The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (21 page)

American women, her works represent not only elements of her personal life

but also, perhaps more important, a record of her creative life (Daly 1996,

223–24).

Oates’s 1970s novels mark the end of her themes of violence and trauma

per se and the beginning of a focus on discrimination and violence against

women. Her fi ction features a number of specifi cally “woman-centered nov-

els”—
Do with Me What You Will
(1973),
The Assassins
(1975),
Childwold

(1976), and
Unholy Loves
(1979)—as well as a number of similarly themed

short stories in
Marriages and Infi delities
(1972). In addition to feminist

themes, Oates practices fi gurative “infi delities” against male-dominated

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institutions in the majority of her work during this decade—against science

in
Wonderland
(1971); against law in
Do with Me What You Will
; against

politics, philosophy, the visual arts, and religion in
The Assassins
; against

literature in
Childwold
; against fundamentalist Christians in
Son of the Morn-

ing
(1978); against literary criticism in
Unholy Loves
; and against business

in
Cybele
(1979)—each personifi ed in a male character. Oates also criticizes

patriarchal institutions.
The Triumph of the Spider Monkey
(1976) and
A Sen-

timental Education
(1979) critique social welfare and military institutions,

respectively (Daly 1996, 69–75).

In this, her work was refl ective of feminist efforts to publicize and eradi-

cate sexual violence and male domination (Brownmiller 1999, 194). Prior

to the 1970s, Americans seemed unaware that rape, incest, and domestic

abuse were social problems (Davis 1991, 308). The women’s movement—

which included a signifi cant number of Irish American women—helped

raise the consciousness of the American public. Continuing Irish American

women writers’ tradition of protecting women’s rights through their jour-

nalistic efforts, Marilyn Webb, a member of DC Women’s Liberation, helped

develop a counterculture journal,
Off Our Backs
. Its fi rst issue discussed

abortion, the Pill, and how to use a diaphragm. Collaborating with Martha

Shelley and members of WITCH, Robin Morgan took over
Rat
magazine

from its male editors. Her essay in the inaugural issue, “Goodbye to All

That,” which repudiated the male members of the New Left, is still consid-

ered “one of the most powerful documents of the emerging feminist era.” In

Pittsburgh, Jo-Ann Evans Gardner founded
KNOW, Inc.
, a fact-fi lled com-

pendium of women’s issues; in New York, Mary Cantwell, managing editor

at
Mademoiselle
, contributed to the movement by running a series of pro-

feminist essays. In Los Angeles, Varda Murrell, under the pseudonym Varda

One, started
Everywoman
magazine, which eventually led to the founding

of the Everywoman Bookstore. In Berkeley, Bay Area Women’s Liberation

members Trina Robbins, Lynn O’Connor, and Susan Griffi n contributed

to
It Ain’t Me, Babe
, a twenty-four-page feminist newspaper (Brownmiller

1999, 74–77). Although Kate Millet’s
Sexual Politics
was the fi rst to iden-

tify rape as a “weapon of the patriarchy,”
It Ain’t Me, Babe
was one of the

earliest feminist journals to draw attention to the issue. After running an

article entitled “Anatomy of a Rape,” the editors included essays on how to

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

“Disarm Rapists” and “Fight!” Diane Crothers brought this to the attention

of New York’s West Village-One, a feminist consciousness-raising group,

after seeing an article describing how California feminists had exposed the

men (including the groom) who raped a woman at a bachelor party. Conse-

quently, the New York Radical Feminists held a speak-out on rape at which

victims described their ordeals. Carolyn Flaherty, of the Brooklyn Brigade

#5, ensured the event would receive adequate publicity by convincing Gail

Sheehy, then writing for
New York Magazine
, to cover it. Sheehy’s coverage

led to the New York Radical Feminist Conference on Rape, whose publicists

were Rosemary Gaffney and Sheila Michaels (Brownmiller 1999, 195–201).

The following year, Susan Griffi n, poet and cofounder of Bay Area

Women Against Rape, published “Rape: The All-American Crime”—con-

sidered a “trailblazing article, the fi rst in a national publication to put rape

in a historical context.” Later that year, WAR (Women Against Rape) groups

were founded around the country. In response, Kathy Barry, along with

Joanne Parrent, Cate Stadelman, and eight other women published a hand-

book,
Stop Rape
. This work was the impetus for Liz O’Sullivan and others

to form East Coast support groups for victims of rape, which led in turn to

the DC Crisis Rape Center, a hotline women could call twenty-four hours

a day. In 1974, Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson co-edited
Rape: The

First Sourcebook for Women
, the fi rst book on the topic to be published by a

mainstream press. It was followed by
Against Rape
, coauthored by Kathleen

Thompson, and
The Politics of Rape: The Victim’s Perspective
, by Diana Rus-

sell (Brownmiller 1999, 205–23).

Irish American women were also active in the abortion rights move-

ment. In 1966, Patricia Maginnis, Lana Clarke Phelan, and Rowena Gurner

had begun publishing a handbook—emblazoned with Margaret Higgins

Sanger’s famous declaration, “A woman has the right to control her own

body”—offering advice for women seeking illegal abortions. In 1969, the

Austin Women’s Liberation Group, led by Judy Smith, Bea Durden, and

Victoria Foe, convinced the recent law school graduate Sarah Wedding-

ton—who went on to be co-counsel in
Roe v. Wade
—to join them in the

fi ght to legalize abortion. In the 1972 inaugural issue of
Ms.
magazine, Jane

O’Reilly contributed the lead article, “The Housewife’s Moment of Truth,”

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detailing her travails in attempting to secure an abortion. Such increased

awareness led to passage of the marital rape law in 1976 and the establish-

ment of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence in 1977. In 1976,

the feminist author Del Martin wrote
Battered Wives
, the fi rst book expos-

ing domestic violence. This work, as well as the establishment of shelters for

battered women in England, inspired Lenore Walker to research and write

The Battered Woman
. Published by Harper and Row in 1979, this book

introduced the “battered woman’s syndrome” as a defense argument for

women accused of killing their abusers (Brownmiller 1999). By 1979 forty

of the fi fty states had developed or revised their rape statutes (Ferguson,

Katrak, Miner 1996, 47).

