"You just call out my name,/ and you know wherever I am,/ I'll come running . . . " Carole King, sans piano or back up, had the 400 delegates of the first annual Irish Women's Studies Summer School at TCD this week singing along, celebrating the sisterhood. "We empower ourselves through helping each other," was King's message on Tuesday, tying in with the theme of this year's school: "The Power of Women". The school was officially launched on Monday night by the President, Mrs Robinson, who was received with a rapturous standing ovation. After several sessions on women in politics, and some moving poetry from the cross-community Craigavon Women's Creative Network (which included verses on children lost through sectarian violence) the delegates were more than ready for Carole King's light-hearted pep talk on Tuesday.

"I achieved career success early. I was in my late 20s when Tapestry came out in 1971 and I had already written a lot of hit songs," she recalled. King still writes songs but is now also an actress and environmentalist.

When she was 15 she was already taking her guitar on the subway from her native Brooklyn to the big record companies in Manhattan, trying to get an appointment to see one of the executives: "I kept coming back. I was fearless. I just dove in. Eventually a door opened." It took longer to gain the confidence to perform her own work in public, but "eventually I realised all I had to do was be myself".

Describing herself as "an ordinary woman" to whom something "extraordinary" happened, King said: "And guess what? It could happen to you. You can be anything you want to be." King suggested Mary Robinson, Michelle Smith, Mags O'Brien and Jane O'Brien as role models. "Do you want to go through your life saying, `if only'? Say instead `I can, I will, I am'," she urged. "It is not unfeminine to fight for yourself, to feel your power and to use it with love and the spirit of fairness."

There was a question from the floor from a woman who wondered how women from underprivileged backgrounds could hope to achieve the kind of success King has enjoyed. In King's view, "education is the key".

This was certainly the message of a fascinating lecture by Sylvia Walby of the University of Leeds who explained that women with no educational qualifications are less likely to be in employment: "The more educated you are, the more likely you are to be employed. Class issues between women are being redrawn in terms of access to education." Age issues also apply. Education is enjoyed principally by young women. Between 1991 and 1994, Ireland had the highest increase of women in employment in Europe, she noted, from 35.1 to 49.5 per cent of the workforce. Most of these jobs were held by women in their 20s. Women in their 40s were far less likely to be employed, or else more likely to be in poorly paid part-time or unskilled work. Young women, she concluded, are reaping the rewards of the struggles of their mothers' generation for equal access to education and equal rights at work, but those older women are not themselves enjoying the same benefits.

Ground-breaking struggle is ongoing among the members of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition. This was evident in the lecture by Monica McWilliams who, along with her colleague Pearl Sagar, won a seat at the multiparty peace talks. They found themselves "the only women among the 23 delegates seated at the table". McWilliams, a university lecturer from a rural, Catholic background, and Sagar, a community worker who lives in a working-class loyalist area of Belfast, have experienced a considerable amount of verbal abuse at the Forum: "We face humiliation every Friday. We get booed. We get told: `Shut up and sit down, you stupid woman'." The DUP told the Women's Coalition members they should be "breeding for Ulster". Historian Mary Cullen argued that feminists need to use their commitment to try and achieve equality for all, in terms of employment, class and ethnicity. Community activist Kathleen Maher spoke of her experiences in Ballymun, where the local network of community workers often comes into conflict with middle-class outsiders with their own agenda: "Community problems can only be adequately addressed when the community is involved."

Meanwhile Nora Owen, TD, illustrated that the age-old struggle women face to achieve recognition for the work they do is alive and well as far afield as Namibia: "I was visiting a tribe called the Bushmen and we started talking about why we call the sun male and the moon female. A male Bushman explained that it is because the sun is strong and nourishing, while the moon is weak and less important. His wife then started beating him with a stick, yelling: `Who walks 10 kilometres every day carrying fresh water on her head? Who built our house? Not you!' "

Owen was speaking in a session with women politicians, featuring Liz McManus, TD, Mary Hanafin, TD and Niamh Bhreathnach. The latter said she did not miss "the bear pit" which is the Dail, where women's voices "are not heard as much as men's": "Women are more interested in topics than in talking for hours about nothing."

Liz McManus concluded that not just the Dail, but "global policy" needed to be "feminised if we are to survive": "Women prioritise in a way that points towards a sustainable future for our children."

All four seemed stumped by the question posed by Tina Byrne, who lives in Fatima Mansions: "How do you help working-class women get involved in politics? How do you make marginalised people feel you care?"

Today is the last day of the school which closes with a session on "Women and Their Close Relationships", 9.30 a.m. to 11 a.m. and a lecture by historian Margaret MacCurtain entitled "Pity the Country that has no Heroines!" at 11.30 a.m. in the Burke Theatre, TCD.