The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women by Sally Barr Ebest

much less attractive than her tomboy persona.
    The memoirs of Caryl Rivers and Maureen Waters, born before the war
    (1937 and 1939, respectively), adumbrate the feminist concerns of their baby-
    boomer successors. Rivers’s childhood games alternated between arguing
    and fi ghting. “I was convinced that being a girl was an O.K. thing. Could I
    not do anything the boys could do, and do it better? Except, of course, pee
    on target” (1973, 20). Rivers grew increasingly disenchanted during high
    school. To her, the nuns’ insistence on the rhythm method implied that it
    was “a woman’s duty to be a brood mare, even it if destroyed her health, her
    marriage, her family life, and kept them all in bleakest poverty.” The idea
    that it was “better to die in the state of grace than to commit [the] mortal
    sin” of using contraceptives was unacceptable (1973, 185).
    Maureen Waters had similar experiences. “Nobody played with dolls,”
    she writes. “What a strange group of girls we were, children of immigrants,
    fi ghting for a toehold in the promised land.” As Waters grew older these atti-
    tudes intensifi ed. A teenager in the 1950s, she writes, “the last thing in the
    world I wanted to be was a housewife. In high school my electives were math
    and science; I wouldn’t be caught dead in home economics.” The last straw
    occurred at her all-girls college. Because there were no males, the female stu-
    dents became responsible for responding to the chaplain during Mass, a role
    Waters assumed with pleasure. However, when she learned that she would
    not be allowed on the altar, that she would have to kneel “on a pretty little
    prie-dieu just outside the sanctuary,” she rebelled. “Despite the thrust of my
    religious upbringing or, paradoxically, because of it,” she writes, “I expected
    to be treated like everyone else, men included” (2001, 95).
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    Waters was not alone. America experienced a spike in divorces after
    World War II, jumping from approximately 16.7 percent in 1936 to 26.4
    percent in 1946 (Day 1964, 511). Despite the Catholic prohibition against
    divorce, these fi gures varied little between Catholics and Protestants, averag-
    ing 21 and 25 percent, respectively (Robinson 2008). Divorce rates dropped
    in the 1950s, when approximately 80 percent of Americans were married.
    But it would be a mistake to infer that these statistics refl ect overall marital
    satisfaction, for couples in those days separated much more often than they
    divorced (Gerson 205–7), and there is enormous anecdotal evidence to sug-
    gest countless unhappy marriages. Nor do these statistics suggest a general
    acceptance of divorce among Catholics. Mary Gordon notes that her mother,
    a legal secretary, explained that her boss did not “‘handle divorce.’ She said
    this as if divorce were a particularly nasty, possibly toxic species of effl uvia,
    which they very well knew better than to touch” (2007, 23).
    Despite their Catholic upbringing, this sampling of midcentury Irish
    American women writers greatly exceeded the national average of divorces
    long before they became commonplace. Perhaps as a result, they also con-
    formed with the fad of seeking psychoanalysis to understand themselves.
    Caryl Rivers offers one explanation: “I would love to see the data on how
    many female alcoholics and frigid wives evolved out of that crazy indoctrina-
    tion” (1973, 185).
    Work + Religion + Education = Assimilation
    Regardless of their marital or psychological problems, Irish American
    women writers at midcentury outperformed their unhyphenated peers. In
    1959, while the average American woman was engaged at age seventeen,
    married by twenty, and mother of four by twenty-four, Irish Catholic fami-
    lies were encouraging their daughters to postpone marriage. Although the
    proportion of women attending