The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (7 page)

about woman’s submerged life” (Seyersted 1980, xx).

Chopin’s contemporary, Clara Laughlin, whose parents hailed from Bel-

fast, was a journalist and an editor at
McClure’s
Magazine. After her father

died when she was seventeen, Laughlin went to work writing essays and

book reviews, eventually publishing in
Harper’s Bazaar
and
Scribner’s
Mag-

azine (Ebest 2004, 30). Her early novels—
The Evolution of a Girl’s Ideal

(1902),
When Joy Begins
(1905), and
Felicity
(1907)—continued the tradi-

tion of sentimental romances. However, her fourth novel,
Just Folks
(1910),

which evolved out of a friendship with a member of Chicago’s Hull House

neighborhood, not only represented an early foray into realism but also into

fi rst-wave feminist critiques of marriage seen in the works of Chopin and

Cleary. Laughlin’s nonfi ction study,
The Work-a-Day Girl: A Study of Some

Present Conditions
(1913), based on her experiences as a settlement worker,

similarly critiqued women’s plight, implicitly reiterating the “almost univer-

sal” statement by Irish women, “If I had it to do over again, I’d never marry”

(Anthony 1914, 20).

Anne O’Hagan conveyed comparable messages. Although her liter-

ary attempts were unsuccessful, her commitment to women’s rights shone

through her journalistic pieces. In pieces such as “The Shop-Girl and Her

Wages” (1913), for example, she exposed the mistreatment of working

women. Given the social mores of the times, this commitment was possible

in large part because O’Hagan was unmarried. As a result, her activist beliefs

were unremitting: in magazine articles she supported women’s right to work;

exposed the unfair treatment of female schoolteachers; praised women’s

clubs, businesswomen, and female athletes; and not surprisingly, wrote often

in support of women’s suffrage. But when questions arose regarding her

sexual preference, O’Hagan’s Irish literary inheritance was awakened (Ebest

2005).

In a 1907 series of essays for
Harper’s Bazaar
, O’Hagan began satiriz-

ing the idealization of marriage. After
The Survey
published essays regarding

a wife’s marital obligations, she asked whether the magazine also pro-

posed reviving the stagecoach; when
Vanity Fair
attacked feminism for its

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supposedly negative effects on married life, she skewered the notion with a

story about Mr. and Mrs. Cave Man; in
Harper’s
she ridiculed the treatment

of single women, while in
Munsey’s
Magazine she poked fun at stereotypi-

cal romantic depictions of literary heroines. Inadvertently anticipating the

actions of second-wave feminists, O’Hagan even criticized her peers. Like

the doctor in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” she con-

sidered Gilman an hysteric;2 like future feminists, she dismissed the next

generation as “trivial and ill versed in the contributions of their foremoth-

ers.” Most ironically, after her own marriage late in life, O’Hagan’s work

(and unfortunately, her sharp wit) dwindled away (Ebest 2005, 116).

Satire came naturally to Irish American journalists. Ruth McKinney, a

daughter of the Irish nationalist Marguerite Flynn McKinney, worked her

way up from the Columbus, Ohio
Dispatch
to the
New York Post
in just three

years. At that point, she became a freelance writer and began contributing

stories to
Harper’s Bazaar
,
the
New Yorker
, and eventually to
New Masses
, where she took over as editor. Yet these early, serious accomplishments—

along with her 1938 expose’ of Depression-era factory workers,
Industrial

Valley
—were all but forgotten with the publication of her short story col-

lection,
My Sister Eileen
(1938), which quickly went through six reprints,

yielded a sequel, and was turned into musical, a Broadway play, a movie,

and eventually a sitcom. Unlike the pre-Famine generation, McKinney’s sat-

ire was not meant to counter anti-Irish slurs; rather, she expressed “amuse-

ment over the oafi sh attempts of the Irish to Americanize themselves” (Ebest

2005, 73–75). In this, she refl ected a sense of assimilation characteristic of

the third stage of postcolonial writing—a “declaration of cultural indepen-

dence” (Barry 2009, 189).

During this same period, the Scots-Irish Ellen Glasgow began writ-

ing what are now considered feminist novels. Anticipating later French and

American feminists, her novels
The Romance of a Plain Man
(1909) and
The

Miller of Old Church
(1911) imply that women should begin writing their

2. In turn the fi ctional doctor refl ects the feelings of Gilman’s real doctor, S.

Weir Mitchell. See Nancy Cervetti’s biography,
S. Weir Mitchell, 1829–1914: Phila-

delphia’s Literary Physician
.

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own stories and thus challenge patriarchal traditions. In
Virginia
(1913), her

most successful work, she argues that a woman must search for and estab-

lish her own identity. Her 1922 novel,
One Man in His Time
, suggests that

females reject the notion of being a “womanly woman” and focus on devel-

oping friendships with one another, while
Barren Ground
(1925) implies

that self-denial is not a necessary part of a romantic relationship. Further

anticipating twenty-fi rst-century gender theory, Glasgow asserted that gen-

der roles should be socially constructed. She expanded on these issues in

“Some Literary Woman Myths” (1928) when she attacked the “subservient”

role of women vis-à-vis their male colleagues in the publishing world. In

1938, she incorporated some parts of this essay into her novel
She Stooped to

Folly
, noting at one point that the derogatory view men took of women could

be traced to the Garden of Eden (Matthews 1995).

