Virginia Weaver, Senior Staff Writer
Microwaved Beef is a column by Virginia Weaver that reflects on flashpoints from the last few years in the culture wars. The rapid pace of contemporary discourse makes it easy to forget critical moments and trends that have defined our social and academic lives. Microwaved Beef brings those moments back into the spotlight.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Patricia O’Shea was a notorious figure on UNC Greensboro’s campus. For a short time, she was an editor at Coraddi, UNCG’s arts magazine, before she resigned over heated disputes related to funding. In 1971, she was the ringleader in the “spaghetti incident,” in which she and another student dove, naked, into a pool of spaghetti, ketchup, and dog food outside the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Just prior to the spaghetti incident, she had played another of her pranks in the pages of The Carolinian.
In the November 6, 1970, edition of The Carolinian, Patricia O’Shea published a seemingly grave—but in reality, tongue-in-cheek—critique of the women’s liberation movement. She argued that women’s liberation pressured women out of the home and encouraged them to wear pants, as well as to abandon their God-given natures as feminine homemakers and mothers. O’Shea jokingly prodded women to push back against the movement to which she belonged. “I would urge women to set an example against these deviants, to wear their most feminine dresses, sing before breakfast, serve their husbands breakfast in bed, with a smile, tell them how great they are, and how much they love being homemakers and wives.”
It is not obvious, however, how a person who was unacquainted with O’Shea would know that her article was satirical. Letters to the editor flooded in, expressing approval and disapproval alike, almost all taking O’Shea as a straightforward antifeminist. One letter came from cadets at West Point, who strongly approved of O’Shea’s conservative values. They wrote that, “what the American male prefers is a woman who can assume the unalterable responsibilities of a wife and mother with the grace, charm and femininity which have always been appreciated by men everywhere: someone whom he can admire and respect.” The cadets could not have praised O’Shea’s farce more highly. They had sprung a trap.
“In the first place, who cares what the American male prefers? Are women out to please men or to please themselves?” wrote Nelda French, a known feminist on campus who was, at the time, a staff writer at The Carolinian. In response to the letter writers from West Point, she published a scathing edition of her Taming of the Shrew column on November 20, 1970. “Anyone who knows Pat will know that her letter was a complete farce,” she writes. “If there were such a thing as liberation of the individual, Pat’s name would be at the head of the list. She is definitely not a ‘typical’ female and her lambasting of the women’s liberation movement is ironic for that reason.” French accuses the West Point writers of chauvinism and egotism. “The egotistical assumption here is that all women are primarily concerned with pleasing men.” The trap that O’Shea laid had been snapped shut. French, always a sharp writer, was seldom more vigorous than in her refutation of these West Point cadets.
Nelda French and Patricia O’Shea are far from the only feminist writers who have graced the pages of The Carolinian. Nelda French is not even the only writer to have had a feminist column in The Carolinian. In its 107 years of circulation, The Carolinian has had a long and rich tradition of feminist writing and of writing rooted in other social justice movements. Sometimes, feminism has had to take the form of farce here.
