The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (28 page)

As the novel develops, Howard explores the dichotomy between her

generation and her daughter’s. After Elizabeth marries Gus, she gives up

her singing career to be a housewife and mother. She and her husband are,

her mother says, “hopelessly suburban”: “She had paid me with silence. Sold

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 128

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 128

7/3/2013 4:10:30 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:30 PM

1 9 8 0 S : T H E W A R O N W O M E N | 1 2 9

out in Westchester. Gagged in her house with a lawn and trees, a baby. With

her money and her husband, the corporation stud. Ungrateful child” (156).

This is the life Elizabeth and her husband think they want—“as though we

were about to live as an ideal family before the Second World War” (111).

Elizabeth protests that she did not give up her music for her marriage, but

the fact remains that she stops singing.

Mother and daughter come together over tragedy. After Maude has sur-

gery for a “minor chalzion” she calls Elizabeth. Waking up, she is thrilled

to fi nd her daughter at her side. More delightfully, after drifting off again,

she awakens to hear Elizabeth singing. “When it was done we smiled at

each other foolishly, until she said, ‘Stop that, Mother. Stop crying’” (159).

Elizabeth sings a requiem for the dead, “a song that the reader recognizes

as not only for those characters who have died (Elizabeth’s father; a young

patient of Maude’s) but also for those selves that Maude and Elizabeth have

left behind” (Durso 2008, 65).

Howard’s acclaimed 1986 novel,
Expensive Habits
, expands on this

theme by detailing the price women pay for fame and fortune. The protago-

nist, Margaret “Maggie” Flood, is a highly successful writer, tough, arro-

gant, and loud. Maggie is the dreaded feminist—twice married, divorced,

fi ercely independent, who spies on her husband’s lover and fl ies to Mexico

to get a divorce. Yet she is no caricature. As she freely admits, “I pricked my

fl esh with the sight of this woman to beg relief from what seemed a terminal

wound—my life” (50–51). It wasn’t the infi delity that hurt so much. “I saw

that I had not been taken seriously and that broke my heart more than a

peroxide blonde” (75).

As the novel opens, Margaret is suffering from heart disease. In this

expansive iteration of Howard’s stylized approach debuted in
Bridgeport Bus
,

the novel ranges forward and backward, intermixing characters as well as

snatches of novels and refl ections scattered across fi ve long chapters in which

she retells and then recasts the story of her fi rst marriage (and novel), under-

goes a heart operation, and loses her son. In the fi nal scene Margaret is chal-

lenged one last time: looking at the stars, she falls into a hole and breaks her

leg. But she perseveres, dragging herself out of the hole, across the lawn, and

up to the porch: “They could never call her in,” she recalls. . . . She would

not go, defi ant, then dreaming on in the dangerous night air. Too smart for

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 129

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 129

7/3/2013 4:10:30 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:30 PM

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

her own good. . . . [T]hey called, but she took her chances. She would not

go in” (298). Maggie Flood personifi es the strong feminist working woman

of the 1980s. While independence is an “expensive habit,” carrying both

rewards and punishment, Irish American women would not relinquish it.

Yet the war on women continued. In a time when the divorce rate had

risen from 44 percent in 1970 to 52 percent in 1980 (Woods 2005, 367) and

the number of single-parent households continued to rise, Reagan’s bud-

get director decimated domestic spending, drastically reducing funding for

WIC, the Women, Infants, and Children Program. Hundreds of thousands

of families were thrown off welfare or faced reduced benefi ts, over a million

people lost their food stamps, three million children no longer qualifi ed for

free school lunches, and 75 percent of all day-care centers had their budgets

cut (Davis 1991, 439).

