The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women (41 page)

Commencement
into a league with . . . that paragon of women’s college nov-

els,
The Group
” (Russo 2009, 8). Indeed,
Commencement’s
failure to inter-

rogate the characters’ behavior or even to question it via satire places it fi rmly

within the post-feminist category.

Recall that post-feminist culture valorizes “female achievement within

traditionally male working environments.” Bree is a lawyer, Celia is a writer,

Sally wants to be a doctor, and April is a lackey for the documentary fi lm-

maker Ronnie. These are upper-middle-class positions unavailable to many

women. Post-feminism values individualism, but “this formulation tends to

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confuse self-interest with individuality”—and everyone but April has her

own interests at heart. Post-feminist culture assumes and promotes equal

educational opportunities, but it also believes in “freedom of choice with

respect to work, domesticity, and parenting; and physical and particularly

sexual empowerment”—again, rights fought for by feminists now taken for

granted. Rather than needing to work, post-feminist women like Sally and

Bree
choose
to work—or not—when prostrate with grief. Finally, post-fem-

inism assumes that feminism is diffi cult, shrill, and restrictive—traits that

characterize April and Ronnie Munro.

Despite her personal disregard for feminism, Mary McCarthy not only

exposed societal inequities but also opened the door for future Irish Ameri-

can feminist novels. In contrast, Sullivan’s novel reveals a complacent femi-

nism, which is just another term for post-feminism. These characters are

more interested in their own lives than those of women in less comfortable

environments; indeed, Sullivan’s women worry more about April’s feminist

activities than the problems she tries to expose. Worse, there is no sense of

satire or irony in Sullivan’s rendering of their concerns. Feminism no longer

merits attention.

With the 2000 election of George W. Bush, a version of this mindset had

already begun to emerge among the conservative Right, but 9/11 somehow

gave it legitimacy. Although most people dismissed Jerry Falwell’s proclama-

tion that “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays

and the lesbians helped [9/11] happen,” his message was soon promoted

by mainstream mouthpieces (Faludi 2007, 22; Finlay 2006, 3). Denounce-

ments of feminism might be expected from the Bush administration, but

soon respected pundits such as Jonathan Alter and Jonathan Turley not only

took up the cry but also attacked any women brave enough to offer counter

opinions. Journalists and intellectuals such as Susan Sontag, Katha Pollitt,

Barbara Kingsolver, and Naomi Klein were publicly castigated as Taliban sup-

porters simply for expressing their wish that war be avoided and cooler heads

prevail (Faludi 2007, 29–30). In
George W. Bush and the War on Women
, a

study that demonstrates the many parallels between the Bush and Reagan

administrations, the sociology professor and feminist scholar Barbara Finlay

joins Faludi in calling out Bush for fomenting such behavior, noting that the

mainstream media were so enmeshed in the administration’s jingoism that

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

they not only let such comments pass but also failed to “analyse his actions

critically and ignor[ed] contradictory evidence” (Finlay 2006, 3).

Female commentators were not the only targets. By 2004, the nation’s

mindset refl ected the post–World War II antiwoman propaganda reported by

Betty Friedan and Susan Hartmann. First, female writers disappeared from

the nation’s editorial pages. Within a week of 9/11, only 5 of 88 op-ed pieces

in
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
, and
The Los Angeles Times
car-

ried female bylines. Although women writers had never dominated these

pages, in
The New York Times
their numbers dropped from an average of 22

percent before 9/11 to 9 percent in the weeks following, whereas
The Wash-

ington Post
featured only seven women out of 107 editorials. Even
The Nation

was in league: the October 8, 2001 issue was all-male (Faludi 2007, 35–36).

As the Irish American journalist Caryl Rivers observed, “If you’re a regular

reader of [
The Atlantic
], which I am, you’d think that some sort of plague had

decimated the female population. Between December 2001 and December

2002, for example, I found 38 major articles by men and seven by women. . . .

The essays were even worse. During this period, I found 41 essays by men

and two by women. Or to be precise, two essays by the same woman. For the

Atlantic
, Margaret Talbot represented all of womanhood” (2003).

The “shunning” of women in the media continued for several years.

From January through June 2002, over three-quarters of the Sunday morn-

ing talk shows “featured
no
female guests.” By 2005, women were still miss-

ing on the editorial pages of major newspapers, comprising only 10.4 percent

of the bylines at
The Washington Post
and 16.4 percent at
The New York

Times
(Faludi 2007, 37). As late as 2006, women were still grossly under-

represented. In a
New York Magazine
special issue, “What If 9/11 Never

Happened?” featuring responses from eighteen pundits, only two women

were represented—the Irish American historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and

the Slate correspondent Dahlia Lithwick—and they received considerably

less space than their male counterparts (Heilemann 2006). Just as the Bush

administration had managed to ignore the plight of the poor and minorities,

women’s rights were now “largely dismissed as being unimportant or insig-

nifi cant by mainstream opinion leaders” (Finlay 2006, 4).

When women tried to call positive attention to their patriotic efforts,

such as the documentary
The Women of Ground Zero
, they were disregarded.

