The Bitch Is Back: A Reappraisal of Mary McCarthy for the 21st Century

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the Mary McCarthy special issue of Women’s Studies asks, why Mary McCarthy? Why now? Mary McCarthy is one of America’s leading women intellectuals – fiction writer, literary and cultural critic, editor, and public intellectual. Her career spanned over fifty years as theatre editor of Partisan Review; autobiographical writer of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and the later Intellectual Memoirs and How I Grew; best-selling novelist of The Group; satirist of the New York intellectual scene in The Oasis and The Groves of Academe; public intellectual and reporter on the war in Vietnam, the Medina Trial, and the Watergate Hearings; and recipient of the National Medal for Literature and the MacDowell Medal. Yet her literary and critical contribution have been largely eclipsed by her cultural celebrity as a sharp wit with an acerbic tongue, striking good looks, and a penchant for taking on taboo subjects of female sexuality. This essay looks at how limited gender expectations have shaped McCarthy’s reputation as a “modern American bitch” and “our leading bitch-intellectual,” and why new feminist readers are ready to embrace her distinction as a smart, sharp, sexy woman of wit

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Wendy Martin, the editor-in-chief, and Lauren Hartle, the managing editor, of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for inviting me to guest edit a Mary McCarthy special issue of the journal and for smoothly overseeing the process. Thanks as well to the original panelists of the Mary McCarthy Society special session of the American Literature Association Conference, 2019, whose outstanding and varied contributions form the basis of this collection, and to the additional essayists and book reviewers for their valuable contribution to the issue. Special thanks to Richard Lees, for permission to reprint his original artwork inspired by McCarthy’s life and writings, and to Ronald Patkus, Head of Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Library, for permission to reprint the cover image from The Vassarion, 1933. As always, thanks to Sophia Wilson Niehaus, Executor of the Mary McCarthy Literary Trust, for her guidance and generosity in sharing Mary McCarthy’s work.

Notes

¹ See Elaine Showalter, 339–353; Wendy Martin, 187–206.

² See Andi Zeisler.