The purpose of summer schools seems to be to summon the ghosts of the seminal figures in Irish history and literature, and the Parnell school is no exception. However, yesterday the ghosts summoned to Avondale, the Parnell family home set among the Wicklow mountains, were more those of Anna and Fanny than their more famous brother. The topic discussed at the summer school, which continues until Saturday, was women and land, and, although their names were not invoked, the spirits of Anna and Fanny, who sought a more radical social transformation of rural Ireland than did Charles Stuart, seemed to be present at the lively symposium conducted by six women academics and rural activists.

Dr Sally Shortall from Queen's University in Belfast pointed out that women's access to land was one of the most important factors shaping their role in farming. Land was almost always passed on to sons, and women only came to own land in exceptional circumstances or through widowhood, when they were often perceived as the caretakers for their sons.

"Within farms, sons and daughters are perceived differently, regardless of their capabilities," she said.

This was not inevitable. Inheritance was shaped by legal and social norms, and it was custom, rather than law, which dictated this pattern of inheritance, she said. In other countries it was different. She gave the example of Norway, where the eldest child inherits the farm, regardless of sex; and Sweden, where the child who stays on the land buys out his or her siblings.

By the 1950s marriage "was no longer a buyer's market for the inheriting man", according to Prof Mary Daly from UCD, who described the gradual shift of women from involvement in agriculture to employment in cities and town at home and abroad. The changing role of rural women was part of the shift from a family-based economy to an individual-based one, she said.

The advent of the creamery brought the final death of home churning, which had been a source of income for the woman in her own right, and had employed female members of the farming family. The period immediately after the war brought the death of the last remaining source of such income - egg-money.

However, this was also a time of increasing opportunities for single women to work, either in Ireland or abroad, and the advantages of this attracted women away from the land.

By the 1950s there were fewer women than men in rural Ireland. Life in the countryside was grim, and women did not want to endure it. They were usually educated to a higher level than the men.

The men were often unwilling to improve conditions for women, she said. For example, there was a campaign against bringing water to farms, because the farmers feared it would increase their rates. Relieving women of the burden of carrying water from wells was not seen as important.

"The survival of rural Ireland required the renegotiation of gender relations," she said. A survey of those farms which did not survive revealed that they had no running water, no domestic comforts, no willingness on the part of the farmer to renegotiate relationships.

Maire Walsh runs a rural development programme in the south where most of the farms are small and there are high levels of rural poverty. There are higher education levels among women there, she said, and they are leaving the area. There are only 77 women to every 100 men, which does not allow for sustainable population development.

The role of women was changing, not on the farm itself, but in the farm enterprise. The situation now, especially on small farms, was often that the main breadwinner was the wife working outside the home, with the farmer's income supplementing hers.

"This is causing its own problems," she said. "There will be a need for a lot of negotiation." Often the problem lay not with the farmer himself, but with his friends and neighbours, who disparaged him, probably as much from jealousy as from male chauvinism, she felt.

She described a meeting of small farmers where the question of the productivity of dairy cows was being discussed. One farmer, whose wife worked in an office, was praising a particular cow. "The best cow you have is in the solicitor's office," said one of his neighbours.

Leader and other EU programmes were helping rural development, and encouraging a greater role for women in particular, she said, but more women needed to participate at leadership level. It was a question of self-image and self-confidence, she said. "It's like the Ballroom Of Romance - they're still waiting to be asked to dance."

Anne Byrne from UCG said there was a need for positive action to get women onto such boards. "When women are involved, the agenda changes," she said.

The male domination of all the bodies associated with agriculture was also a theme taken up by Dr Patricia O'Hara of Callaghan Associates. "Farming and land ownership is one of the last bastions of maleness in Ireland," she said. She stressed the role of farming mothers in encouraging their children to be educated so that they could leave.

A former president of the Irish Countrywomen's Association, Mamo McDonald, pointed out that there were one women and 57 men on the national council of the ICMSA; four women and 72 men on the national committee of the IFA, and no men on its family farm committee; and one woman on the executive of the co-ops' organisation ICOS.

Earlier, Dr Catriona Clear from UCG described the results of her interviews with women about their lives in rural Ireland from the 1920s to the 1960s. She pointed out that the farmer's wife appeared in the Census at this time not as an "assisting relative", but as "not productively employed".

The women she had spoken to described their experiences of "made matches"; heavy workloads compounded by no running water; living with in-laws, including their husbands' siblings; high levels of maternal mortality in childbirth; and lack of access to money.

. The Parnell Summer School runs until Saturday. For information, tel: 0404-46929.