Feminism: The thought occurred to me recently that I had never regarded the Women's Liberation Movement as an end in itself: for me, it was an instrument towards some other goal.
Feminism, like Marxism, is in itself sterile. But as a tool for something else - the analysis of society, a political means for change, contemplating the meaning of life, exploring one's sexuality - feminism, like Marxism, can be a brilliant instrument.
What was its purpose, then, for me? Possibly, simply, freedom. Freedom from all those restrictions which hampered liberty: the scolding elders who were always seeking to lecture you "for your own good" with archaic piseogs about men not respecting you once you'd yielded to them, or the necessity of obtaining a steady job in a bank: oh, how the landscape was littered with controls and restraints and "thou shalt nots" of custom, law and practice.
But when I ponder on the view from here - the "here" being me in my 60s - I wonder, like Alfie, "what's it all about, mate?" For in place of old restrictions and controls, there are new ones: and the State, which should wither away on both the Marxist and the feminist model, has intruded into our lives ever more, from ID security controls to bossy regulations about smoking and other aspects of private life ("for your own good"). Old conformities have been exchanged for new orthodoxies: social control is always the name of the power game.
Anne Stopper is a conscientious American Fulbright scholar who has done a service to the social history of Irish life in the 20th century by providing a narrative about the birth of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement in 1970, and exploring how that came about. Her careful work should provide a template for subsequent feminist researchers and journalism students, for it is a subject which elicits continuous interest from historians and researchers. And I suppose it was a serendipidous moment in time for the promise of social revolution and change, with a full cast of contrasting characters.
Stopper has done a diligent job in getting the facts down on paper, through interview and archive. I am glad she has brought to the fore significant figures such as Máirín de Búrca, Máirín Johnston, Eimer Philbin Bowman, the eponymous Margaret Gaj of the title and most especially Mary Maher, who, writing for The Irish Times, was a central influence - certainly for me.
She might have pursued, further, the subsequent development of members such as Deirdre McDevitt and Bernadette Quinn, who joined IWLM as "ordinary housewives", so to speak, and not media performers. And there are other omissions from the cast, but perhaps one cannot interview everyone.
And Stopper's approach generally strikes a note of trustworthiness. She always strives towards fair reporting, even if I am rather too insistently described as "flamboyant", "vivacious", and "fun-loving", well established obituarists' codes for drunk and promiscuous - not too far from the mark anyway.
Where the analysis is, possibly, underdeveloped is in not quite nailing the undercurrent of left-wing and right-wing tensions that fed into Women's Lib. The late Mrs Gaj herself came from the stable of old Reds for whom Women's Liberation was also a means to an end - to destroy capitalism (the endeavour now being undertaken by Greens). Some subsequent researcher might investigate further the former Marxists who refused to support Women's Liberation in 1970 because they regarded it as an indulgent form of bourgeois individualism. Some Marxists believed that pay differentials should exist between men and women, since men were the family breadwinners, and women, on the whole, were not. Not equality, but not an ignoble sentiment.
Perhaps only a novel or a play could truthfully explore where the original Women's Liberationists are in their lives today: reportage is always somehow superficial and inadequate in probing the emotional hinterland of experience.
For myself, I came to find that the deposit of Irish Catholic culture built up so lovingly by the mothers and grandmothers of yore was a more nurturing source than all the Funloving Flamboyance, and the characteristics required of the "vivacious" Rebel Girl are little use when it comes to motherhood and marriage. A drunken slag is, by definition, a lamentable mother and a nightmare spouse.
When young, our world is built on theory; when old, on experience. And that is why the young are fiery and righteous, and the old crabbedly mutter that there is no new thing under the sun; or that old conformities return as new orthodoxies under the social control of the Politically Correct.
• Mary Kenny is a columnist for the Irish Independent
Mondays at Gaj's: The Story of the Irish Women's Liberation Movement By Anne Stopper The Liffey Press. 232pp. €16.95