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

college dropped from 47 percent in 1920, to
    35 percent in 1958—increasing numbers of Irish American women went to
    college and worked throughout their lives (Woods 2005). “A century earlier,
    women had fought for higher education; now girls went to college to get a
    husband” (Friedan 1973, 150). Not so with the Irish Americans.
    Just as “Teaching ultimately allowed daughters . . . of immigrants to
    leave the working class and enter the educated lower middle class” (Nolan
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    2004, 137), education in the postwar years ensured that Irish American
    women writers continued to move up. They went to college when other
    women were dropping out; they were among the 15 percent who married
    and kept working. They established careers that granted them membership
    in the top tier of Catholic professionals, the 9 percent of Catholics in the
    upper class (Schneider 1952). That they did so long before the advent of
    second-wave feminism no doubt accounts for their above-average rates of
    marriage, divorce, and psychoanalysis.
    The works discussed here confi rm these statistics; more important, they
    also relate aspects of Irish America that challenge its conventional portrayal
    as a conformist patriarchy in which women were at most housekeepers or
    nannies, their parents pious simpletons or atavistic ethnics. This picture of
    Irish America not only offers a convincing response to the traditional mono-
    lithic view; it also reveals how Irish American women laid the groundwork
    for future generations.
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    2
    The 1960s
    The Rise of Feminism
    I am as dull as the picture I ripped out of the frame, dull as
    the idea of a mirror over the couch. Impersonation of wife and
    mother. I have begun to wonder what I am like in real life.
    —Maureen Howard, Facts of Life
    The Eisenhower era provided a seedbed for American feminism. Whereas
    the war years had encouraged married women to leave their homes
    to support the war effort, the postwar years pushed them back. As chapter
    1 outlined, a cultural and public relations blitz resulted in a “consolidated
    attack on women’s new-found freedom.” Women were urged to stay home,
    take advantage of all the new labor saving devices, and view their roles as
    wife and mother as embodying “autonomy and responsibility” if not destiny
    (Whelehan 1995, 7). Many succumbed. Across America, the average marriage
    age fell to twenty, the lowest since the 1900s; overall 70 percent of young
    women were married by age twenty-four. Worse, single women over twenty-
    four were considered old maids (Davis 1991, 17). But although motherhood
    is important it is hardly glamorous, and while vacuum cleaners and washing
    machines made housework easier, they could not make it fun. Regardless of
    age or ethnicity, many American women felt alienated and dehumanized by
    housework (Whelehan 1995, 9). Thus it is not surprising that, apart from the
    civil rights movement, the most important and enduring social phenomenon
    of this decade was women’s liberation (Woods 2005, 363).
    This chapter traces the growth of the women’s movement as portrayed
    in Irish American women’s writing in the 1960s. Through their novels and
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    short stories, these authors reminded readers that in love, marriage, work,
    and religion, women were second-class citizens and they were not happy
    about it—an attitude most often conveyed via satire to illustrate the “femi-
    nine mystique.” The 1960s saw Irish American women’s novels lamenting
    unhappy marriages, condescending husbands, and domestic abuse, themes
    characterizing