Irish American women exposed these problems in their literature. In the

lesbian novel
Give Me Your Good Ear
(1979), the heroine Francie is involved

with Ben, a man who verbally abuses her. For much of the novel she contem-

plates leaving him but stays for fear he will go berserk (Brady 1979, 16). In

Final Payments
, Gordon’s Isabel Moore is raped by the politician John Ryan

and later physically and verbally abused by her “ideal” man, Hugh Slade.

Joyce Carol Oates further explores these themes in
The Assassins
. This mes-

sage becomes more uplifting in
The Childwold
, which takes the themes and

characters running throughout Nabokov’s
Lolita
and turns them on their

head. Rather than featuring a ruined and defeated nymphet, Oates’s Laney

Bartlett moves beyond the infl uence of her seducer, Kasch, for his tutelage

has enabled her to expand her mind and her world. “Where are you, why

have you gone so far?” he asks. “The books you read are not my books, the

language you use is not my language. You are no longer recognizable! You

are no longer mine!” (Oates 1975b, 290).

Unlike Nabokov’s socially and intellectually stunted Lolita, Laney not

only transcends Kasch but also actually returns to help him, for “she feels

her own power to restore Kasch to life through her own imagination.” Laney

represents Oates’s “youthful alter-ego,” for like Oates her intellectual eman-

cipation enables her to regain her voice and tell her own story as the novel

concludes (Bender 1979, 121). As such this novel “rewrites
Lolita
, trans-

forming Humbert Humbert, a monologic narrator, into a man named Kasch

who fantasizes but does not act upon his ‘paedomorphic’ lust” (Daly 1996,

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

93). In this novel as well as Oates’s
Unholy Loves
(1979), women free them-

selves from negative relationships with men (76).2

As the decade progressed, the Women’s Liberation movement continued

to raise the nation’s consciousness by making social and political progress.

In Supreme Court rulings,
Eisenstadt v. Baird
ended the ban on unmar-

ried women using contraceptives,
Corning v. Brennan
put an end to job

discrimination, and
Taylor v. Louisiana
allowed women to be part of jury

pools—bans that seem unimaginable now. In 1975, Elaine Noble became

the fi rst openly gay candidate to be elected to the Massachusetts State Legis-

lature; two years later, the U.S. Air Force academy graduated its fi rst female

cadet. A woman (Bella Abzug) was the fi rst congressperson to call for Rich-

ard Nixon’s impeachment, women-owned businesses were growing, and
Ms.

magazine’s circulation grew to over four hundred thousand (Brownmiller

1999, 225).

Traditional attitudes were also challenged in the gay and lesbian com-

munity. Although the 1950s and 1960s saw some evidence of gay and les-

bian writing—in pulp fi ction and more notably in Jeannette Howard Foster’s

Sex Variant Women in Literature
(1958) and
The Ladder
, which reviewed

lesbian literature—the 1969 Stonewall Riot marked the offi cial beginning

of the Gay Rights movement. After two nights of rioting to protest police

raids on gay bars in Greenwich Village, the Gay Liberation movement ush-

ered in a spate of gay and lesbian-themed plays and novels exploring coming

out, sexual experimentation in urban and rural environments, and some-

times “sexually transgressive” writing like pornography and sadomasoch-

istic works (Bona 2004, 211). Among lesbian novels, the best known was

Rita Mae Brown,
Ruby Fruit Jungle
(1973), published by Daughters Inc., a

press cofounded by Parke Bowman, June Arnold, and Bertha Harris (a major

infl uence on Dorothy Allison).

Given the attitudes toward homosexuality expressed by the Catholic

Church, Irish American Catholic writers were not among this initial group;

2. Somewhat obtusely, in
Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life
, Eli

Zaretsky suggests that
Lolita
is actually a feminist novel because it stands as an

implicit critique of the postwar reifi cation of family life.

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however, Blanche McCrary Boyd did not suffer from this pressure. Born and

raised in South Carolina, Boyd belongs to the school of Scots-Irish Protes-

tants of the American South—stubborn, prickly, independent “radical indi-

vidualists” who refused to be cowed, or to bow, to anyone—particularly the

Catholic Church (Webb 2004, 81). Indeed, her main themes—the explora-

tion of sex and sexual preference—echo those of another Irish American

Southerner, her predecessor Carson McCullers. Boyd’s fi rst novel,
Nerves

(1973), traces the feelings and frustrations of a woman who cannot be sexu-

ally satisfi ed by a man but does not know why. This theme, as well as the

novel’s locale, set Boyd apart, for Irish American lesbian novels have been

almost completely overlooked.

Nerves
intersperses chapters exploring friendship, betrayal, love and

loss from the point of view of husbands, wives, and daughters. First Lena’s

friend Martha leaves her husband for a younger man, exclaiming, “You

wouldn’t believe how much freer I feel. Out of a cage.” Martha’s confession