The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (13 page)

this point of view,” since she (like her Irish American foremothers) made her

living in the male-dominated world of publishing (Brightman 1992, 343).

Prior to
The Feminine Mystique
, Betty Friedan had publicly disavowed an

interest in feminism. But like McCarthy, her work belied her stance. Whereas

Friedan claimed to have awakened to the “problem that has no name” after

twenty years as a suburban housewife, she actually had her consciousness

raised as an undergraduate at Smith, where she was an activist for labor issues

and took what would now be considered women’s studies courses. In 1943,

just a year after graduating from Smith, Friedan was warning male read-

ers that women’s wartime factory jobs had made them aware of just how

enervating housework was. Far from being a suburban housewife, through

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the 1950s Friedan keep repeating this message in her job as a labor journal-

ist—while living in Sneden’s Landing in upstate New York, the site of Maeve

Brennan’s 1950s satires about the nouveau riche. Friedan was unwilling to

recognize feminism at this point, thanks in part to Joe McCarthy’s Red

scare. After observing Senator McCarthy’s attacks on feminists and Com-

munists, Friedan may have found it prudent to hide that element of her

professional past (Horowitz 1998). Likewise, as McCarthyism grew more

virulent, Mary McCarthy, who had initially viewed the Communist Party

as the “pinnacle,” disavowed and actually admitted embarrassment for her

ardor in a 1953 piece, “My Confession”—published while working on the

fi rst chapter of
The Group
—which pokes fun in parts at her characters’ politi-

cal naïveté (Brightman 1992, 119, 352).

Even if McCarthy abjured feminism in her personal life, from 1942 to

1967 feminist themes dominated her fi ction. These are best exemplifi ed

in
The Group
, the most infamous of her novels, in which she attempted to

document the “idea of progress . . . in the female sphere” (1963, 62). In

this novel McCarthy explores the aspirations of seven female graduates of

the Vassar class of ’31, juxtaposing early second-wave feminist desires for

a meaningful career and a happy marriage with the realities of American

society in the 1930s. In the process, McCarthy introduces the reader to

formerly taboo subjects such as birth control, women’s sexual pleasure, adul-

tery, impotence, mental illness, homosexuality, spouse abuse, and the double

standard. The main character, Kay (generally accepted as McCarthy’s alter

ego), lives openly with her fi ancé, Harald, and shares details of their sex life

with the other women in the group. In a time when birth control had only

recently been legalized, McCarthy’s characters discuss it openly. One of the

males suggests it is used only by “adulteresses, mistresses, prostitutes, and

the like,” as opposed to respectable married women. Although Kay contra-

dicts him, she is no better, declaring that “birth control . . . was for those

who know how to use it and value it—the educated classes” (75). When

McCarthy’s antagonist, Norinne, visits a doctor to seek advice about her

husband’s impotence, she reports that the doctor asked “whether I wanted

to have children. . . . When I said no, I didn’t, he practically booted me out

of the offi ce. He told me I should consider myself lucky that my husband

didn’t want intercourse. Sex wasn’t necessary for a woman, he said” (165).

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Another character, Lakey, has a lesbian lover—a daring inclusion in the

pre-Stonewall era. Although Marguerite Duffy, aka Megan Terry, was gain-

ing notoriety for her gender bending plays, such as the off-Broadway produc-

tion of
Ex-Miss Copper Queen on a Set of Pills
in 1963 (Bona 2004), most

Irish American women writers had not fully exited the closet. More notable

is Dottie’s fi rst sexual encounter—which she openly pursues. The graphic

foreplay and seduction cover several pages, culminating in the following

passage: “while she was praying for it to be over, surprise of surprises, she

started to like it a little. She got the idea, and her body began to move too in

answer, as he pressed
that
home in her slowly, over and over, and slowly drew

it back. . . . Her breath came quicker. Each lingering stroke, like a violin bow,

made her palpitate for the next. Then all of a sudden, she seemed to explode

in a series of long, uncontrollable contractions that embarrassed her, like the

hiccups, the moment they were over, for it was as if she had forgotten Dick

as a person” (McCarthy 1963, 41).1

McCarthy uses
The Group
to remind readers of the unfortunate dispar-

ity between the group’s liberal theories and the reality of their marriages,

for once they marry independence disappears. At the beginning of the novel

Kay is a strong-willed, independent woman, but as the story progresses she

becomes increasingly helpless and miserable. Soon she is tiptoeing around

husband Harald, eager to please and afraid to upset him. Priss, another

group member, is introduced as a political activist; however, after she mar-

ries and gives birth she becomes so weak-willed that she lets her newborn cry

for hours rather than disobey her husband and nurse the baby before he is

“scheduled” to be fed.

Although reviewers such as Norman Mailer and Norman Podhoretz

dismissed
The Group’s
focus on women’s lives and manners, McCarthy’s

Irish American contemporaries understood: Louise Bogan recognized the

satire inherent in the “patois of privilege,” and Robert Kiely’s review for
The

Nation
termed the novel a “virtuoso display of ‘narrative mimicry,’” while

1. This description rather contradicts Thomas Flanagan’s assertion that Mc-

Carthy’s sexual descriptions were written in a “deliberately dry, clinical, wryly self-

observant, and defl ationary” manner (130–31).

