The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (2 page)

Church, which created and reinforced them. By analyzing their work,
The

Banshees
addresses this issue while simultaneously expanding the boundaries

of the Irish American canon.

Why the banshee? Because Irish American women writers share a good

deal in common with the mythical Irish being. Sometimes translated as

“scold” or “a scolding woman,” the term “banshee”/
bean-si
is a derivation

of
badhb
, which can mean “war goddess” or “a dangerous, frightening and

aggressive being.” One variation,
badb
, is associated with “heroic individu-

als”; another,
badhbh
, refers to “threatening” females; whereas tales associ-

ated with the
si
-woman convey the role of guardian (Lysaght 1986, 37–39,

216).1 Given these roots it is not surprising that in the 1970s, the banshee

was adopted as the symbol of the Irish Women United (IWU), a radical

1. For additional information, see Patricia Lysaght,
Banshees
,
1986. Lysaght,

the foremost expert on the banshee, devotes at least three chapters to the Irish roots

and meanings of the term.

1

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

feminist group. The IWU named their journal
Banshee
“not only because

the being is feminine, but also because her appearance and behavior do not

correspond to conventional male ideas about what a woman should look

like and be like” (Lysaght 1986, 243). Although the journal disappeared in

1975, the concept was revitalized for a literary website in 1997 by New Irish

authors Emer Martin and Helena Mulkerns. “We chose the name
Banshee
,”

Mulkerns explains, “because we wanted something strong, loud, female, and

Irish” (quoted in Wall 1999, 67).

Like the banshee who delivered messages forewarning imminent death,

through their writing Irish American women have repeatedly warned of the

death of women’s rights. These messages carried the greatest potency at lim-

inal times when feminism was under attack owing to the politics of society,

the government, or the church. Similar to the banshee’s plaintive lament,

Irish American women’s writing has been cautionary if not “tutelary” (Lysa-

ght 1986). Moreover, just as the banshee’s lament was not heard by every-

one, Irish American women—and their writing—have been omitted from

“most religious, academic, and popular chronicles” (Dezell 2001, 89).

The American Catholic Church is responsible for women’s absence in

religious histories. Early works, generally written by and about priests, con-

tained very little information about lay men, but lay women were “invisible”

most likely because of what Mary Jo Weaver terms the authors’ “invincible

ignorance.” More recent works, Weaver continues, have simply been guilty of

“willful neglect.” In Robert Trisco’s
Catholics in America 1776–1976
(1976),

thirty pictures are of male clerics and only seven of women; the rest are

of buildings or political cartoons. Out of 331 pages in James Hennessey’s

American Catholics
(1981), information about women amounts to approxi-

mately 10 pages, yet that alone represents the largest inclusion among Cath-

olic histories at that time. Ten years later, William Shannon’s
The American

Irish: A Political and Social Portrait
(1990) devoted only a few paragraphs to

women, most often citing their relationships with Irish men or their involve-

ment with the suffrage movement. However, since suffragists were gener-

ally upper-class Catholic women, most Irish Americans were left out. Even

as late as 2005, Tim Meagher’s
Columbia Guide to Irish American History

cited only thirty-six women within over three hundred pages of text. Such

oversights are not accidental, nor are they limited to Catholic historians; they

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I N T R O D U C T I O N | 3

simply refl ect the fact that throughout much of American history, religion,

Catholicism, and women were rarely addressed (Weaver 1985, 11–13).

Since the 1980s, women have been increasingly included in academic

studies. Recent years have seen publications devoted to Jewish, Hispanic,

Russian, Chinese, African, African American, Italian, Korean, Polish, Asian

Pacifi c, Japanese, Pakistani, Arab, Greek, and Roman women. Studies have

focused on lesbians, vampires, lesbian vampires, Islamic, Appalachian, medi-

eval, and Victorian women, to name just a few. In contrast, coverage of

Irish women has been scant. When the three-volume 4,000-page
Field Day

Anthology of Irish Literature
was published in 1991, female readers were out-

raged to discover that editor Seamus Deane had “overlooked” the contribu-

tions of Irish women. In response, Toni O’Brien Johnson and David Cairn

published
Gender in Irish Writing
(1991) and Anne Owens Weekes put out

Unveiling Treasures: The Attic Guide to the Published Works of Irish Women

Literary Writers
(1993). In 2002, the
Field Day Anthology
corrected the

oversights of its initial publication with a two-volume 3,200-page addition,

Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions
. But to date, no similar efforts have

been undertaken on behalf of Irish American women.

Within literary studies,
Making the Irish American
lists only (non-Irish)

Betty Smith, Mary McCarthy, and Flannery O’Connor (Casey and Rhodes

2006). Although Patricia Monaghan (1993) laments the lack of coverage,

her essays tend to focus on Irish American women poets. Charles Fanning,

recognized nationally and internationally as the foremost Irish American

literary scholar, devoted portions of
The Irish Voice in America
(1991; 2001)

to women writers; however, since it covers 250 years, analysis is limited.

