The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (8 page)

178). Nevertheless, these traits—which run throughout the works of Irish

American women writers—enabled Scarlett O’Hara to endure.

Quest for the Self

The model set by Irish American women became more widespread during

World War II, when prohibitions against women working changed rapidly:

media propaganda encouraged women to support their country not only

as wives and mothers but also “as workers, citizens, and even as soldiers.”

By 1945 the female labor force, three-quarters of whom were married, had

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doubled in size (Hartmann 1982, 20–21). By war’s end, married women

represented the majority of female workers (Chafe 1991, 13). Although their

jobs were neither glamorous nor creative, women “enjoyed the companion-

ship of fellow workers, the pleasure of mastering a new skill, the opportunity

to contribute to a public good, and the gratifi cation of proving their mettle

in jobs once thought beyond the powers of women.” As one housewife put

it, “some just love their jobs. I think they for the fi rst time in their life feel

important” (Hartmann 1982, 20).

But as the war wound down, the same forces that encouraged women to

work ensured that they returned to their “true calling” as wives and mothers:

• Businessmen, labor leaders, and government offi cials told women to

relinquish their jobs.

• Returning veterans compared American women unfavorably to the

“womanly” ones they had met abroad.

• Social welfare and child-care experts called upon women to pay more

attention to their maternal duties.

• Psychologists and psychiatrists emphasized women’s biological destiny

and diagnosed feminists as “neurotic or worse.” (Hartmann 1982, 21)

• Industry followed suit: across the country, 60 to 90 percent of all

postwar job ads were once again “for men only.” (Hartmann 1982, 21)

By the end of World War II, the Cold War mentality was urging con-

formity and obedience to authority in clothing, housing, and behavior, best

exemplifi ed in the move to suburbia, where a failure to conform might lead

to “painful ostracism.” During this period, with capitalism fl ourishing, the

auto industry quadrupled output from 2 million to 8 million cars. Thanks to

improved transportation, the suburbs exploded: between 1950 and 1960, 11

million of the 13 million homes built in America were in the suburbs. Sub-

urban dwellers were expected to have the “right” number of cars, children,

and spouses. Private backyards behind uniform tract homes were frowned

upon; instead, neighbors shared a common area and socialized together in

the neighborhood and at the local schools. Women were expected to marry

young, bear children, and stay home to raise them (Woods 2005, 126–35).

This message was reinforced by the media.

In the comics—the primary texts for 60 million readers in 1946, 80

percent of whom were young men and women between the ages of six and

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

seventeen—wartime strips had featured women so courageous and resource-

ful that they could rescue male heroes like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

Among these powerhouses were Sheena, Queen of the Jungle; Mary Mar-

vel, Captain Marvel’s twin; Miss Fury, Batman’s counterpart; and of course

Wonder Woman. But after the war, these paragons gave way to simpering

teens like Betty and Veronica of the “Archie” comics. Likewise, Wonder

Woman and her feminist cohorts gradually devolved into the hero’s love

interests (Hartmann 1982, 190, 202).

Whereas the four major prewar magazines—
Ladies’ Home Journal
,

McCall’s
,
Good Housekeeping
, and
Woman’s Home Companion
—had featured

stories about young career women who not only worked but were also attrac-

tive and beloved by their husbands, these same magazines did an about-face

as the war wound down and the men came home.
Ladies Home Journal
set

the stage with “Occupation: Housewife,” whose (female) author dismisses

the housewife’s ennui by pointing out her many skills and reminding her

that even if she feels thwarted, “a world of feminine genius, but poor in

children, would come rapidly to an end. . . . Great men have great mothers”

(Thompson, quoted in Friedan 1963, 42. Beginning in 1949, subsequent

articles such as “Femininity Begins at Home,” “Have Babies While You’re

Young,” “Are You Training Your Daughter to Be a Wife?,” and perhaps the

most insulting, “Why GIs Prefer Those German Girls,” perpetuated these

messages. By 1950, only a third of magazine heroines were pursuing a career

outside the home—and they were usually getting ready to quit after realizing

they really wanted to be housewives and mothers (Friedan 1963, 38–44).

By the late 1950s, a review of the above magazines (minus
Woman’s

Home Companion
, which had folded) yielded roughly one career woman per

hundred articles, a focus echoed in other women’s magazines like
Redbook

and
McCall’s
. Worse, magazines such as
Life
presented supposedly fact-fi lled

stories that attacked educated working women.
Life’s
1956 Christmas issue

referred to them as the result of “that fatal error that feminism propagated,”

so masculinized that they emasculated their husbands. Even former career

women were suspect, for their education had led them to be discontented

with housewifery, disrupt the PTA, dominate their husbands, and destroy

their children. In contrast,
Look
praised the contented housewife: “No lon-

ger a psychological immigrant to man’s world, she works, rather casually, as a

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third of the U.S. labor force, less towards a ‘big career’ than as a way of fi lling

a hope chest or buying a new home freezer. She gracefully concedes the top

jobs to men. This wondrous creature also marries younger than ever, bears

more babies and looks and acts far more feminine than the ‘emancipated’ girl

of the 1920’s or even ’30’s (quoted in Friedan 1963, 59).”

These messages were echoed at the movies. During the war years over

100 million Americans attended the movies every week; indeed, the demand

for escapism was so great that in some cities theaters remained open all night.