To accomplish their goals without appearing to beat up women, the

men of the New Right employed two ingenious strategies: linguistic subver-

sion and female “hit men.” Instead of attacking women’s liberation, they

denounced feminists as “antifamily.” Rather than be anti-abortion they

became “pro-life” and “pro-motherhood.” Hiding behind this linguistic

subterfuge, they not only attacked practically every federal program assist-

ing mothers but also lobbied “for every man’s right to rule supreme at

home” (Faludi 1991, 239). More insidious was the use of women against

their own sex. Like turncoat Serena Joy in
The Handmaid’s Tale
, working

mother Phyllis Schlafl y railed against the Equal Rights Amendment. Con-

naught “Connie” Marshner stuck her three children in day care because

she was busy promoting the Family Protection Act. Then when she was dis-

missed after becoming pregnant with her fourth child, she switched gears

and attacked women who used day care instead of staying home with their

children!(Faludi 1991).

Mary McGarry Morris’s fi rst novel,
Vanished
(1988), uses role rever-

sal to question these essentialist beliefs. Aubrey Wallace is a mentally weak

white man; Dotty is a white trash teenager who has more or less kidnapped

Aubrey by driving off with him in his truck. When he tells her they need to

head back, Dotty runs away and returns with “a loaf of bread, a blue mason

jar fi lled with dimes”—and Canny—a “baby girl with a pale pink ribbon in

her yellow-white hair” (9). For fi ve years, Aubrey, Dotty, and Canny travel

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 130

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 130

7/3/2013 4:10:30 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:30 PM

1 9 8 0 S : T H E W A R O N W O M E N | 1 3 1

around the country stealing and conning people out of their belongings.

Although they appear as a family, Dotty is not the typical mother. She picks

up men wherever they stop and she physically abuses Canny. When they stop

at a county fair, Dotty has sex with a cowboy while his pal molests Canny.

Aubrey is no help. Whenever he “tried to think about his dilemma, he would

be seized with a helplessness so vast and so paralyzing” that he could not

act (11). Aubrey is the demoralized “wife” who so fears being left that he is

unable to protect his “daughter” from physical or sexual abuse. Some people,

Morris suggests, are not fi t to be parents.

Regardless of their politics, women began disappearing from public offi ce

after Reagan’s election (Faludi 1991, 257). The number of women appointed

to judicial positions fell from 15 to 8 percent; the number of women put

forth for Senate confi rmation also dropped. In the White House, the female

staff was reduced by half. And even though 2.5 million women lived below

the poverty line, Reagan cut their funding too. Granted, he did appoint a

few women—most of them Irish American—to offi ce. In 1981, Sandra Day

O’Connor became the fi rst female jurist on the Supreme Court. Reagan also

appointed Jeanne Kirkpatrick to the United Nations, hired Peggy Noonan

as his assistant and speech writer, and named Elizabeth Dole and Margaret

Heckler to his cabinet (Davis 1991, 419–20). But they were not suffi cient to

stop the New Right juggernaut.

After Reagan won a second term, he eliminated the Coalition on

Women’s Appointments, the Working Group on Women, and the Federal

Women’s Program. After passing the Paperwork Reduction Act, the Reagan

administration stopped collecting statistics on women’s status altogether.

Even the women who had supported Reagan’s measures discovered that their

jobs carried “infl ated titles but no authority or required them to carry out

the administration’s most punitive antifeminist policies.” Marjorie Meck-

lenburg had to enforce the “squeal rule”—a term coined by Irish American

Mary Cantwell during her tenure on the
New York Times
—which required

clinics to report teenage girls seeking birth control. Another woman, Nabers

Cabaniss, was charged with ensuring that members of family planning clin-

ics were fi red if they “mentioned the word abortion.” Jo Ann Gasper was

assigned the job of eliminating domestic violence programs (Faludi 1991,

257–59).

