolonged exposure to non-Catholics was not healthy” (Riv-
ers 1973, 129). She also suggests that Catholic teachings attack girls’ self
esteem, for they were inculcated with the belief that physical beauty—per-
sonifi ed in the Virgin Mary—is the ideal and thus unattainable. This atti-
tude is reinforced by the nuns, who held limited ideas about sex. They “made
the whole thing seem dirty. It was clear that babies and bosoms and sex and
reproduction were all low and disgusting, the sort of things hogs did in
the trough. . . . The Marriage Act was for the purpose of creating children.
Period. One was not supposed to enjoy it” (179). Furthermore, marriage per
se was not enough. “If you didn’t get married by a priest, you were living in
sin, and if you died, off you went to hell.” If you were married and poor, you
prayed to avoid getting pregnant, for using contraceptives was a mortal sin.
“Better to die in the state of grace than to commit a mortal sin,” the nuns
told her (183–84).
Rivers would have none of it. By adolescence she “was aware that society
had carved out a niche for me, now that I was about to become a woman.
I was offered one ticket, good for a lifetime, to the bleachers” (224). Used
in this way, humor provides subversive liberation: “Perhaps the potential for
change that feminists envision for the Catholic church can only come from a
kind of religious syncretism, an opening up of the church’s teachings to new
(or old?) thought and fresh visions. And perhaps humor can play a large part
in that change” (Del Rosso 2005, 167). If that were true, Mary Daly would
have been a best-seller.
•
The 1970S were truly tumultuous. Just as Americans demonstrated for
and against the war in Vietnam, the feminist movement warred within itself
while Irish American women revolted against the strictures of the church.
Assimilation played a major role in these decisions. First-generation writ-
ers such as Elizabeth Cullinan and Maureen Howard confl ated the terms
“Irish” and “Catholic” and thus attacked both, whereas writers like Maeve
Brennan, who viewed herself as more Irish than American and thus took
the church for granted, left it alone. Writers in the second generation such
as Mary Gordon and Elizabeth Savage, more comfortable with their status,
took a less jaundiced, more ambivalent stance. Women’s roles and treatment
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by the religious hierarchy certainly infl uenced this decade’s authors and their
novels; conversely, despite the lack of a strong religious commitment among
Protestant Irish Americans, the racism and sexism they observed helped
shape their feminism.
Perhaps the most striking issue of the decade was sexuality. With Blanche
McCrary Boyd’s
Mourning the Death of Magic
, the 1970s marks the emer-
gence of the fi rst Irish American lesbian novel. Although Carson McCullers
touched on this theme, her androgynous girls eventually succumbed to soci-
ety’s pressures—they put on a dress, grew out their hair, and lost their virgin-
ity—to a male. While Mary McCarthy’s
The Group
(1963) included a lesbian
character, she remained in the background, carefully closeted overseas until
the novel’s end. Even when she did emerge, the other characters expressed
mainly curiosity and disbelief, and Lakey’s character was not explored. The
discovery of Boyd’s novels is all the more striking because of their location in
the 1970s, coincidental with the publication of the fi rst “offi cial” American
lesbian novel, Rita Mae Brown’s
Rubyfruit Jungle
. Boyd not only predates
the topic in contemporary Irish women’s novels (most notably Emma Dono-
ghue’s
Stir-Fry
in 2000), but also displaces Eileen Myles, who heretofore
held the title as the fi rst Irish American woman writer to exit the closet—in
the late 1990s. Fellow Irish American southerner Dorothy Allison warns
that in addition to being lesbian writers, she and Boyd are “expatriate writ-
ers, prickly and rebellious at being labeled any one thing too fi rmly” (Allison
1995, xii). This distinction merits attention, for its advent epitomizes the
spirit of the decade.
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4
The 1980s
The War on Women
She is not like other mothers, who make grocery lists and wear
undergarments. Other mothers do not forget that you go back
to school in September. . . . Although she preferred her mother,
sometimes she was frightened.
