The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (5 page)

role in these wars. Second generation Irish Americans Elizabeth Cullinan

and Maureen Howard confl ated Irish and Catholic and thus attacked both,

whereas Maeve Brennan, who viewed herself as more Irish than American

and thus took the church for granted, left it alone. Third generation Irish

Americans Mary Gordon and Elizabeth Savage, more comfortable with

their status, took a less jaundiced stance. Feminist issues like women’s roles

and treatment by the religious hierarchy certainly infl uenced this decade’s

authors and their novels; conversely, despite the lack of a strong religious

commitment among Southern 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
Nerves
, the

1970s mark the emergence of the Irish American lesbian novel.

Anyone who has read Margaret Atwood’s novel
The Handmaid’s Tale

will recognize its genesis in
Backlash
, Susan Faludi’s account of the Reagan

administration’s war on women. Similarly, anyone who remembers
Huma-

nae Vitae
will recognize the anger it engendered among its female fl ock.

Chapter 4, “The 1980s: The War against Women,” illustrates the effects of

the New Right’s hypocrisy as well as the church’s duplicity on Irish Ameri-

can women’s novels of the decade. Irish American women reacted to these

assaults with an outpouring of fi ction illustrating the ignorance and hypoc-

risy of Reagan’s policies. Three types of novels appeared: lesbian, anti-Cath-

olic, and matrophobic, featuring every possible type of “bad” mother, from

crazy or remote to teenage or working.

Chapter 5, “The 1990s: Fin de Siècle,” demonstrates the parallels

between attitudes and themes in novels at the ends of the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries. Any period of pro-marriage propaganda or antifeminist

backlash inevitably yields feminist novels critiquing marriage. This seems

particularly true of Irish American women: practically every novel published

in the 1990s dwells on unhappy marriages or bitter divorcees. Like their

predecessors in the 1890s, these fi n de siècle novels break with convention by

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I N T R O D U C T I O N | 1 7

fracturing timelines, featuring odd women and androgynous heroines, les-

bian and sexually independent women, as well as “hybrid novels” that move

beyond a strictly feminist focus. Such changes underscore “the magnitude

of the societal disruptions associated with the evolution of feminism in this

century” (Gilbert and Gubar 1994, 376).

Chapter 6, “The New Millennium” discusses the impact of 9/11 on

second- and third-wave writers. As Susan Faludi and Barbara Finlay have

documented, gains in women’s rights were either ignored—with the hopes

of abolishing women from the workplace—or readily accepted as complete.

This mindset clearly affected the literature of the decade. Some Irish Ameri-

can second-wave feminists defected while others rebelled, but the majority

retreated into the safety of marriage, family, or the church. Luckily, feminism

was protected in historical novels, memoirs, and eco-feminist works as the

authors turned from present to past and from religion to nature. Although

some younger writers took advantage of Irish popularity and post-feminist

attitudes and began churning out formulaic novels for entertainment and

fi nancial gain, new third-wave writers, as well as second-wave feminist novels

published toward the end of 2010, reveal a heartening resurgence. These

novels remind us of women’s battles with sexism, sexual abuse, depression,

addiction, and low self esteem, as well as the very obvious need to avoid

complacency.

In sum, despite pressure to desist, Irish American women’s novels con-

tinue to refl ect feminist literary history. Whereas they originally depicted

their milieu, over the course of the twentieth century Irish American women

have increasingly reacted, critiqued, and ultimately helped to shape it. By

comparing the novels published during each decade and following each

author’s political trajectory as represented in her fi ction,
The Banshees
offers

the fi rst Irish American women’s literary history. In the process, it illustrates

these banshees’ roles in protecting women’s sovereignty, rights, and reputa-

tions via the contemporary feminist novel. Thanks to their efforts feminism,

like the banshee, remains “an intrinsic part of our cultural inheritance”

(Lysaght 1986, 243).

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1

1900–1960

Ahead of Their Time

Early on, the word “work” took on for me a gravity, a luster, like

the stone in a monarch’s signet ring. “Work” was a word I savored

on my tongue like a cool stone.

—Mary Gordon,
Circling My Mother

Irish American women writers have been defending their domain since

they set foot in America in 1717. Whether they arrived before, during,

or after the Famine, and regardless of their relegation to the lost genera-

tion, midcentury realists, or twentieth-century feminists, their mission has

been consistent: through their writing, they protect their own. From the

beginning, these women wrote to protect their family, their church, and

their nation’s reputation via satirical, nationalistic, evangelistic, and romantic

novels (Fanning 2001). However, at the dawn of the twentieth century, this

focus began to change.

Irish American women have always worked. Initially they were nannies

and domestic servants, but as they assimilated they made sure that their

daughters moved up the economic ladder. Some worked in the manufac-

turing sector. But thanks to parochial education—and the nuns and teach-

ing sisters who founded Catholic colleges and universities—through the

fi rst half of the twentieth century, Irish American women dominated the

teaching profession. Moreover, with or without college degrees, the major-

ity of second-generation Irish American women writers began their careers

as journalists. Increasingly, these banshees protected their domain by mov-

ing beyond family, church, and nation to expose injustices in government,

18

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society, and the workplace. Through their writing they supported women’s

right to vote, the legalization of birth control, Irish independence, organized

labor, and safety in the workplace.