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 131

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 131

7/3/2013 4:10:30 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:30 PM

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

When the Reagan administration wasn’t fi ghting feminists, unwed moth-

ers, and poor women, its cohorts tried repeatedly to take away their right to

choose. Federal funding for poor women seeking abortions was eliminated,

family-planning clinics found their funding cut by 25 percent, and support for

international Planned Parenthood stopped altogether. Since efforts to repeal

Roe v. Wade had failed on the national level, pro-life groups began focusing

on individual state laws so that getting an abortion—especially for teenagers,

the least-prepared of all mothers—would be more diffi cult. Valerie Sayers’s

Due East
(1987) seemingly supports this stance. Fifteen-year-old Mary Faith

Rapple is pregnant and the baby’s father is dead, but she is determined to have

the baby. Although the novel’s denouement suggests that Mary Faith is a very

mature fi fteen, such a conclusion might strike some as unrealistic.3

More down-to-earth is Alice McDermott’s second novel,
That Night

(1987). McDermott turns her literary clock back to the 1950s to remind

readers how pregnant teens were treated at midcentury. A nameless female

narrator recalls the events leading up to her teenage neighbor Sheryl’s preg-

nancy and what happens after her mother sends her away to give up the baby

for adoption—a common practice in the 1950s. Certainly marriage would

not have solved Sheryl’s problems, for she is too immature. Pressured by a

nurse to look at the child, Sheryl fi nds it “incredibly small and ugly” (173).

Upon returning from the hospital, she endures dinner with the family, then

asks, “‘Can I go?’” Up in her room, she applies heavy makeup, teases her

hair, slips on some bracelets. “The sound of them, she knows, will reach the

boys, make them turn away from their cars. She practices a slow, wise smile.

She wants to love someone else” (175–76). Sheryl has learned nothing; she

is too young to be a mother.

The 1980s saw abortion laws infantilizing women by requiring their

husband’s or parents’ permission, initiating a twenty-four-hour waiting

period, mandating that any abortion after the fi rst trimester be performed

3. Sayers’s second novel,
How I Got Him Back
(1988), revisits Mary Faith, now

the single parent of four-year-old Jesse; however, the focus here is less on mother-

hood and more on various romantic entanglements of Mary Faith and her friends

in Due East.

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 132

Barr Ebest 1st pages.indd 132

7/3/2013 4:10:30 PM

7/3/2013 4:10:30 PM

1 9 8 0 S : T H E W A R O N W O M E N | 1 3 3

in a hospital, and requiring that doctors lecture about the potential dangers

and show pictures of fetuses to dissuade women’s decisions about their own

bodies. Next, the anti-abortion movement targeted clinics through bomb-

ings, arson, death threats, and intimidation (Davis 1991, 459–60). During

the 1980s, there were more than three dozen attempted bombings and acts

of arson, with nine clinics targeted in 1984 alone (Martin 2011, 166). In

response, feminist groups escorted pregnant women into clinics while femi-

nist lawyers fi led lawsuits. By 1989, their efforts began to pay off in the form

of injunctions and court decisions. Ironically, Sandra Day O’Connor was the

key vote in the decision
not
to revisit
Roe v. Wade
(Davis 1991, 463). Her

decision may have been infl uenced in part by the huge pro-choice rally in

Washington, DC, not to mention polls indicating that 63 to 74 percent of all

Americans supported abortion rights (Martin 2011, 167–68).

Joyce Carol Oates addresses the abortion issue in
Solstice
(1985). Unlike

her usual plots, which deconstruct male-female relationships,
Solstice
not

only tells the story of the relationships between two females, but also repre-

sents the earliest Irish American novel to address the aftermath of abortion.4

This theme marks Oates’s fi rst clearly articulated argument for a woman’s

right to control her body and her life. Similarly, in
You Must Remember This

(1987), only after the main character, Enid, has an abortion does she begin

to respect her mother. Through this plot, Oates suggests that a loss of inno-

cence is necessary to develop the “self-knowledge . . . necessary if Americans

are to revise their conception of the family romance and to mature as a

nation” (Daly 1996, 192). In this regard, Reagan’s politics actually helped,