—Susanna Moore,
My Old Sweetheart
Anyone who has read the Irish Canadian Margaret Atwood’s dystopian
novel,
The Handmaid’s Tale
, will recognize its genesis in Ronald Rea-
gan’s war on women. In Atwood’s satire, set in a near-futuristic theocracy,
women’s rights have been stripped. They can no longer work, hold bank
accounts, or walk the streets alone. With birth rates in decline, fertile and
pregnant women are reifi ed. But all women are assigned to castes: childless
Wives, working Marthas, and the Handmaids—who are impregnated by
the Commanders, give birth—and then must hand over their newborns to
the Wives who, because of their chastity and social standing, are considered
morally superior.
Published in 1985,
The Handmaid’s Tale
articulated the fears of many
American women following the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. This vote
marked a political turning point for Irish Americans. Although they had
been trending Republican since the post-Kennedy years, more Irish Ameri-
cans and American Catholics voted for the “Great Communicator” and his
party than ever before (Almeida 2006, 557). Reagan’s popularity coincided
with the rise of nationalist support for Ireland. A year after his election, sup-
port for NOR AID in the midst of Bobby Sands’s hunger strike grew from
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$5,000 a year to $55,000, much of it collected in pubs (Meagher 2005, 334;
Dolan 2008, 297). Where did all of this money come from? By the 1980s,
Irish Americans numbered 40 million. Moreover, they had attained the
highest echelons of capitalist society and turned into “icons of conservatism”
(Meagher 2005, 565–66). They had achieved this pinnacle largely because
of their education, surpassing all other immigrant populations except the
Jews and Japanese Americans and rivaling the fi nancial success of Episco-
palians on the East Coast and across America (Meagher 2005, 156)—an
achievement that most likely contributed to the movement of many from the
Democratic to the Republican Party (Almeida 2006, 557).
This achievement was not simply a matter of assimilation. While World
War II had spurred upward mobility and the election of John F. Kennedy
brought power and recognition, Irish Americans also benefi tted from the
changing defi nitions of the term “race.” Whereas the early years of the cen-
tury had spawned prejudice among Caucasians of various ethnicities, the
Civil Rights movement of the 1960s erased those distinctions, making dif-
ferences redound to black and white. Equally important, the civil rights,
antiwar, gay rights, and women’s movements had ignited a “healthy skepti-
cism of authority and celebrated individual liberation and personal authen-
ticity” (Meagher 2005, 159–60).
As the decade progressed, increasing numbers of Irish Americans sup-
ported Ronald Reagan’s conservative agenda. They applauded his promotion
of prayer in school and opposition to abortion (Dolan 2008, 293), and they
were not overly concerned with his avoidance of homosexual issues. Such
views no doubt helped swing the vote toward the Republicans and away from
the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, and his running mate, Geraldine
Ferraro, who was not only a feminist but also pro-choice. Indeed, Ferraro’s
stance, which she reiterated in a letter stating that Catholics were split on the
abortion issue, so infuriated New York archbishop John O’Connor that he
publicly castigated her—and likely cost Democrats the Catholic vote (Mar-
tin 2011, 153). Among the hawks, conservatives supported Reagan’s strong
stance against Russia. And just before the 1984 election, when rumors of
his disengagement and poor memory were raising questions about his com-
petence (Woods 2005, 456), Reagan cemented his chances by reminding
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supporters of his Irish roots with a televised visit to his great-grandfather’s
hometown of Ballyporeen in County Tipperary (Dolan 2008, 293).
Following his landslide re-election, Reagan further strengthened his
Irish base by supporting constitutional change in Ireland and appointing a
number of Irish Americans to his cabinet: Attorney General Edwin Meese,
Secretary of Labor Raymond J. Donovan, Secretaries of the Treasury Don-
ald Regan and Nicholas Brady, CIA Director James Casey, and U.N. Rep-