Whoredom in Kimmage
Mahoney, Rosemary
/ n the course of two long volumes of autobiography, which deal in loving detail with such minutiae as his childhood toys and distant relatives' drinking habits, the Irish short story-writer Frank...
...But Mahoney is slower to remark on a different strain of the same ambiguity among the Dublin elites, one that is embodied by the social-democratic Fine Gael party as it developed under Garrett FitzGerald (whom Mahoney reveres) in the 1980s, and which reaches its apotheosis in Mary Robinson...
...n the course of two long volumes of autobiography, which deal in loving detail with such minutiae as his childhood toys and distant relatives' drinking habits, the Irish short story-writer Frank O'Connor never mentioned either of his wives—not once...
...It's sad...
...But neither of these is a new phenomenon, and both occur at far lower rates than in countries with divorce and abortion—like America...
...He smirked in a wicked way that made me distrust him...
...Mahoney is particularly struck by the number of Irish babies born out of wedlock and Ireland's rate of infanticide...
...For example, the well-mannered deference she lauds in County Clare becomes—once she is discussing it in a gathering of lesbians—something of a National tragedy: I told the women that I had noticed that if you bumped into an Irish woman and it was entirely your fault, she would spin around and say, "Excuse me...
...In part, they are not only fascinated by, but also ferociously proud of, the culture that shaped them...
...In a hilarious scene in a Dublin lesbian bar called J. J. Smythe's, Mahoney nervously tries to make conversation with two big women, who are pretty but menacing, with huge biceps, crewcuts, and tattoos...
...There are, ofcourse, plenty of excuses to make these reforms seem like necessities...
...It is the dilemma of the elite in any small country or disempowered ethnic group...
...That's one thing I am not able to do...
...Whoredom in Kimmage is an exquisitely funny book—and it is the only funny feminist book...
...And they're right...
...I go over to Germany and go into shops, and people push in front of me in the queue...
...Christopher Caldwell is assistant managing editor of The American Spectator...
...as though asking permission to charge this much...
...In Ireland the sexes are more separate than in any Western country...
...Robinson's attitude towards change is the most fatuous one possible: She thinks that Ireland can somehow influence Europe without being influenced in return, that Ireland's biggest contribution to the EEC will be "self-development and family-based participation," that the Irish language, which has been losing speakers for the last century, will thrive as Ireland becomes more "modern...
...Contented Catholic women appear only sidelong in these pages, like the shrewish Clare woman who thinks Anita Hill lied, agrees with the acquittal of William Kennedy Smith, and tells Mahoney, "There's nothing wrong with Ireland...
...It's more interesting for people from outside Ireland to come and visit Ireland if we have our separate language and culture," says Robinson...
...S ometimes this acuity takes us right into the rift Mahoney wishes to expose, as when she points out a lunatic woman to a country farmer giving her a lift into town: She wore a carrot-colored turban on her head...
...0 The American Spectator November 1993 81...
...She cannot escape...
...Traditional Irish families, for whom Mahoney otherwise feels a great fondness, are treated by her Dublin friends as atavistic barbarians...
...Here Mahoney does the right thing with an anecdote: follows it only until it ceases yielding insights—in this case into the callousness and brutality of rural Ireland's sexual dynamic...
...She is always going on about having been raped...
...Kate said, "You're absolutely right, Rose...
...larly vexing problem, this book is a delight...
...She is alarmed to find that "the Irish Constitution refers to women only three times and in a restrictive and paternalistic fashion"—which is three times more than the American Constitution mentions them in any fashion...
...And it's not trivial...
...And if you went into a shop and asked "How much is that book...
...I asked the sweating farmer if he knew her...
...Her Dubliners are, in general, the most radical, cosmopolitan, and alienated women she can hunt down...
...I suppose she is still hoping...
...that they say stchewpid (for "stupid") and feck and shire...
...So she eavesdrops on Irish men and women for several months in both Dublin and the village of Corofin in County Clare, in hopes that the root of the peculiar Irish battle between the sexes will be found in a "vehement, mistrustful, precipitate way of relating" among the people themselves...
...But to grant her her subject: Divorce, abortion, and homosexuality remain outlawed in Ireland...
...But she was not raped...
...Around the country," says Peg, a lesbian ex-nun, "you'll find an awful lot of women who are getting in trouble for their differentness, but it must be much more difficult for a working-class woman in Dublin...
...How clumsy of me...
...It is an approach that has real promise...
...The result is a book that lurches schizophrenically between Corofin and Dublin, and every time Mahoney re-introduces us to her Dublin activists, it's as if she has WHOREDOM IN KIMMAGE: IRISH WOMEN COMING OF AGE Rosemary Mahoney Houghton Mifflin /307 pages / $21.95 reviewed by CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL If Mahoney's diagnosis is simpleminded, her approach is complex...