Certainly their literary heritage, inherent knowledge of English, and

membership in the largest single ethnic group gave them an advantage (Fan-

ning 2001). But their dual positions as colonized, second-class citizens of

their country and of their religion gave them their political edge. Thanks to

their parochial educations, Irish American women grew up with an “incho-

ate feminism” (Shelley 2006) that can be traced from pious Catholicism

to apostasy or ambivalence; from reticence about exposing women’s private

lives to a willingness to break all taboos, ranging from unhappy wives and

unfaithful husbands to adultery, impotence, sexuality, and sexual preference.

This chapter not only examines the factors that formed and differentiated

these women from their peers and predecessors; it also establishes the themes

characterizing their works and those that followed to illustrate how Irish

American women laid the groundwork for the contemporary feminist novel.

A Generation Lost, or A New Generation?

Since the fi rst edition of
The Irish Voice in America
, Irish American authors

publishing between 1900 and 1935 have been considered “a generation

lost” because they seemed less likely to draw on their ethnic heritage than

their predecessors. During the early years of the century as Irish emigrants

tried to assimilate, one cause for hesitation may have been American reac-

tion to events in Ireland. The Clan na Gael’s support for the Kaiser certainly

aroused anti-Irish sentiment in the United States, as did the 1916 Easter Ris-

ing in Dublin. Effectively marking the beginning of the Irish Revolution, its

unhappy conclusion resulting in Ireland’s partition and rise of the Troubles

did not help. But neither did U.S. postwar immigration laws that cut Irish

immigration from 22,000 per year to 1,200.1 These events, along with the

Great Depression, contributed to the literary inhibitions of Irish Americans

1. After 9/11, history repeated itself: the establishment of Homeland Security

and the Patriot Act resulted in a marked decrease in immigration as well as the belief

among Irish immigrants that the United States was anti-Irish.

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

not yet established within the middle class (Fanning 2001, 239–40). But

Ron Ebest’s
Private Histories: The Writing of Irish Americans, 1900–1935

argues otherwise. This study illustrates the endurance of family traits (alco-

holic father, dominant mother), use of satire, parochial education, neighbor-

hood settings, and traditions like weddings and wakes running throughout

Irish American literature of this period—while also tracing their gradual

demise thanks to intermarriage (2004, 2–3).

Irish American assimilation was fostered in large part by politically

active, highly literate Irish American women. In 1914, the Irish-born femi-

nist Dr. Gertrude Kelly issued a call for “women of Irish blood” to orga-

nize an American chapter of Cumann nam Ban (Irish Women’s Council)

to collect funds for Irish volunteers. A medical doctor and secretary of the

Newark Liberal League, Kelly also contributed polemics to the individualist

periodical
Liberty
. Termed by the editor Benjamin Tucker “among the fi nest

writers of this or any other country,” Kelly’s fi rst article argued that prostitu-

tion stemmed from women’s inability to fi nd gainful employment. In subse-

quent essays she declared that women were victims of prejudicial stereotypes:

“Men . . . have always denied to women the opportunity to think; and, if

some women have had courage enough to dare public opinion, and insist

upon thinking for themselves, they have been so beaten by that most power-

ful weapon in society’s arsenal, ridicule, that it has effectively prevented the

great majority from making any attempt to come out of slavery” (quoted in

McElroy, 1).

Following the 1916 Easter Rebellion and the establishment of the Irish

Free State in 1921, Kelly was among a group of women comprised of suf-

fragists, professionals, actresses, socialites, and solders’ mothers who orga-

nized the American Women Pickets for the Enforcement of America’s War

Aims to picket the British Embassy in Washington, DC. Later that year, this

group and the Irish Progressive League organized a strike to protest the

arrests of Irish Archbishop Daniel Mannix and Cork Lord Mayor Terence

Mac Sweeney. Among the women participating were Kelly, the labor orga-

nizer Leonora O’Reilly, the suffragist Hannah Sheehy-Skeffi ngton, and the

Celtic actress Eileen Curran. Supported by thousands, the strike halted the

loading and unloading of British ships at Manhattan’s Chelsea Pier for more

than three weeks (Dezell 2001, 97).

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Although many were put off by the suffragists’ anti-temperance slo-

ganeering, Irish American activists such as Lucy Burns, Alice Paul, and

Margaret Foley supported women’s suffrage, as did Leonora O’Reilly and

Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, who conjoined their activism with support for

labor unions (Dezell 2001, 97). Similarly, although her propaganda clearly

targeted Irish Catholics, Margaret Higgins Sanger was a key fi gure in pro-

moting birth control—a term she coined after rejecting “voluntary parent-

hood,” “conscious generation,” and the eugenically tinged “race control.”

Sanger supported her cause by passing out copies of
The Woman Rebel
, a

Socialist periodical that helped promote the birth control movement. The

fi rst woman to open a family planning clinic, she used the periodical as a

forum to argue that the church had “historically sustained an exploitative

capitalist system that kept women in bondage.” More offensive (although

most likely true), she maintained that without birth control, the high birth-

rate among the working class would weaken their offspring and further