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As Brenda Berkman notes, “‘I’ve been a fi refi ghter for 20 years and I’ve

never seen the contributions of women fi refi ghters, police offi cers and para-

medics so completely ignored. Suddenly we’ve become invisible.” Even worse

was the reaction to the fi lm. The noted liberal jurist Jonathan Turley actually

accused the fi lmmakers of mining the tragedy “for aggrieved heroes who

would carry a banner of division” (quoted in Faludi 2007, 81–82). When

the movie was released across the country, many people were outraged, most

notably New York City fi refi ghters. Although the department hired 308 new

recruits to replace those killed in the Towers, not a single one was female.

Similar backlash was evident among police offi cers. Said the fi rst female

police chief in Portland, Oregon, “There was this attitude of, ‘Oh, we don’t

need to hire women anymore.’ It was almost like throwing a switch and we

were back in the 50s. Across the country I was seeing what I saw decades

ago” (quoted in Faludi 2007, 85–86).

Despite the three-to-one ratio of male-to-female deaths in the Towers

(Faludi 2007, 3), the media focused on the female victims. They ignored the

women who walked down the stairs of the World Trade Center, the women

who worked the day of the tragedy, the women who returned to their jobs

after burying a family member. Instead, they singled out the 9/11 widows

who “were at home that day tending to the hearth, models of all-American

housewifery” (Faludi 2007, 93). This message was promulgated not only

by the Right, but also by the mainstream media and representatives of the

Left. An article in
The New York Times Magazine
, for example, suggested

that the attacks made single women want to marry and married women want

children.
Time
magazine announced that in the aftermath of the attack,

Americans were returning to “our oldest values,” among them “homecom-

ing and housecleaning” as well as “couples renewing their vows,” while
Time

magazine reported that matchmakers were overwhelmed with clients (Faludi

2007, 117, 122).

These headlines were reinforced by the nation’s retailers. Just as post–

World War II marketers emphasized labor-saving appliances for stay-at-home

wives forced out of their jobs, advertisers were now advised to “dust off their

old commercials and jingles . . . banking on the theory that post-9/11 Amer-

icans would want to retreat to fi fties-era domesticity” (Faludi 2007, 135).

Fashion reinforced the message by designing “Crisis Couture”—described

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

by
The Washington Post
as “softer, without the hard edges and S&M sexu-

ality of recent years.” As recently as May 7, 2009, a
New York Times
article

noted that post-9/11, “child-women were bowed and baby-dolled up to

resemble decorative Easter eggs: newly and uptightly pregnant (a paragon

of marital fi delity), half-crippled by feminine weakness and excess luxury,

declawed and wholly dominated by the unstoppable twin libidos of war and

Wall Street. Men’s wear, in the meantime, fl ew its most ruthless semiotic

pirate fl ags: pinstripes and camoufl age—merciless prints altogether deaf to

feminine pleading and blind to the suffering of tots. Clothing, in a symbiotic

refl ection of the times, told us that the men were to
have their way
” (Wilson

2004, E4, original emphasis).

Some Irish American women writers took this to heart. Pre-9/11, Mary

McGarry Morris’s novels featured tough but misunderstood heroines. The

eponymous heroine in
Fiona Range
(2000) exemplifi es the traditionally

strong Irish American woman (Gott 2008, 172). Fiona is persistent, self-

aware, and honest to a fault—perhaps Morris’s most positive and successful

heroine. But in
A Hole in the Universe
(2004), Morris’s main character is

Gordon Loomis, a slightly backward man convicted of murder. The novel

traces Gordon’s clumsy reacclimation to life outside prison, including his

relationship with Delores Dufault. Delores is the real heroine of this book,

but it is the desire for a family that drives her. This reifi cation of family grows

more profound in Morris’s next novel,
The Lost Mother
(2005). Set during

the Depression, Thomas and Margaret are themselves greatly depressed by

the disappearance of their mother, Irene. Throughout, the children long for

her return. In fact, this longing becomes a refrain. Margaret “didn’t care if

they stayed poor and had to live in a tent forever so long as they could be

together again” (Morris 2004, 2). Thomas sobs, “His mother was gone, his

house. . . . And here he sat bawling in their shadows because his whole life

had changed and he couldn’t do a thing to make it better” (18–19). Despite

a happy ending—which includes a loving stepmother—the children never

forget their mother. “For how could any of us not? . . . Even if you make that

conscious effort, there is still the longing, the almost primitive need. In the

marrow, the blood, the genes. What is so very amazing then is how she could

walk out on her children and then betray them” (270).

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Anna Quindlen’s
Rise and Shine
(2006) represents another strong reac-

tion to 9/11. Rather than continue her string of twentieth-century feminist

novels such as
One True Thing
and
Black and Blue
, Quindlen explores what

happens when the TV celebrity Meghan becomes so immersed in her career

as a television talk show host that she is gob-smacked when her husband

leaves her. A subplot concerns Meghan’s sister, Bridget, a social worker in

a long-term, happily childless relationship with an older man. Yet the novel

concludes with Meghan leaving her job and fi nding love with a longtime

admirer and Bridget happily pregnant. Unlike Quindlen, Beth Lordan and

Bobbie Ann Mason have never written overtly feminist novels; however,

they defi nitely move away from women’s issues in their twenty-fi rst-century

works. In
But Come Ye Back
(2004), Lordan takes a retired Irish American

couple to Ireland where they fi nd new romances before they reconcile. The

plot of Bobbie Ann Mason’s
An Atomic Romance
(2005) falls right into the