...An ability to withhold judgment—which at times amounts .to a delightful self-deprecation at the stupid situations Mahoney has to throw herself into—is the book's saving grace and its glory...
...Because she has so artificially limited the women's agenda to constitutional reform and secularization, Mahoney seems to believe that the objectives of Irish feminists are moderate, finite, and fulfillable—"I'm quite against abortion myself," says one woman, "but I don't think it should be in the Constitution"—while accepting the assertion of Ruth Riddick and other abortion advocates that it is pro-lifers who are using abortion as a stalking horse for a wider anti-woman or anti–working class agenda...
...that they give each other nicknames like Foxy John, the Mouth, and Over He Went...
...in part, they are so embarrassed by its provincialism that they loathe it from the very bottom of their hearts...
...This emphasis leads Mahoney to overstress certain issues of only marginal importance to most Irish women (like homosexuality) and to short-change others that are of paramount importance (like equality in the workplace...
...visited the same local pub every night for thirty years, until one night he sent a profuse note of apology to his friends that he would be missing his evening card game, due to his having to attend a funeral—his wife's...
...Robinson is mistaking her country's folk art for its culture, and assuming that as long as she keeps the former intact she can frig around with the latter without affecting the essential integrity of her society...
...That's what would interest a lot of Europeans...
...And although contraception was legalized in 1979, "even the most liberal people," Mahoney writes, "are thinking in a way that is still, at its foundation, Roman Catholic...
...I heard myself asking—unbelievably--So, what do you girls do...
...We're fine, and we don't need smart-ass writers telling us what's wrong with us...
...Mahoney's gifts are not ideological...
...I have such a losing battle with that," said Kate...
...to which the redhead replied, Work in a prison, to which I said, Prison...
...For the Irish-American writer Rosemary Mahoney, this separation implies inequality, an inferior status for women—and she lays the blame squarely on the Roman Catholic church and the baleful influence of its sexual morality on Ireland's laws and culture...
...The washing machine, after all, has surely done more to liberate women than the diaphragm, and the government-engineered stultification of Ireland's economy has surely done as much as Canon Law to make the typical Irish marriage a stressful thing...
...Men are also caught up in that...
...Similarly, a friend of mine from the North Dublin neighborhood of Ballymun had an uncle who...
...Her Corofin rustics are almost exclusively men, and men of a particular kind—quaint, impotent, pathetic...
...But with the Irish sexual left using the European Court of Human Rights to get abortion and homosexuality legalized in Ireland, the other side feels the same way: "The very people who want women priests," says one woman at a League of Mary meeting, "also want divorce, contraception, and abortion...
...As a tour of Ireland through the lens of one particu80 The American Spectator November 1993 taken leave of a literary talent that amounts to brilliance to shill for people of half her intelligence...
...In the company of the former, Mahoney shows off her daunting descriptive gifts...
...As recently as the 1950s, only 40 percent of Irish men in their early thirties had ever married—the lowest rate in the world...
...And when she gets into a conversation with an affable feminist ideologue, Mahoney is apt to get dragged along by the nose...
...What of the whole complex of crippling taxes and bait-and-switch social initiatives that have turned Ireland into a labor-exporting country...
...She must have the children and wash up and feed and clothe them...
...the salesperson would invariably say, "Three pounds, is that all right...
...Mahoney seems to realize as much, when she asks Irish President Mary Robinson "Would it not be difficult, now that Ireland is becoming a member of Europe, to hold onto these things...
...Unfortunately, though, Mahoney has stacked her argument through her choice of interview subjects...
...That's Mamie Duffy...
...We call her Mad Mamie...
...If Ireland gets new laws, as Mahoney clearly hopes it will, it will not be because circumstances demand them, but because Irish people simply want more sexual license, and are willing to weaken family and church to get it...
...T here is a limit to how much Mahoney's sensitivity to the human heart can tell us...
...I do, of course...
...Mahoney has an effortlessly pretty prose style, and an uncanny eye for the littlest things Irish people do: that they sometimes greet you by grabbing your forearm, not your hand (or, when driving, by lifting an index finger off the steering wheel...
...It's something you have to fight within yourself or you'll be apologizing all the time," said Mary...
...Mahoney mentions a Dublin lesbian who has never left Dublin and yet feels "personally pained by her nation's character...
...Ifis a ludicrous proposition...
...As separate as men and women are in Ireland," she writes, "it is difficult to separate them...
...Nice...
...with the latter, she formulates her political agenda...
...She is what we call an eccentric...
Vol. 26 • November 1993 • No. 11
