For a long time, and up until quite recently, there was a distinct sense in which contemporary women writers, but most especially poets, were judged on the basis of a revived misogynistic bardic "club". The very existence and variety of this conference proves that this is all breaking down, that we have fought the good fight and won - and that, as Eavan Boland says, "a different magnetic field" is arising in both the literary and visual arts.
Nevertheless, until quite recently there was a fight to be fought, and a pretty severe one at that. Now, the medieval bards were king-makers and breakers, movers and shakers, ideologues and political journalists, the equivalent of today's spin-doctors. Briona Nic Dhiarmada, in her excellent article on women's discourse in Irish, quotes Donncha O Corrain's trenchant expose of the extremely political motives underpinning the whole corpus of Bardic poetry.
Whatever about the modern male poet's pretensions to political power, which has been usurped by both PR companies and mainline journalism, some of the other roles of the bards have been successfully resurrected by them, especially their claim to be makers and re-shapers of the past.
Since anthologies of poetry are one of the most powerful means of shaping a tradition, the fact that so many recent anthologies by male poets have marginalised or excluded women is proof, at the very least, of a tone-deafness to, if not a vested interest against, the voices of women. As late as 1986, in his New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, Thomas Kinsella didn't see fit to publish as much as one contemporary woman poet, although several established female members of the profession such as Maire Mhac an tSaoi, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Eithne Stronge and myself had each already published a corpus of work by that time which would have well warranted inclusion.
Apart from some mythical examples from Old Irish, the only real historical poet in the whole book is Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill, who many would say represented no great threat, as she was already safely dead for 200 years.
Of course, the best example of this form of gender-blindness in recent years has been the Field Day Anthology, where only three women were admitted to the "Contemporary Irish Poetry" section of Volume III and two women were allowed into the "Irish Writing, Prose, Fiction and Poetry 1900-1988" giving a total of five women in all.
In my selection of contemporary women's poetry for the fourth volume 40 women are selected for this section, and there could have been twice as many, were there not huge constraints of space.
Now, this gender-blindness has bothered me a lot. I know it can be explained in terms of classical post-colonial theory, but please bear with me a space while I try to work out how it actually came about.
Beyond the emphasis on childbearing and rearing, and housekeeping in general (remember Eavan Boland's pathetic woman in a poetry group, who would never let her neighbours know that she was a poet in case they thought she never cleaned her windows), there was an actual symbolic and ontological obstruction that Irish women had to overcome before they found their way into writing. It had to do with the image of woman in the national literary tradition and I have previously characterised it as a very real dragon that every Irish woman has to fight each time she opens her literary door.
This may seem a tad theoretical and abstruse at times but it is the only way I have as yet managed to think the thing through, and it deals mostly with women writing in poetry and the theatre, where until now this particular obstruction has loomed largest.
Geraldine Meaney has successfully shown in her pamphlet, Sex and Nation, published by Attic Press in 1991, that the dominant myth for the Irish prose writer was either as the "true son" of "Mother Ireland", a view which has gone out of fashion very much of late, or its alternative, the literary-subversive-in-exile best epitomised by Joyce. She emphasises how the present dominant (Joycean) form is every bit as sexist and masculinist as that which went before, as "he too is a son, escaping from the nets of Mother church, Mother Ireland and perhaps Mother tongue."
How much more pronounced, therefore, is this in the case of poetry, the creation of which in our culture has been characterised as arising from the sublimation of pre-oedipal and archaic impulses that derive from the ubiquitous Muse. If that Muse, as the French feminist Julia Kristeva persuasively argues (Power if Horror/An Essay in Abjection), is indeed none other than the "never to be again accessed body of the Mother", then we might question, with Kristeva, why only the male offspring has been granted a privileged relationship to that maternal body and to poetic language because of that allied relationship to the maternal body.
To grant the masculine poet a privileged, indeed an exclusive, relationship to the Feminine is to construct the poet as a matriarchal druid/priest, a construction that in Ireland has been successfully resurrected and peddled with a certain aplomb, even in its less aggressive forms as "Green Man" or acolyte of the Muse, (such as the ubiquitous Sweeney figure of the 1980s).
At a deep and ontological level, this oedipal model is not only masculinist to the core but also fails to take into account that it is predicated not on the so-called "worship" of the Feminine but rather upon the suppression of the female in the very construction of the "masculine" (which is to say non-feminine) poetic identity.
A lot of poets and critics have bought into the poetic status quo at such a deep level of their being that they find any seismic rumblings, or shifting of the ground rules unbearably threatening. The perceived shifting of intellectual goal posts which results from the trespassing of a large number of women's voices on the hallowed male sanctum of literature is perceived as a threat to being on the basic level of self-image or primary narcissism.
And a threat perceived at this level means wham, all hell breaks loose and this, I think, lies behind the hysterical male outbursts, masquerading as literary criticism, which have heralded the emergence of women's voices in literature, and especially in poetry.
This is also what lies to this very day behind the seemingly innocent question "Yes, women are writing a lot nowadays, but is it any good?"
