Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [40]
Some of the more serious young women became involved in the YWCA, a center among campus clubs for race politics and social feminism. “People find it odd when I tell them that I was radicalized at this women’s college in Georgia in the forties,” says the 1946 yearbook editor Helen Matthews Lewis. She credits support for such leanings from a cadre of “older spinster-suffragette teachers: strong, independent women who were among the first generation of women to vote.” The director of the YWCA, Emily Cottingham, once boldly drove a car full of GSCW students to Atlanta University to live in the dorm, and eat in the cafeteria, with black women students. When the Milledgeville paper printed an editorial critical of an AFL-CIO speaker, brought to campus by the YWCA, Betty Boyd and Helen Matthews composed a ringing “Letter to the Editor”: “Ours are girls with a vivid realization that the pattern set for the coming world will deeply affect their future well-being and happiness and those of their children.”
Living in an “imposing” terraced home, like the aunts in “The Partridge Festival,” about “five blocks from the business section,” O’Connor, as a freshman, was insulated, either by her design or her family’s, from many of these burning issues among her peers. As she was a “town girl,” she didn’t fully reside in “Jessieville.” “Most of the time Mary Flannery walked home alone when she had a break from classes, but sometimes she stayed in the Town Girls Room,” remembers Zell Barnes Grant, who lived on a farm a mile outside town. “She always had her nose stuck in a book.” Tellingly, the only club O’Connor joined her first year was the Newman Club, which met weekly in the Sacred Heart rectory and included about ten girls, the total number of Roman Catholic students at the college; they all woke up at dawn to attend monthly First Friday masses together.
She kept her friendship with Betty Boyd during all their years at school. “They were so close,” remembers their mutual friend Jane Sparks Willingham. “They had a kindred spirit. Yet Betty was not awkward like Flannery. She was a very polished person, and much more into things on campus.” Within the first few weeks of the fall semester, Boyd had already grown beyond the circumference of summertime at the Cline Mansion. She was living in Terrell, the freshman dormitory, with a roommate coincidentally named Mary Boyd, an English major from Calhoun, Georgia, who worked on the literary magazine. And she became active in student government. The tall, shy, reticent young woman showed such a knack for engaging in policy issues at meetings that she was elected freshman class secretary.
As Betty Boyd’s roommate, Mary Boyd was also invited many times to Sunday dinner at the Cline Mansion. “She was very fond of her mother in Flannery’s way of liking people,” Mary Boyd Gallop has recalled. “Being the only child, the mother seemed just as fond of her girl as were two maiden aunts living there.” Yet there was tension between Betty’s two friends. Mary Flannery once told Betty Boyd that she found her roommate “just a bit too pedantic.” More to the point, Mary Boyd made constant comments along the lines of her observation, years later, that “O’Connor never seemed interested in the opposite sex. She was happy just being herself.” Mary Flannery did avoid dating. Yet she was uncomfortable at having such a private topic openly discussed.
Her defense was to cast Mary Boyd as a husband hunter, or simply boy crazy. O’Connor’s letters to Betty Boyd