Ask the next five people you meet: "Do we still need a women's movement?" Then ask "Why/why not?" and see if you get the same answer twice. It may be more than 30 years since the birth of "Women's Lib" but the controversy continues.
To many people in the 1990s, the women's movement seems irrelevant or outdated because "we have equal rights now". After all, the marriage bar has gone, the contraceptive train has long since arrived in the station, we are on our second woman President and seem to have equal pay. Others, however, believe there are still many battles to fight and attitudes to change. There are also many women who, despite believing gender equality is far from a reality, would be offended if they were labelled "feminist" and will have nothing to do with the women's movement; others believe the women's movement wants nothing to do with them.
Exclusion, from the women's movement and from our wider society, was the focus of a conference last week in Trinity College, Dublin. "Women and Social Exclusion, Reclaiming and Transforming the Women's Movement" aimed to provide a voice to women who are rarely heard and to offer an alternative forum to the annual Power of Women Summer School, established in 1997 by the Centre for Women's Studies at TCD.
This free conference (with the all-important free creche) was attended by a broad spectrum of around 150 women - including travellers, deaf women, asylum-seekers, HIV-positive women, Muslims, former prisoners, recovering drug-users, rural women, older women and lesbians.
"Many women felt excluded from the first summer school," says one of the conference organisers, Ronit Lentin of TCD's sociology department. "The fees were high, many issues were not included and it wasn't doing everything we wanted it to. In many ways, the women's movement has been hijacked by academics who are not representative of the women's movement." broker issues." A community development worker in Inchicore, Dublin, Marian Jameson, agrees: "At the summer school seminars, most women were bored after a few minutes but in this conference, it's all coming from the women themselves and it's really positive." Young women in Inchicore were interested in attending "until they heard `Trinity'. Then they excluded themselves. They don't see it's just a building and they have as much right to be here as anyone else. They're the forgotten community."
According to another organiser, Cathleen O'Neill, development worker with SAOL, the Dublin drugs project for women, "we couldn't get our issues on the summer school agenda". She feels the women's movement has been split into single issue groups, such as Cherish and Rape Crisis and, while fully supporting their aims, believes there is a need for an unstructured space for women who feel excluded. In this slightly anarchic conference, the participants were called on to set the agenda and make presentations in the form of talks, drama, poetry, art or song.
There is a complete absence of acknowledgement of "wide areas of inequality within the women's movement and after 25 years, it's time it started to happen," says O'Neill. However, the chief executive of the National Women's Council of Ireland (NWCI), Katherine Zappone, although "delighted" to see a conference on this issue, feels "it is not helpful to publicly proclaim some of the divisions between women". Social inclusion, she says, is the central principle of the work of the NWCI and for its forthcoming, 25th annual conference, entitled "Women Mapping the New Millennium" (October 16th -17th), "we have made every effort to be as inclusive as possible."
To define the issues for women in the next millennium, the women attending last week's TCD conference were invited to speak-out in "Speakers Corner" (decorated in the suffragette colours of purple, orange and white). For Cathleen, they are: "Childcare, childcare and childcare," and she was followed by a stream of women who shared their experiences and named the changes they wanted to see both in society as a whole and within the women's movement. "In prison, my rights as a mother were taken away from me. I had no physical contact with my child. My issue is reform in prison around mothers and children," says a former prisoner. "Racism is about us all. Let's put racism on the agenda of every women's meeting in every forum," says a Jewish woman. "I've lived in poverty for 35 years and I've been totally excluded from the education system. My issues are women's health through poverty, and childcare," says a woman from Dublin's northside.
Poverty, with its consequent ill health and lack of access to education, was mentioned repeatedly by women. As the recent reports by the UN and the Combat Poverty Agency illustrate, the Celtic Tiger has failed to roar for many families. "The Government, the agencies, need to stop managing poverty. They need to eradicate it," says Cathleen. "Around the margin of this booming buoyant economy, 27 per cent of women are living in persistent poverty."
Perhaps it is a sign of post-feminism, but women today rarely describe men as the enemy or use the traditional feminist language of "patriarchy" or "oppression". "It's not about being anti-men," says community development worker, Lisa Fingleton. "It's about getting rights for women." Many young women, however, believe the battles have been won and equality has been achieved. "Women my age see the women's movement as obsolete," says the women's officer of the Union of Students of Ireland (USI), Emma Dowling. "Women are saying `we don't need the women's movement. We've come so far - with legislation and equal pay'. Feminism's a dirty word and women don't want to be called feminists. "In USI, the women's movement is issue-based. A woman wouldn't call herself a feminist but she has a friend with an eating disorder or she knows someone who has been hit by a man, so she comes to meetings."
As the new Ireland prepares for the new century, dialogues on the difficult issue of the relationship between women in the South and the North are beginning. At the TCD conference, Marie Mulholland of the Belfast Women's Support Network and Ailbhe Smyth of UCD's Women's Education Research and Resource Centre looked back at the last 30 years and expressed their hopes for the future.
Mulholland attributes the isolation of Northern women by those in the South to the suspicion "every time women activists from nationalist areas raised an issue, that we were somehow the foils of, or the pawns of, the republican propaganda machine.
"What I regret about this isolation we've had between the two women's movements, and women in the North and South, is that we are here in 1998 and instead of being on some twin-track process, we're just starting groping towards one another," she says. What Smyth regrets is that most feminists in the 1980s decided not to talk about the issue of the North - to avoid a split in the women's movement. Now, she feels building a relationship may not be easy: "We cannot assume there is common ground . . . What we can do is immerse ourselves in common projects and then maybe there will be common ground."
The late 1990s have seen the emergence of a new conflict between women on this island - between white, working-class women and refugees. Women living in poverty feel threatened by asylum-seekers who are being housed in deprived areas, increasing the pressure on limited resources. There is a sense of competition between local women and refugee women "which creates a clash between class deprivation and race deprivation", comments one community activist.
Women attending the conference found it easy to celebrate female diversity - until some women expressed hostility towards refugees, at which point, the positive atmosphere threatened to disintegrate. They wanted to know why refugees in Tallaght were "driving big cars" and why the Government was "giving them money to go to the pub". There was some understanding that working-class women were the ones who were having to "juggle space and move over in a space which was already overcrowded and under-resourced". But despite the conference being billed as "a safe place for women to express themselves without being judged", it was agreed to postpone any further dialogue on the sensitive issue of racism for another time and another forum.
As Ireland prepares to enter the next millennium, it seems one of the major issues for women is the same as for society in general: how do we transform ourselves into a multicultural society?