Likewise, Catriona Maloney and Helen Thompson’s
Irish Women Writers

Speak Out: Voices from the Field
(2003) features interviews with seventeen

contemporary Irish and Irish American women writers, but only six of them

are Irish American. While Ron Ebest’s
Private Histories: The Writing of Irish

Americans, 1900–1935
(2005) addresses detailed attention to women authors

of the period, coverage is limited to just three decades. Even the most recent

research, such as Christopher Dowd’s
The Construction of Irish Identity in

American Literature
(2010) includes just one Irish American woman writer:

Margaret Mitchell. As of this writing, the only in-depth study is a collection

of twelve critical essays,
Too Smart to Be Sentimental: Contemporary Irish

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

American Women Writers
(Ebest and McInerney 2008). But this work rep-

resents at most 10 percent of contemporary Irish American women writers.

Irish American women have been overlooked not only because their

writing avoids classic Irish American themes such as camaraderie, drink, vio-

lence, and pub life, but also because they refuse to reify saintly mothers or

spend much time on priests (Monaghan 1993, 340). Historians and feminist

scholars have also ignored Irish American women—historians because they

were women and feminists because the women were presumably Catholic

(Weaver 1985, 11). Irish American women have been ostracized because of

the fi eld’s traditional defi nitions.2 Eamonn Wall suggests: “If a writer does

not write about Irish Americans . . . he or she will be labeled an American

writer. The problem for an Irish American writer is that the fi eld of opera-

tion is rather small, but if he or she abandons this fi eld, there will no longer

be an Irish American novel,
unless the parameters are extended
” (1999, 37,

emphasis mine). But Gerda Lerner offers an antidote. In her argument for

adding women to historical studies she recommends that the parameters

be extended to include “sexuality, reproduction, role indoctrination, [and]

female consciousness” as well as women’s culture, which might encompass

their “occupations, status, experiences, rituals, and consciousness” (quoted

in Weaver 1985, 5–15).

The banshees have done just that: they extended the boundaries of the

Irish American literary canon by moving inside the bedroom, outside the

home, and into the workplace. Perhaps as a result, their works have been

overlooked because of their feminist message. Since they arrived in America,

the banshees have anticipated, fostered, and protected feminism by expos-

ing domestic violence, fi ghting prejudice, and refuting political attacks on

women’s rights.

The Famine Generations

Although the earliest groups of immigrants were primarily male (Fanning

1997, 2), women quickly made themselves heard. A role model for pre-Famine

2. This list was adapted from that used by Elaine Showalter in
A Jury of Her

Peers
, 2009.

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writers, Maria Edgeworth’s novel
Castle Rackrent
(1800) was not just the

fi rst signifi cant work of Irish fi ction; it also made a political statement, for the

term “rack-rent” referred to British landowners’ practice of raising their ten-

ant farmers’ rents too high for tenants to pay, then evicting them and charg-

ing interest on any improvements they had made to the property. Originally

published in Dublin and London,
Castle Rackrent
was quickly reproduced

in America and went through multiple editions between 1814 and 1904.

Another model was
The Wild Irish Girl
by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan.

After its success in London and Dublin, the novel was reprinted fi ve times

in New York and Philadelphia. Although part of its popularity was due to

a romantic plot, its story of a young English lord banished to Ireland who

comes to love the land was not only an indictment of the British; it was also

one of the earliest books by a woman to argue for Irish nationalism (Fan-

ning 2001, 13). Still, these works were not typical Irish fare, for they mostly

lacked a satiric edge.

The fi rst generation of Irish American writers was more likely to draw on

their forebears’ tradition of satirical writing to parody and defl ate anti-Irish

stereotypes. These early emigrants were confi dent, educated, and articulate;

consequently, they had no problem poking fun at their xenophobic neigh-

bors. In 1835,
Six Months in a House of Correction; or, the Narrative of Dorah

Mahoney, Who Was Under the Infl uence of the Protestants about a Year, and

an Inmate of the House of Correction in Leverett St., Boston, Mass., Nearly Six

Months
was published anonymously to counter Rebecca Reed’s anti-Catholic

tale
Six Months in a Convent
, which had resulted in a mob burning down

a convent (Fanning 1997, 47). “Dorah’s” tale is rife with wry one-liners,

but the subsequent “Letter to Irish Catholics” is even better. Building on

the model of juvenalian satire exemplifi ed by Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest

Proposal” (1729), the author urges fellow immigrants not to learn to read

or write, arguing, “Besides, it is a great trouble and expense to build schools

and maintain them, and a great botheration to the brains to pore over books.

The Catholic Sentinel and the Jesuit, those two admirably conducted recip-

tacles [
sic
] of knowledge, contain all that ever was known since the creation

of the world” (Anonymous 1835, quoted in Fanning 1997, 60).

This highly literate fi rst generation, who emigrated willingly prior to

1840, was followed by the Famine generation, most of whom were uneducated

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cottiers and tenant farmers (Fanning 1997, 97). Forced to choose between

starvation or emigration, between 1846 and 1875 at least 2,700,000 Irish

entered the United States. Half of this number consisted of single women,

but by the 1870s female immigrants outnumbered the males—a freedom

unique to the Irish (Meagher 2005, 173–74)—and memorialized by the

statue of fi fteen-year-old Annie Moore, the “fi rst ‘offi cial’ immigrant to

enter the New World through Ellis Island” (Dezell 2001, 58). Miss Moore

epitomized the Irish American female immigrant, who was young, single,

and traveled alone, with sisters, or with female relations. By the end of the

nineteenth century, these women represented over 60 percent of the Irish

immigrants (Dezell 2001, 91).