About 15 years ago I climbed out on a limb about feminism, with an article calling for an end to the women's movement and the start of a new equality movement which would include men and regard gender as one of several discriminations to eliminate. I was soundly thrashed in a series of furious readers' responses. I'm afraid I hear the bough creaking under me again. Last weekend the National Women's Council of Ireland held its 25th anniversary conference in Maynooth: thoughtful, informative and enjoyable as always until the small hours of the morning.
I left convinced again that the old-style movement had had its day; though as with so many other things, I'm not as sure as I used to be about what's to be done. These days it's all questions. Such as, who or what is the women's movement? The council itself is basically a co-ordinating and monitoring body, supporting a lot of worthy ventures that are run by women and might not survive otherwise. There are about 150 organisations affiliated to it, amazingly disparate.
Yet there must be a common bond, because from the floor and the speakers' table, one woman after another pleaded for policies that women have been seeking as long as I can remember: a working world that will integrate the demands of family with the demands of the productive earning world; a formula to recognise the unpaid labour - domestic, voluntary, community - that underpins the paid labour.
Most frequent of all was the same familiar cry that "male power structures" must go, and the same proposal to send them packing by levering women forward: "unless we get women into positions of power we cannot get the change we want" and "we must get more women into authority".
Where is the evidence that this will reform power structures? I'm told the answer is in critical mass theory. This suggests that 40 per cent is a kind of watermark - when 40 per cent of our politicians are women we will see a shift in the kind of legislation that gets priority; when 40 per cent of the management in industry is female, the workplace culture will begin to change.
Well, we can live in hope, or we can take a critical look at the women in positions of power. In her excellent analysis of the discrimination dilemma, Pat O'Connor of the University of Limerick said of the present generation of students: "Young women have bought into the idea that Ireland is a gender-neutral place and that their expectations are no different from their male counterparts."
That has been true for some time, since the legislation of the 1970s and early 1980s cleared the way for girls to aspire to careers just as boys did. A good number of those girls have now grown up and hold important posts in work and public life. While they're grateful, in a perfunctory way, to the feminists who made this access possible, a lot of them shy miles away from what they perceive as feminism.
Theirs is the "why can't women just get on with it" school of thought: get practical, work hard, compete without complaint, find personal solutions. If women are victims, it is of something else besides their gender - poverty, class, awful parents - and the whingers who gripe about "male power structures" are taking cover in a comfortable victim role.
This stance offers a tidy way of rationalising some of the more blatant facts about wholesale discrimination as laid before us by O'Connor: for instance, that two-thirds of professional service workers are women but more than 93 per cent of senior management in such institutions as the civil service, local authorities, universities and health boards, are men.
Successful women like these are a problem for feminists, and have been since Maggie Thatcher rose to conquer Britain. The tendency has been to pay homage to them - surely they are role models in their way, examples to us all? - but carefully avoid the fact that by and large they want nothing to do with the sisterhood thing.
I have a suggestion. Let's jettison them. Some of them are terrific people, clever and admirable and great fun to have a drink with, but they are no use at all to a political movement with a mission to change the world's power structures. If that's really what women want, do women's organisations serve our purpose? Feminism has come dangerously close to creating institutions of what were meant to be strategies.
There was a good reason for women to organise separately 25 years ago, because a political vacuum existed that wouldn't otherwise have been filled. Their ranks swelled because the need was there. That's much less the case now, though it still happens. The Women's Coalition in Northern Ireland filled a vacuum left by inadequate representation of women in the political parties, and filled it splendidly. After making a significant contribution to the peace process, the coalition members were duly shafted.
I hope they don't regroup, at least not in the same form. I hope the women concerned will take their experience straight into the party system and keep on fighting, because I suspect that most progress is being made by women working in councils or committees within larger organisations where they are in genuine alliances with men.
Supportive groups, networks, are useful and energising. But if women aren't getting their message across outside the caucus, they're going nowhere. The same applies to positive discrimination. Tipping the balance in favour of women is still a good idea in many areas, but it's a dangerous practice unless everyone is clear about motives.
Quotas were meant to achieve the long-term goal of equal representation by giving enough women experience in the areas they had been excluded from, to generate confidence and create role models for the next generation. If it isn't working in particular necks of these dense woods, we should scrap it and try something else.
There are, of course, those various pockets of Irish life where bastions of male privilege have not yet been forced to give way. In this regard, it appears the boards of our third-level institutions would be wise to examine their procedures and their consciences. The phrase "look at UCD" rang recurringly last weekend, and it was clear from conference sessions as well as the lunch-time and late-night chats that UCD is not alone in harbouring a lot of very angry female academics. I hope they get together and do something with their rage. They may find, as many women have in the past, that a just cause will be supported by just men. This is precisely where I think the women's movement is weakest. Outright male-bashing, which was at its height in the early 1980s, is all but gone. Feminists now remember to mention men, as that crowd we're not really hostile to and must be sure to invite along on our campaigns.
But it's pretty faint stuff. On radio a few weeks ago, my colleague John Waters demanded to know why fathers weren't getting support from feminists in their battle for equal rights with mothers. Why is there any hesitation about this? As far as I'm concerned, feminists have truly lost their bearings if they don't believe men and women have equal rights as parents. If there is dissenting opinion, let's have it out and redraw the lines.
I am on the side of changing the power structures, and I believe to do it we must join forces with men precisely because the great majority of them are also excluded. The powerful are very few, and together we are very many. Men are still not the enemy; it's still the system. I think this is where I came in.
