Mary Gordon
Mary Catherine Gordon (M.A., Syracuse University, 1973; A.B., Barnard College, 1971) is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College and is known for her novels, memoirs and literary criticism.
She and her husband, Arthur Cash, live in New York City and Hope Valley, Rhode Island. They have two adult children, Anna and David. Gordon is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. Cash is retired.
In 1981, she wrote the foreword to the Harvest edition of Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." In 1984 she was one of 97 theologians and religious persons who signed A Catholic Statement on Pluralism and Abortion, calling for religious pluralism and discussion within the Catholic Church regarding the Church's position on abortion.
Novelist Galaxy Craze has said of Gordon, "She loves to read; she would read us passages in class and start crying, she's so moved by really good writing. And she was the only good writing teacher at Barnard, so I just kept taking her class over and over. She taught me so much."
“Look, just because I'm an angry, repressed, Irish-Catholic feminist doesn't mean I hate everything. I only hate youth, beauty, the human body, nature, technological change, popular culture, and democracy. Oh, and I forgot to mention sex. And sports. And Andy Warhol. But other than that, I'm cool with whatever the kids are into. Really!”
“One of the drawbacks of upward social mobility is a sense of guilty indebtedness to the old neighborhood.”
“For the Irish, life is a matter of perpetual grievance. We remember the Famine, but forget the Draft Riots. We seal off our neighborhoods to strangers, but allow our own priests to victimize our own children. We worship violence and we enslave ourselves to alcohol, we lie and steal and kill without conscience for generations at a time. But it's all right in the end, and do you know why? Because we don't tolerate lust.”
“People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!”
“All the Jane Austen in the library cannot wash the Queens from this little hand.”