Navigating the Zeitgeist. Helena Sheehan
not shake it. It was an urge too basic to depend on the validity of one particular way of seeing the totality. I acknowledge this debt to Catholicism, however radical my rejection of nearly everything else about it. It inculcated a belief in having a comprehensive worldview and a demand for total commitment to the values flowing from it, which has stood me in good stead, even if it has been turned to purposes the Church never intended. I know all the arguments against this made by positivists, neo-positivists, existentialists, postmodernists, all the sneers about changing one religion for another, but I stand by it. It was not as if I simply took another totality off the shelf. I knew what I was leaving behind, but I did not yet know what I would find ahead.
On a practical level, I had to get a job and a place to live. At first, I found work in a downtown department store as a credit interviewer. I was to ask prospective customers a list of questions, and if certain boxes could be ticked, I could authorize credit. If the boxes could not be ticked, I had to deny it. For borderline cases, I had to consult the credit manager, who would glance out of his office to see who was standing at my hatch. I began to see a pattern. White customers were approved and black ones denied. Once I was sure of it, I confronted him, and was promptly fired. Then I had to get another job, although it was getting difficult now, having been fired twice in a matter of months. Next I worked for a market research company, doing telephone interviews about how certain advertising campaigns were received by the public. It was an intensely repressive environment. Everything was heavily monitored; even every trip to the lavatory was counted and timed. Meanwhile, I got a roof over my head. A classmate from St. Joe’s, a Filipino, took me in, and I slept on her floor for a few weeks. She and her friends introduced me to the New York nightclub scene. It wasn’t really for me, but I wanted to experience what I was rejecting as well as what I was embracing. As soon as I could afford it, I got an apartment of my own.
Life was hard. I completed three years of university in two years, while also working full-time at jobs I hated and traveling long distances on public transport. I studied every possible minute I could. My teachers saw how I was struggling and tried to help me. My literature teacher, John Mullen, suggested I quit my job at the market research firm and work for St. Joe’s. He arranged a scheme whereby I would be paid to grade assignments and exams, starting with his own freshman composition papers. Then Dave Marshall took me on to grade his logic papers. Several others in philosophy, literature, and education did likewise, and I earned enough from this to scrape by under far better conditions than in my other jobs. I even made up with my parents, though our relationship was still strained, and moved back home for a while to make ends meet.
Above all else was the quest for a new worldview. It did not come easily. At the center was the challenge of learning to live without God, to explain the natural world without recourse to supernatural forces. Religion was not the only force in my life being called into question. It was everything. Not only in my life, but also in the world around it, everything was changing. Everything was undergoing a radical reassessment. Gender was high on the list. Finally, I found a means of understanding my extreme unease about gender in a way that allowed me to feel whole. Like many others, I was struck by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and even wrote an article on the book for a college magazine. I questioned traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity. I objected to the life world of a woman confined to the beautification of the body, the seduction of men, the production of children, and the care of the home. I argued for psychological wholeness and social participation.
Situation ethics was creating a buzz at the time. Theology and moral philosophy were shifting from adherence to rules and laws toward consideration of the contingencies and exigencies of concrete situations. The idea was that it was love, not the pastor or judge, that determined whether sex was moral. It applied to matters other than sex, of course, but most of the discussion surrounding it was about sex. I broadly agreed, but needed a firmer grounding for morality. I was acutely aware of my need to build a new ethical position now that the moral precepts of religion had fallen out of the picture. I was less inclined toward case studies of isolated moral or immoral acts and more on an overall moral grounding. I focused on integrity of personality and responsibility to society. I was disposed (at least theoretically) to be flexible about sex, but believed strongly that ethics had to be about truth and justice, and I wasn’t inclined to be all that flexible about deceit or injustice. So many questions. Were the answers really blowing in the wind? I wondered.
I attended my first philosophy conference, at Pennsylvania State University, in October 1966. It was on existentialism and phenomenology. In beautiful autumn weather I took the bus to the center of the state brimming with anticipation. I read the program on the way, which caught the attention of a man seated next to me, who was also going to the conference. It was the first of many conversations with philosophers during that weekend. They treated me with extraordinary seriousness and respect, given how young and new I was to such things. I attended every session and listened with awe. I was particularly impressed with Paul Ricoeur and Richard Rorty. The latter spoke of the two dominant trends in contemporary philosophy—analytic and phenomenological—and memorably articulated the insights and blind spots of both. As far as I can recall, I was the only young woman at these sessions. (There was a “ladies program” for wives.) I also met a philosopher from Duquesne, who asked if I knew a friend of his who was lecturing in theology at St. Joe’s. When I told him I was avoiding the theology department, he made me promise I would get in touch with him.
Back in Philadelphia, true to my word, I went to the theology department and introduced myself to John Malinowski. We talked and talked. When I got up to leave, he offered to drive me home, although it was far out of his way. We stopped at a bar for happy hour and didn’t leave for many more hours—all of them happy. After that, we were nearly inseparable. I guess it was love at first sight. It marked a change for me to feel attracted to someone who was not out of reach. Jack was good-looking, articulate, critical, conscientious—the sort of person who entered the seminary in those days, though he never did. He was in tune with all the new thinking in the Church. He was drawn more toward social activism than supernatural intervention. He grew up in Mahony City, a tiny mining town full of churches and surrounded by a devastated landscape of strip mines. He had studied history at Duquesne and theology at Notre Dame, and was earning his PhD in religion at Temple University while teaching at St. Joe’s. We soon got an apartment near the college, where I lived while he came and went, fulfilling his duties as a proctor at a college dormitory.
In June 1967, I graduated from St. Joe’s and married Jack. The wedding was a bit tricky to organize, as I was an agnostic, although still a very Catholic one, and Jack was still a Catholic, although a very agnostic one. Those gathered around us urged us to be married in the most liberal church in the city. There was also the fact that Jack was teaching theology at a Catholic college. I saw the need for compromise, but I was resolute in my rejection of inauthenticity. The night before the wedding involved intense negotiations with the officiating priest, who was Jack’s brother (which was already a compromise, as I would have preferred Greg). I refused to profess anything I did not believe or promise anything I would not do. I was adamant about not promising to obey. I also declined to be given away by my father. Jack and I walked up the aisle together. It was not a lavish affair. I made my own dress and he wore his best suit. We had a buffet for guests in the church basement. The bill from the caterer was far higher than we had expected, because it turned out that someone had sent an open invitation to radical Catholics all over the city, who flocked to it. It featured the latest in progressive church singing and participation. I met for the first time some of Jack’s friends, such as Kevin and Dorothy Ranaghan, who were leaders of a new charismatic renewal movement in the Church who hoped to persuade Jack to join. He had shown me their letters, which kept getting stranger and stranger. I was curious to meet them. They were warm and friendly, but there was a huge gap between us. Jack and I both thought that this movement was seriously unsound. They were speaking and singing in tongues, becoming obsessed with ecstatic experiences and turning away from political engagement.
I had been intending to go away to pursue a PhD in philosophy. I applied and was accepted and offered fellowships to a number of graduate schools and planned to go to Purdue, but decided to stay in Philadelphia and do my postgraduate studies at Temple, because of Jack. It was a compromise, not only in city, but in milieu. I wanted to move away from Catholic circles and study in a more secular setting,