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

Hayden Carruth called it a “whopper” (quoted in Brighman 1992, 481,

486). What non-Irish reviewers apparently overlooked was that McCarthy

was “taking the mickey”: like her pre-Famine ancestors, she used satire to

mock people unlike her—in this case, the very rich. To illustrate their vapid-

ity, she makes practically every pronouncement an indictment. When, after

a one-night stand, Dottie’s lover tells her to buy a pessary, or diaphragm,

her reply underscores her naiveté: “‘Yes, Dick,’ Dottie whispered, her hand

twisting the doorknob, while she let her eyes tell him softly what a deep

reverent moment this was, a sort of pledge between them” (61). Priss Harts-

horn makes them all look bad when she expounds on the diffi culty of great

wealth—“a frightful handicap; it insulated you from living” (31). Such “lin-

guistic subversion” should come as no surprise from the orphan among the

Vassar elite who tried to fi t into their social circle even as she abhorred their

snobbery.

McCarthy was in good company. Amidst a literary fi eld dominated by

male Jewish intellectuals, Irish American women were making their mark.

Although Maeve Brennan’s “Talk of the Town” columns appeared to be

aimed at the
New Yorker’s
advertisers, she was actually speaking directly to

her women readers. Brennan wrote in a “feminine code, a parody of ‘girl talk,’

the breathless italics making a vivid piece of aural and visual description seem

like a fuss about nothing, or a joke” (Bourke 2004, 189). In “Skunked,” an

article about the failure of a furrier to understand that he was to make a col-

lar to match her skunk fur purse, she begins, “A rather long-winded lady has

just given us an example of the death of the faculty of attention, which she

believes is rampant,” concluding, “today they called up in
agony
to say that

the little man had turned up with the collar, but when they said, ‘Where’s

the bag?’ he said ‘Well, I didn’t think she’d want the frame, so I threw it

away.’ He
said
he only wanted the bag to match the skin, and then he
chopped

up this madly expensive bag and made a measly little collar out of it. Well,

there you are, in case you’ve paid any attention’” (Brennan 1954, 27).

Beneath the surface, the Long-Winded Lady was skewering the male

sex—and her readers knew it. Brennan’s essays about working, shopping,

drinking, and watching her fellow New Yorkers provided a subversive coun-

terpoint to the postwar campaign to rid the workplace of women, to adver-

tising’s efforts to compensate paid employment with “fun” appliances, to

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Joe McCarthy’s attempts to curtail feminism, and to the fashion industry’s

emphasis on sexy, nonutilitarian women’s clothing (Brightman 1992, 189).

This confl uence of discrimination provided a strong impetus for femi-

nism’s second wave. While Mary McCarthy and Maeve Brennan had been

raising these issues since the 1940s, Betty Friedan’s research in
The Feminine

Mystique
provided indisputable facts. Although she undertook the research

to disprove the postwar canard that “higher education somehow masculin-

ized women and prevented them from fi nding happiness as housewives and

mothers,” her fi ndings revealed that this was partially true. College-educated

women
did
regret not using their degrees; they just did not know why they

felt so disenchanted with housewifery. They had bought into “the feminine

mystique,” the belief that woman’s true happiness lay in marriage and mother-

hood (Friedan 1963). Brennan’s short stories “The Carpet with the Big Pink

Roses on It” (1964) and “The Sofa” (1968) illustrate this mindset: cleaning

the carpet or getting a new sofa become major events, for they give house-

bound mothers something to fi ll their days and enliven their conversations.

Like her Irish American predecessors, Brennan focuses on marriage and

motherhood; like her contemporaries, she inverts those themes. Hers are

not happy stories. After thirty years of marriage, Hubert Derdon despises

his wife and the feeling is mutual. In “An Attack of Hunger” (1962), Rose

and Hubert’s son John has left home to enter the seminary. Resentfully set-

ting out cups and saucers for tea, she refl ects, “Oh, if only Hubert had died,

John would never have left me, never, never, never” (26). After the Derdons,

Brennan began writing about Rose and Martin Bagot. These stories offer

snapshots of unhappily married life in the 1960s. “The Shadow of Kind-

ness” (1965–66) describes the condescending attitude of the working man

toward his stay-at-home wife: “Martin had warned her often enough against

thinking, because thinking led to self-pity and there was enough of that in

this world. What he had really told her was that she must stop forcing herself,

stop
trying
to think, because her intelligence was not high and she must not

put too much of a strain on it or she would make herself unhappy” (30).

Brennan’s personal life provided plenty of fodder. “Maeve fell in love

recklessly and had her heart broken more than once,” writes biographer

Angela Bourke (2004, 133). Her fi rst serious boyfriend, Solly Paul, was Jew-

ish. When he decided they could not marry, Maeve was “distraught” but she

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

soon recovered and fell in love with Walter Kerr. Described as “ambitious,

good-looking, witty, and hugely energetic,” he and Maeve seemed the per-

fect match. However, he broke off their engagement after meeting another

clever Irish American woman, Bridget Jean Collins, who under the pseud-

onym Jean Kerr went on to recount their life together in
Please Don’t Eat the

Daisies
. Bourke asserts that the resulting heartbreak was the primary source

of the “naked pain that is so strong in [Brennan’s] fi ction” (2004, 136).

This pain stands out in the second set of stories in
Springs of Affection

about Rose and Hubert Derdon. Although this couple might be confused

with Brennan’s parents, their portrayal may be more refl ective of her mar-

riage to St. Clair McKelway. When they wed, she was thirty-seven to his

forty-nine. She had not married before, whereas he had already married and

divorced three times and carried on countless affairs. Neither he nor Maeve

could handle money or alcohol, and neither friends nor family believed the