Merriman Summer School:The women's project had not succeeded in Irish society despite advances made over the past five decades, columnist and author Nuala O'Faolain said at the Merriman Summer School in Lisdoonvarna, Co Clare, yesterday.
In a symposium on women's liberation, entitled What Were We Like?,O'Faolain said that while the situation of Irish women had changed over the past five decades, "our condition has not".
She asked why there should be constraints on what a little girl might be that a little boy did not have. "Why should this little thing with a heart and a soul and a mind and a body be differently able to be all that she might be?
"Why different than the little fellow? To me that is the women's project, however you might approach it."
In addition, she said, women did not have the same access to opportunity as men. She also believed that "the thing sacrificed on the fires of Ireland has been people's sex lives".
She did not believe most women were celebrating their bodies and having wonderful sex lives. "The larger project was never just about jobs and education and denial of contraception even, no more than the North was just about housing and jobs."
She said that she believed children were the people who had changed their condition within this society. "Attitudes to children are completely different to when I was young. They are immensely loving and generous now and everybody wants to love their children."
Author Anne Enright said that the feminists of the 1970s had not just made life easier for women, they had unmade the Ireland that was there at the time.
"These women were fighters. It was an urgent and very moral national enterprise. There was little talk about climbing the corporate ladder . . .
"In Britain and America they were talking about barriers to career advancement while we were still talking about barrier methods of contraception."
However, unlike the great flowering of women's writing in Britain and the US, in Ireland there had been "a great flowering of mass market paperbacks".
She said she blamed "chicklit" on the Leaving Cert. Although girls were getting great results, the "wonderful Irish woman" was staying home after her second child to mind kids, "and dreams of Dundrum, because she forgot to earn as much as her husband, who only got 380 points in his Leaving Cert but seems to have got some secret about getting on that she does not possess".