To encourage women’s participation in the war efforts, producers cast Betty

Hutton in
Here Come the Waves
(1945), Lana Turner joined the WACs in

Keep Your Powder Dry
(1945), and Lucille Ball portrayed an heiress working

in a munitions plan in
Meet the People
(1944). To reinforce the notion that

women could survive and succeed in the workforce while their men were

gone, Hollywood produced fi lms such as
Mrs. Miniver
(1942),
Since You

Went Away
(1944), and
Tender Comrade
(1943) (Hartmann 1982, 191–92).

But as the war wound down, these messages changed. Suddenly career

women were less admirable. In
Spellbound
(1945), the psychiatrist Ingrid

Bergman is frigid; in
Together Again
, the mayor Irene Dunne abandons her

career for marriage (1944); in
Mildred Pierce
(1945), obsessive business-

woman Joan Crawford neglects and alienates her daughter. With the rise of

postwar fi lm noir, Barbara Stanwyck and Rita Hayworth seduce and manip-

ulate their male paramours in
Double Indemnity
(1944) and
The Lady from

Shanghai
(1947), respectively, while Olivia de Havilland tries to murder her

twin sister in
Dark Mirror
(1946). If they weren’t killing or manipulating,

postwar female stars were often portrayed as victims. Ingrid Bergman is

driven mad in both
Gaslight
(1944) and
Notorious
(1946); Barbara Stanwyck

is terrorized in
Sorry, Wrong Number
(1948). Whereas women had appeared

confi dent and competent when the war began, within a matter of years they

had become helpless, insecure ninnies (Hartmann 1982, 202).

In this, the church was complicit. The Jesuit Daniel Lord wrote Hol-

lywood’s Production Code while the Irish Catholic Joseph Breen enforced

it, thus brokering a deal between Jewish producers and Catholic bishops

(Dezell 2001, 27). Films like
Going My Way
(1944) not only helped align

American Catholics with the nation’s commitment to war, but they also

moved away from Depression mores of collaboration and mutual support

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

toward a “moral economy of pragmatic leadership” (Smith 2010, 68). Henry

Luce’s
Life
magazine contributed to this reassessment. Whereas prewar arti-

cles had depicted Catholics as “ethnic Others,” postwar photo essays repre-

sented them as good American citizens, in the process eliding any hint of

ethnic difference. This message was underscored in a 1944
Life
editorial,

“The Kremlin and the Vatican,” which attacked Russia for criticizing the

pope, and in numerous articles featuring Cardinal Francis Spellman, praise

for the pope, and photo essays about cherubic altar boys (Smith 2010, 104).

Luce’s campaign was aided by Irish Americans Margaret Bourke-White

and Bishop Fulton Sheen. Bourke-White was the fi rst female photojournal-

ist hired by
Life
. In fact, one of her photos graced the inaugural cover (Bois

1997). Bishop Sheen helped revise the public image of Catholics with his

television show,
Life is Worth Living
, which ran from 1952 to 1957. During

this period Sheen was featured in a cover story in
Time
magazine, won an

Emmy for “most outstanding personality,” and became a permanent mem-

ber of the top-ten list of most admired American men. What was his appeal?

The promotion of “faith, home, and family as the foundation for collective

American identity” (Smith 2010, 140).

Responses to this retrenchment varied. Like their foremothers, some

Irish American women who were themselves professional writers supported

the move. Betty Smith’s novels of Irish America—
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

(1943),
Tomorrow Will Be Better
(1948), and
Maggie-Now
(1958)—reiterate

the belief that when women married, they quit working outside the home.

Indeed, the preoccupations of Smith’s heroines are “romance, marriage,

childbirth, and death” (Scott 1979, 90–92).3 Other Irish American novels of

the time such as Mary Doyle Curran’s
The
Parish and the Hill
, Mary Deasy’s

Hour of Spring
, and Ellin Berlin’s
Lace Curtains
(all published in 1948)

sound a comparable note. In a 1948 interview with
The Boston Post
, Curran

describes her novel by saying: “mine isn’t a love story. There isn’t a drop of

sex in it. . . . [I]t is my family of whom I am writing. . . . My mother was born

in Ireland. She taught her children the true Irish value of life. . . . My mother

3. In contrast, Smith’s
Joy in the Morning
is notable for its racy sex scenes.

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believed in education for her children, moral and intellectual. . . . [W]e must

return to those values” (quoted in Halley 2002).

But many prominent Irish American women writers refused to go that

route. A descendant of John McCarthy, an Irish immigrant who settled in

Newfoundland in 1837, Mary McCarthy married immediately after graduat-

ing from Vassar and then married three more times; nevertheless, she worked

from 1937 through 1962 as a writer and editor for the
Partisan Review
,

the most intellectually elite “old boys’ club” in New York City (Brightman

1992; Showalter 2001). McCarthy’s prominence in this imbalanced work

environment is all the more striking given the low stature of its women con-

tributors: in the
Partisan Review Reader
, a collection of the “best and most

representative” essays published from 1939 to 1944, only fourteen of the

ninety-two selections are by women. However, over a third were written

by Irish Americans—McCarthy and the poets Louise Bogan and Marianne

Moore—and they were soon joined by Flannery O’Connor.4 O’Connor’s

short stories “The Heart of the Park” and “The Peeler” (which became part

of her fi rst novel,
Wise Blood
) were published by the
Partisan Review
in 1949