Navigating the Zeitgeist. Helena Sheehan
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to be just that, even while still a child myself. Any book I wanted to read was preempted by a seemingly never-ending list of domestic tasks. It was assumed that no one chose to be a shop-assistant-maiden-aunt, but it happened because some unlucky women were “left on the shelf.” I thus intended to be a teacher-nun, aiming toward something larger and higher than the small domesticated lives of other women. When my mother advised me never to let a man think I was more intelligent than he was, I dismissed her words with disdain. As the years went on, I had less and less respect for women like my mother, particularly housewives. I had more and more respect for men and actively sought their company and respect.
There was a tension for me between being intellectual and being feminine. It caused me to develop in a one-sided way. I grew confident intellectually, but not sexually. Many girls of my time developed in the opposite direction, but it was still one-sided. That most girls no longer face such caricatures and choices represents one of the great advances in human history. Although even as a child I increasingly felt the existing sexual division of labor was problematic, I could not yet articulate a critique. There was no trace of feminism in my life-world at that time. The male of the species was perceived as rational, the female emotional. I found it hard to think of rationality as opposed to emotion, since they seemed to flow through me as one. The male was destined to inhabit the world of the political, the scientific, the economic, while the female was confined to the domestic realm. I could not accept it, but without a critique of it, all I could do was to feel increasingly uneasy with being female and sometimes wish that I had been born male. At the same time, I was a heterosexual female attracted to the male of the species in the conventional way. Not that I understood much about sexuality of any kind. I’d heard vague suggestions that some men were a bit effeminate and some women a bit butch, but the idea that people of the same gender had sex with each other was not a part of the picture.
Sometime, starting in second grade, I became uneasy, no longer so blissfully happy, no longer so at one with it all around me. I can’t pin it to any one thing. It was a gentle dawning of critical consciousness, I suppose, although I didn’t yet have much of a critique. I no longer took my parents and teachers to be founts of wisdom. My pre-feminist fretfulness about gender was part of it, but it was more than that. As the fifties progressed, I felt like a “rebel without a cause.” Like others of my generation, I saw James Dean as an icon of something struggling for expression. We went mad for Mad magazine and rallied to the rhythms of rock and roll. My parents had 78 rpm records of Tommy Dorsey, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra. That was their idea of music. My first record was a 45 rpm of Elvis Presley singing “Hound Dog” on one side and “Don’t Be Cruel” on the other. In my home, as in homes all over the country, my parents denounced that “jungle music.” The generation gap had opened.
I found adolescence excruciating. I don’t guess it was easy for anyone, but it seemed that some were sailing through it by comparison. Along with my peers, I developed an attraction to the opposite sex, but it ran according to script only for those at the top of the cruel and crude pubescent hierarchy of the popular and cute. At parish dances, where girls were grouped on one side and boys on the other, many of us on both sides watched and languished as the popular ones took the floor. How painful it was standing there in our carefully crafted curls and crinoline skirts and high heels before anyone asked us to dance. It was even worse at unchaperoned dances that turned into “make-out parties.” The popular kids kissed and the rest of us pretended that we preferred to talk and to dance. Games like Spin the Bottle and Post Office were agonizingly awkward. My first crush came at the age of ten, when a new boy arrived in school. I was constantly aware of his presence, blushed when his name was mentioned, and recalled every scrap of casual conversation between us. When our mothers happened to meet at church, it turned out they knew each other and were second cousins, making us third cousins. Thereafter he addressed me as “Cuz,” which killed our one-sided romance.
Sexuality was a mysterious force and I did not come to terms with it easily. For multiple reasons—from my early sense of religious vocation to my adolescent physical insecurity—I felt excluded from full participation in it. As I watched the high school kids on American Bandstand, dancing to the rhythms of rock and roll, I longed to fit into the world as seamlessly as they did, but felt I never would. There was an added dimension to my unease, beyond the usual awkwardness of adolescence. It was the incipient philosopher in me struggling to be. I hardly knew the word. I knew no professor of philosophy or professor of anything. I began to feel that people were so busy going somewhere that they didn’t think about where they were going. I wanted to see the big picture. By the time I was in high school, this became very intense and I started reading works of philosophy. My education began to diverge from the curriculum more and more.
All this unfolded amid a distinct historical atmosphere. Throughout the 1950s, even when innocence and credulity and fun outweighed my emerging unease, a sense of apocalyptic fear hung over all that I did. From my earliest years, I knew the deadliest weapons the world had ever known were being developed. The problem wasn’t that our country had them, but that our enemies had them too. An “Iron Curtain” divided the world between freedom on one side and tyranny on the other. The other side sought nothing less than world domination. The third world war, we were warned, would be a nuclear war. We held regular air raid drills in school and saw frightening films depicting a nuclear attack. We crouched under our desks, as if that would somehow save us from nuclear annihilation. There were debates about fallout shelters, specifically about whether you would be justified in killing someone who tried to get into your fallout shelter. I thought a lot about this, although no one I knew even had a fallout shelter. My mother did have the cellar well stocked with enough tinned food to last for many months. Aside from worries about an attack, I became so concerned about the levels of strontium 90 in the atmosphere as a result of nuclear testing that I wrote letters to US senators about it.
We were taught that communism was the enemy. It was not just a fallacious political ideology, but a cosmological evil. It was hostile not only to our country, but to our religion—the work of the devil. I imagined communists entering my bedroom and demanding that I renounce my nation and religion, even my own parents. I believed that I would be brave and be a martyr if necessary. The whole apocalyptic scenario was heightened by the “third secret of Fatima” in a letter which couldn’t be opened until 1960. I got the impression that it somehow had to do with communism and the end of the world. I had a terrible foreboding about the year 1960 and a sense that I could not count on any future after that. I didn’t actually know any communists, yet Senator Joseph McCarthy said they were everywhere, even in the government, the army, and the film and television industry. I watched the Army-McCarthy hearings and was on the side of McCarthy. He was not only patriotic but Catholic, so he had to be right. I even read his biography, Tail Gunner Joe. I wanted all these evil subversives rooted out. Nothing seemed more inconceivable than that I would one day become one. Sputnik sent us into a spin, because it felt as if they were getting ahead of us, not only in the space race, but perhaps in other ways as well.
By the late 1950s, observing mainstream debates between liberals and conservatives, I decided I was liberal. I didn’t think it was right that some people were rich while others were poor, and that a disproportionate number of poor people were black. I was stirred by events in the South, especially when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and when the army had to be brought in to defend pupils entering high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. My mother insisted that communist agitators were behind it. I doubted it, but also began to wonder if they were in fact behind it, whether communists were really so bad after all.
The 1960s arrived, and the world didn’t end. Things were changing, both in the wider world and in my perspective. The stability and smugness of the system I took for granted was starting to show cracks, revealing its vulnerabilities and delusions and hinting at other possibilities. There were new faces at the top, symbolizing the stirring from below. The election of John Kennedy as president and John XXIII as pope put faces on a new mood, a new energy, a new path forward. The faces of the other side changed, too. When we watched Khrushchev debating Nixon in a kitchen and banging his shoe at the United Nations, we didn’t fear him as we had Stalin. The Iron Curtain didn’t seem so iron any more. When revolution reshaped Cuba and Fidel Castro came to the United States, we regarded him as a folk hero. When he became a communist,