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

their status at home, at work, and at church.
    Why such a consistent message? Because Irish American writers had an
    advantage unavailable to their peers. Whereas many women found it diffi cult
    to organize because they lived in different neighborhoods or lacked a central
    organizing body and could not build the critical mass necessary to effect
    political change (Woods 2005, 364), through the mid-sixties Irish Ameri-
    cans were still bound by their religious beliefs and thus possessed a “collec-
    tive consciousness” (Cochrane 2010, 2). Most important, as members of the
    largest, most enduring, and most literate of American ethnic groups, Irish
    American women not only had a long history of voicing displeasure through
    their writing but they also anticipated the need for change.
    In this they consistently pre-dated their closest literary rivals, Jewish
    American women. Whereas Ruth Herschberger’s Adam’s Rib (1948), Alva
    Myrdal and Viola Klein’s Women’s Two Roles (1956), Rona Jaffe’s The Best of
    Everything (1958), and Alix Kate Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
    (1971) have been cited as the earliest twentieth-century feminist novels
    (Brownmiller 1999, 40, 45), Irish American women were actually the fi rst
    to raise these issues. Mary McCarthy published The Company She Keeps in
    1942 and Maeve Brennan’s “Talk of the Town” had been satirizing male
    vanity since 1949. During the 1960s, Helen Gurley Brown gained fame for
    Sex and the Single Girl (1962); Maureen Howard put a satirical, feminist spin
    on the message in Bridgeport Bus (1963); Elizabeth Cullinan criticized the
    infl uence of the Catholic Church in her 1960s New Yorker stories; and Mary
    Daly blew them all away by arguing for women’s equality in The Church
    and the Second Sex (1968). Given their history, it is not surprising that Irish
    American women were ready for the women’s movement, for they had been
    fi ghting this battle throughout their adult lives.
    During the 1960s, Women’s Liberation movements sprang up all over
    the country, among them the New York Radicals, the Chicago Women’s
    Liberation Union, and Boston’s Cell 16 of Female Liberation. After the
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    New York Radicals grew too unwieldy, the Redstockings formed as a splin-
    ter group. WITCH—known variously as Women’s International Terrorist
    Conspiracy from Hell, Women Inspired to Tell Their Collective History, or
    Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays—was formed to move
    from raising consciousness to raising hell, with factions in New York, Wash-
    ington, DC, and elsewhere. Angered by Jewish feminists’ assumptions that
    their Catholic counterparts were “intellectually inferior” because of their
    working-class backgrounds, the Irish American Redstocking Sheila Cro-
    nan formed a separate group—the Class Workshop—to discuss how their
    upbringing had affected Catholic women’s confi dence and political rheto-
    ric (Brownmiller 1999, 65). A radical feminist, Cronan instigated the plan
    to hang a banner from the Statue of Liberty reading “Free Abortion on
    Demand,” an idea unfortunately scuttled; she was also one of the fi rst to
    argue that marriage enslaved women and that to achieve equality, it should
    be abolished (Echols 1989, 142).
    Irish Jewish friction was clearly a by-product of World War II. Prior to
    the war, Irish American women dominated the female sphere of the publish-
    ing world, representing the major female ethnic group among the literati.
    But after the war, thanks to the infl ux of Jewish immigrants and Americans’
    response to the Holocaust, anti-Semitism faded in the face of postwar pros-
    perity, necessitating an expanded workforce; consequently, Jews became a
    part of the mainstream, entering the white-collar echelons and moving to
    the suburbs. Whereas the best-known female Jewish writers