Glasgow’s contemporary, Kathleen Coyle, who was born in Derry,

worked as an editor in London, and later emigrated to America, was of a sim-

ilar mindset (Ulster History Circle). A suffragist, she divorced her husband

after four years and took up writing to earn money. Coyle wrote thirteen

novels, among them
The Widow’s House
(1924),
Youth in the Saddle
(1927),

It Is Better to Tell
(1928),
A Flock of Birds
(1930),
The French Husband

(1932),
Family Skeleton
(1934),
Undue Fulfi llment
(1934),
Immortal Ease

(1941),
Morning Comes Early
(1934), and a memoir,
The Magical Realm

(1943) (culturenorthernireland.org 2008). Using stream of consciousness (a

method perhaps emulating her friend James Joyce’s approach in
Ulysses
),
A

Flock of Birds
conveys a woman’s jumbled thoughts while she worries about

her imprisoned son’s fate: she hates childbirth yet bears children, she longs

to engage in sexual intimacy without losing oneself, and she enjoys the com-

pany of other women who despise their husbands. Also writing during this

period was Kay Boyle, who published more than forty books, including four-

teen novels that explored power differentials in male-female relationships.

Yet another relatively obscure Irish American writer, the Scots-Irish Bernice

Kelly Harris, developed the Irish penchant for satire in plays, short stories,

and seven novels about family life.
Sweet Beulah Land
(1943) is perhaps her

best-known work.

Labor activist and journalist Dorothy Day also began publishing during

this period. Early in her career she worked for the Socialist newspaper
The

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Call
and then moved on to
The Masses
, where she served as a reporter. When

The Masses
was closed down after dubious charges of espionage (based on

their antiwar cartoons and editorials), she left journalism and entered nurs-

ing school. Seven years later, drawing on these experiences she published an

autobiographical novel,
The Eleventh Virgin
(1924). A co-founder of
The

Catholic Worker
, Day was a lifelong activist, ultimately publishing over one

thousand articles as well as
Houses of Hospitality
(1939), which recounted the

founding of the
Catholic Worker
;
The Long Loneliness
(1952), an autobiogra-

phy; and
On Pilgrimage: The Sixties
(1972) (Simkin).

But all of these writers pale in comparison to Margaret Mitchell. Chris-

topher Dowd maintains that
Gone With the Wind
“is one of the most sig-

nifi cant and popular works by an Irish American woman. . . . Mitchell

offered a unique female voice and created a female character that appealed

to Irish American women in a way that a character like Studs Lonigan never

could. . . . [A]ny study of Irish American literature that ignores the impor-

tance of
Gone With the Wind
is missing one of the biggest pieces of the puz-

zle. . . . In rewriting the story of Irish America, Mitchell established one of

the most enduring myths of post-immigrant Irish identity” (2010, 174–75).

Scarlett’s ethnic roots are reinforced throughout the novel. Her father

tells her she cannot escape her “Irish blood,” Rhett Butler characterizes her

temper as getting her “Irish up,” and neighbors refer to her as “highfl ying,

bogtrotting Irish,” while Atlanta’s society mavens dismiss her as an “Irish

peasant” (Mitchell 1937, 39, 195, 528, 89). Scarlett sees herself as more

than this, and as a second-generation immigrant, she is. Her temperament

represents an amalgamation of positive and negative Irish traits, accurately

depicting the contradictory nature of Irish Americans (Dowd 2010, 175).

Scarlett’s character also personifi es aspects of Mitchell herself. Better

known as a novelist than an Irish American, Margaret Mitchell was the

daughter of the Irish Catholic suffragist Mary Fitzgerald Mitchell, who co-

founded what eventually became the League of Women Voters. Margaret

grew up in a staunch, fi rst-wave feminist environment that emphasized the

importance of fi ghting for one’s rights (Pyron 1992, 41). Although mother

and daughter did not always see eye-to-eye, this early infl uence was evident

throughout Mitchell’s life. After capturing everyone’s attention at a debu-

tante ball—à la Scarlett O’Hara in low-cut gown and provocative gaze—she

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later took to the stage to belittle marriage, stating that she and her friends

were “coming down off the auction block . . . and going to work” (quoted

in Pyron 1992, 161). At her mother’s insistence, she entered that bastion

of feminism, Smith, but lasted only two semesters (82). When she returned

home, under the nom de plume Peggy Mitchell, she worked as a reporter for

the
Atlanta Journal
, where she focused on women’s rights. “She wrote as a

woman, with women, and for women, and women dominated the content

of her essays” (169).

Just as Mary McCarthy’s
The Group
imposed a 1960s sensibility on a

story set in the 1930s,
Gone With the Wind
refl ects a 1930s worldview in

an 1860s setting. One purpose of the novel was to invert Irish stereotypes

still prevalent at the time: thus Scarlett credits her heritage for the courage

to ignore the Southern insistence on good manners, to disregard Southern

society’s expectations of women, and to fi ght for Tara and her family even

if it involves murder (Dowd 2010, 178). Totally overlooking her mother’s

infl uence, Dowd credits Mitchell’s Irish American uncles for these traits and

maintains that Mitchell used the novel “as a metaphor for contemporary

ethnic confusion”; however, Pyron’s biography suggests that through Scar-

lett, Mitchell (like Flannery O’Connor) was more likely rejecting Southern

expectations regarding proper female behavior, as evidenced in Scarlett’s

refusal to be passive or submissive, and engagement in “unladylike” work

and behavior (Dowd 2010, 187).

Unfortunately, Southern mores and society’s expectations failed to rec-

ognize, let alone appreciate, Mitchell’s message, so women continued to be

bound by Southern social conventions. Consequently, such traits in a female

character actually perpetuated negative perceptions of the Irish (Dowd 2010,