THIS feeling that the image of women in the literary tradition, the very strong way in which Ireland was imaged as a woman and muse and therefore you could only be a poet as a woman by taking on the form of a man or by being some kind of literary lesbian, was a really big block to women's poetry. I called it a dragon at the time, and I still stand by that image.
But, just in case we might be tempted to become a bit complacent in the middle of this marvellous plethora and abundance of women's writing that this conference is a very witness to, let me add just a tiny bit from a Comhra that, between myself and Medbh McGuckian, was published in the Southern Review as late as 1995.
We were talking about our initial difficulties of making it into print and Medbh says: "Others are being published now, but I was the only one who managed to by-pass the early pamphlet stage. The by-passing was amazing. When I married I knew that it was now or never and that what I had to do was win a competition. I hate competitions and judging things and even this kind of thing. I did it so clinically. I sent away for the previous year's winners and saw that they were narrative poems of about 40 lines - it had to be substantial and to flitter about the place. I wrote three poems in this style and submitted them under a pseudonym and I won.
"There was no other way. I still would not have a book out. I would still be sitting with my Emily Dickinson tome."
That this could have happened at the beginning of the 1980s to one of the most gifted of all women poets may give people an idea of what we all have been up against. As Geraldine Meaney puts it once more: "Even where the Irish literary and political culture opposes the dominant ideology of Church and State, it often merely re-presents the emblems and the structures of that ideology in more enchanting forms. One consequence of this is the cultural hegemony which the women's movement has found particularly difficult to shatter."
Just as the price of democracy is eternal vigilance, the healthy development of women's writing from now on means taking nothing for granted and being well aware of what we are up against.
Speaking of Joyce reminds me of the very first time in my life that I read anything in a book that I could really identify with as an Irish person. As a child I had gobbled up the usual diet of Bunty and Judy and the Bobsey Twins and Enid Blyton's Five Findouters and Dog and even the Chalet School series, but these were all English and had nothing to with my life as it was lived in Ireland.
Kitty the Hare in Ireland's Own was a bit more familiar, although I was loath to have anything to do with the kind of Ireland she represented. At least she told the kind of stories my granny told.
It was when I started reading Joyce's Por- trait at the age of just 14 that I came across something I could directly identify with and call my own. The particular passage that struck me with most force was the one in which Stephen and his father visit Cork city and end up in a bedroom in the Victoria Hotel. When Stephen wakes up in the morning his father is standing before the dressing table softly crooning to himself:
T'is youth and folly /Makes young men marry So here, my love, /I'll no longer stay, What can't be cured, sure, /Must be injured, sure, So I'll go to Amerikay
I still remember the marvellous feeling of excitement that came over me that here was a song that I knew, a song that was regularly sung by my own Dad and here it was in a book, the actual stuff of literature.
What a pity that women children's writers such as Marita Conlon McKenna, Maeve Friel, Margrit Cruikshank and Siobhan Parkinson weren't around in my childhood, or my life might have been entirely different. I might not have taken my Joyce so utterly seriously that I actually went and lived out for a whole seven years his strategies of silence, exile and cunning.
Witness my amazement and dismay to wake up one morning about 10 years later in what I used to call on my bad days "a frozen slum on the top of a hill" in the middle of the Anatolian plateau and suddenly realise quite simply that I was living in the wrong book. The name of Joyce's book, after all, was Por- trait of the Artist as a Young Man and, however those particular strategies had held up for Joyce, they were not suitable for me.
If I had to be living in a book, the book I should have been living in was one which until that time was unavailable to me because of the Censorship of Publications Act. That book was Kate O'Brien's wonderful Land of Spices, set in the very boarding school that I had gone to myself. Unlike Joyce's bildungsroman which calls on the hero to cut and run, the plot of this book entails the opposite movement, a moving out of frigid loneliness into warmth and human entanglement.
Unlike Joyce's image of nets as things that tie you down, his horror of Ireland as the sow that eats her own farrow, the Land of Spices contains a very different image of freedom. The young girl, Anna, in it realises: "In fact if a girl sees liberty as the greatest of all desirables, she will have to spin it out of herself as the spider spins its web, her self-made snare in which to catch Anna did not yet know what."
This is strikingly different to Joyce. Here the threads that bind us to life, to family, to community are not to be cut but are to be spun out of ourselves. Ariadne and her thread which leads into and out of the labyrinth of the self is the myth that is at work here, not that of the conquering hero.
If only such a great book by a great Irish woman writer had been available to me growing up, I think maybe that my life might have been, if not greatly different, at least greatly enriched.
But the days when such a great and, in fact, extremely moral book could have been banned for just one sentence, where Helen Archer sees her father and his pupil, Etienne, "in the embrace of love" - those days, thankfully, have long gone. This very conference is proof that we Irish women writers have stood the course and are now really coming into our own. The sheer amount of names who are successful in every possible section of writing is incredible and heart-warming.
This is what is being celebrated at this conference, this late flowering of Irish women's writing which is quite spectacular.
The WERRC conference continues today. For information, phone (01) 706 8571/8573 - or email: werrc@ollamh.ucd.ie