SUPERWOMAN is dead, long live Hyperwoman. Where Superwoman merely coped with the demands and the guilt of combining paid work with child rearing, Hyperwoman conquers.
Hyperwoman relishes the challenge of superachieving in her career, makes family life an exercise in efficiency, refuses to bow to guilt and smashes through the glass ceiling. There is nothing she cannot do as she moves from one success to the next in the workplace and in her immaculately decorated home.
She's a doctor or solicitor, a media figure or an entrepreneur, a top civil servant or a PR wizard. Every moment of her day - and her children's - is scheduled weeks in advance, as is even her "relaxation" time, an aromatherapy session every second Thursday at 5 p.m.
You'll find her with a fax machine at the bedside, sending her shopping list off to Quinnsworth Merrion Centre in Dublin 4 in time to meet the deadline for a Friday or Saturday morning delivery. Or you'll see her in her immaculate designer suit as she bursts from her double parked Mercedes and into the Butler's Pantry or Douglas Food Company to collect her dinner order. Ordering a mere "take away" would be a sign of failure.
You'll see her stuck in traffic, where she's glued to her mobile phone as she plans the next day's business meeting or tells the nanny/housekeeper: "I'm on my way". Early mornings, three days a week, you'll find her in the gym.
On Saturdays, she'll think she's "letting it all hang out" as she buzzes around in her fancy car and her track suit with the kids in tow. She is actually as hyper as ever as she chauffeurs her brood from rugby to swimming to drama. On Sunday morning, she leads the family on a walk into the Dublin mountains. This is no slovenly stroll, she's determined to walk 10k, because she takes her relaxation as seriously as her work. If it's cycling she's into, she's had her bicycle fitted with a gadget that tells her how far and how fast she's going.
Hyperwoman is so focused on achievement that even her domestic life is goal oriented. Late into the night she examines paint and fabric samples as she trawls Elle Decoration for ideas for perfecting her home environment. Her garden looks a picture with its herbaceous borders and lavender beds redolent of Victorian leisure - leisure being no more than a design concept.
Hyperwoman is the 1990s' head girl inspiring the admiration and envy of women and men alike - but while she leaves men simply standing in awe, she makes the rest of us women feel woefully incompetent.
Patricia O'Reilly, author of Working Women (Wolfhound, £7.99), sees these superachievers as being "addicted to stress". In the course of her research, she met a teacher who once a month made the family's entire supply of lunch rolls and packed them into black bin liners before stuffing them into the freezer and a businesswoman who refused to let the family leave the house in the morning until a military style roster of domestic duties had been painstakingly completed.
Topping them all was the marketing whizkid who thought nattering on the telephone to friends was time consuming and instead relied on pre addressed "notelets" by which she arranged lunches and dinners via post - weeks in advance, of course.
"The more high powered and organised they were in their jobs, the more high powered and organised they were at home," says O'Reilly. "There was nothing spontaneous in their lives. Everything was planned months in advance, even holidays and going to trendy places on Saturday nights with other couples."
THEIR husbands were supportive and admiring, but passive in the domestic domain. They left it to their super successful wives to see what needed to be done, to organise the house and to delegate duties to childcare and domestic staff.
"The more cash the women had, the more perfectionist they were because they had money to spend on caterers, interior decorators and gardeners," says O'Reilly.
Most women, however, had to rein in their perfectionist impulses at home because they spent more than one third of their salaries on childcare, forcing them to compromise on some of the materialistic aspects of achievement.
Gail Grossman Freyne, a mother of teenagers and a psychotherapist with the Family Therapy and Counselling Centre in Ranelagh, Dublin, thinks that the Hyperwoman phenomenon comes from something positive, "an awareness that you can be your best possible self". In her view, the Superwoman of the 1970s was pressured from the outside: she needed the job for the money and somehow had to fulfil her responsibilities at home as well. Hyperwoman's drive for achievement "comes from within as she tries to move above just being a working wife and mother".
The negative side is that this sense of achieving an independent existence alongside one's domestic interdependency with partner and children may ultimately be illusory.
"The danger is that the marketplace which draws you towards this sense of achievement can consume you in the same way the hearth once did. If feminism ever was to offer anything different to women, it was to offer an alternative to being consumed," says Grossman Freyne. "The question we women have to ask now is: what is it that feminism has to offer other than just being assimilated as a second class male?"
Indeed, is Hyperwoman achieving anything to improve a woman's lot? Or is she merely using her hyper behaviour to avoid the reality that in some ways things are no better in the workplace for women today than they were 20 years ago?
Caught in a bind between succeeding in their careers and being good mothers, many women have experienced a splintering of ideals, with two stark choices: either succeed magnificently in the public sphere, or retreat into the home and live as though the 1970s never happened.
Grossman Freyne believes that rather than settling for these two extremes of Hyperwoman versus home woman, women - and, more importantly, men - should agree to change the workplace to accommodate family life, although this may be a hopeless aspiration. "You have to think of stopping this huge juggernaut called capitalism," she says. Without the co operation of the patriarchy, feminism has inevitably failed to change the system. Witness Hyperwoman.
"Her public and private lives are in state of constant tension," says Grossman Freyne. "Hyperwoman thinks she can compensate through her superachievements and refuse to be beaten in the privacy of her own life or by the system. These are women who are bravely determined to wrest power from the hands of men."
Yet in her subconscious Hyperwoman is being eaten away by the internal pressure which drives almost all women to do far more than their fair share in the domestic sphere. Women are conditioned to understand that if they are "selfish" and demand from their partners equal contributions in terms of time and energy in the home, they risk destroying the very relationship which they need to be emotionally happy. Thus, they enter into the spirit of overcompensation which has produced Hyperwoman, who believes only she and she alone can run the family properly.
Ruth Barror, chief executive officer of the Marriage and Relationship Counselling Service in Dublin, believes Hyperwoman is programmed by ambition, motivated by anger and emotionally crippled by her deep feeling of loss. "Hyperwoman is trying to prove she is as good as a man but at the cost of closeness with her children. She has acquired status and identity - but you never get your babies back again," she says.
Hyperwoman has by definition rejected motherhood as her sole role in life, which is understandable considering "you're nothing when you're a mother", as Barror puts it. It takes great courage and self sufficiency for any woman with a string of achievements behind her from childhood - first in education and then in career - to risk throwing away her potential to become the unappreciated carer of small children with their engulfing demands.
Barror sees Hyperwoman as dealing with the guilt of having a career by being a perfectionist in every area of her life. "I meet Hyperwomen on the circuit they are very angry woman," Barror says. The classic example was the solicitor she met at a networking session at 8 p.m. one evening who said: "I bloody charge my clients what I like because they prevent me from being with my children."
In Barror's observation, Hyperwoman's marriage is bound to suffer because she has no time for a sex life. As for an inner life - Hyperwoman has completely lost contact with the "shadow side".
"THERE'S a dark side to everyone and all our lives have bits of failure and disappointment. It's vital to take time out to meditate, to draw on inner resources," Barror says.
So what is the future for Hyperwoman? Will she fall apart when her children leave home and there are no more board meetings to chair, no more school runs to organise? Upon retirement, will she disintegrate at the thought of too many "windows" in her diary? We'll see, but Hyperwoman's successors are already asking questions.
In Britain, psychologists have identified 13-17 year old female, middle class, high achievers as suffering from Imposter Syndrome because already they have come to believe that no matter what they achieve, it will never be good enough.