Abigail Quigley McCarthy died on February 1 at her home in Washington, D.C. She was eighty-five. Mrs. McCarthy wrote a column in these pages from 1974 to 1999. She had been scheduled to offer a comment on James O’Toole’s "Empty Confessionals" in this issue. May she rest in peace.
Cocktail hour at Abigail McCarthy’s Connecticut Avenue apartment was quite a treat, not because of the liquid refreshment, but because of the hostess herself. She believed in conversation, she practiced it, and anyone who happened by was immediately drawn in. It was during the first Bush administration (probably 1990), when I first walked into her apartment building and along the broad, carpeted hall leading to her door (the hall would have done Windsor Castle proud). I found Mrs. McCarthy and her friend newspaperwoman Mary McGrory in a discussion about that wonderful woman, Mrs. Bush—that is, Mrs. Prescott Bush, George H. W.’s mother, George W.’s grandmother, and wife of Senator Prescott Bush.
The hour’s conversation ranged over a number of political persons and topics, culminating in the statement, "Peggy, never trust a man." This was offered neither in anger nor protest. After the extended political analysis, it was simply the logical conclusion of the discussion.
Through our intermittent encounters and phone calls, I came to admire McCarthy’s sense of form and propriety leavened with a sharp wit. These might be considered the qualities of a well-brought-up, old-fashioned lady, except that the propriety included a spirit of unflappability that marked her as a public woman. We served together on an advisory committee to the president of Saint Catherine’s College in Saint Paul, Minnesota (of which McCarthy was an alumna and a great supporter). During one visit, we were ushered into a theology class peopled by young women decked out in black punk garb set off by neon hair, nose rings, and the inevitable surfeit of earrings. Impeccably dressed and coifed, McCarthy sailed right into the classroom and started a conversation that revealed what she surely knew, that beneath the de rigueur punk fashion, these were Minnesota farm girls.
The importance of Catholic women’s colleges was one of the recurrent themes in McCarthy’s Commonweal columns. She praised their past achievements in providing Catholic women, like herself, solid and serious education, and applauded their current spirit of adaptation, focusing on educating women of all ages and races who might otherwise be left out. She argued that women’s colleges gave special opportunities, lacking in coed settings, for women’s leadership. As a teacher, mother, and wife of U.S. Senator and 1968 presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.), she had many opportunities to put her own education and leadership to work. Perhaps most dramatically she did so after she and her husband separated in 1969, and she made a life of her own as writer, columnist, and public leader.
In her 1972 memoir, Private Faces/Public Places (Doubleday), she tells the story of the extended Quigley-McCarthy courtship in Mandan, North Dakota; a happy marriage in Saint Paul, Minnesota; and their partnership in Washington, D.C., at the center of the nation’s political life. When Senator Eugene McCarthy took up the dark-horse challenge of the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination in the midst of the protests over Vietnam, she met the challenge with him. When it became clear that, instead of her husband, Vice President Hubert Humphrey would gain the nomination, McCarthy writes, "I began to live out the role for which I had been preparing the last month. This was what I had been trained to do, not only by the demands of political life but by my heritage—from those daughters of the pioneers, my grandmother, my aunts, my mother-to face disaster with as much dignity as possible, to affirm whatever was positive." There is in that sentence and many others in the book, the straightforward and poignant memories of a woman who knew herself and where she came from.
She completes her memoir with this reflection: "Despite the fact that the campaign brought almost unbearable emotional strain and disaster to our family, I cannot wish that the campaign did not happen. Through it I crossed the barrier into the world of my children and of all the young people to whom this world really belongs. I see the world now as they see it. I feel a sense of surprise that it is so easy to lay aside what once were rocklike basic assumptions as I look at injustice in the fierce light of their outrage. But I do not wish to have crossed this barrier having brought nothing from the other side, as have so many older people in a kind of headlong rush to join the young. What I would like to bring with me is a sense of the past, its continuity in the present, and a sense of identity stemming from the past which enables each one of us to withstand the assault of change." And so she went on for the next three decades.
She was an independent thinker. Efforts to open the public world to women were both the story of her life and the achievement of her life. The traditional women’s organizations drew her support, as did those founded for newer purposes. She wrote in Commonweal of Emily’s List, established to finance women’s campaigns for national office. Her column (August 15, 1997) discusses the group’s decision to support only prochoice women for office. What she declined to mention was her own role in the early days of Emily’s List and her withdrawal when it became clear that no prolife women candidates would be funded. McCarthy’s willingness to withdraw for a principled reason and her refusal to make an issue of it is typical of the sharp and disciplined intelligence she brought to matters both political and religious. At the 1987 Synod on the Laity, Archbishop Rembert Weakland requested that women be allowed to serve in nonordained ministries. McCarthy found this "not awfully bold at the end of the twentieth century, but heartening." When the request was denied by the Vatican because of its potentially deleterious effects on other cultures, McCarthy reflected: "Never mind that it is pretty hard to think of a late-twentieth-century culture (outside of the ayatollah’s) where representatives of the majority of the baptized serving in the sanctuary or pulpit would be too unsettling" (December 4, 1987).
The tone of regret and restraint expressed in both her political and religious commentary are fast disappearing from world and church. In that sense, Abigail McCarthy was perhaps old-fashioned—a Catholic from the Midwest, she is among a dwindling breed of women who knew and embraced their faith, respected church authority, and spoke their minds, nonetheless. That form of Catholic practice is diminished by her passing.
