The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (25 page)

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-