The images of Virgin and Mother have, to some extent, been replaced for younger women by modern role models of pop stars like Madonna, Sinead O'Connor and the Spice Girls, and the President, Mrs Robinson, the Merriman Summer School was told yesterday.
Young women identified with such personalities while not identifying themselves as feminists.
Ms Ivana Bacik, the Reid Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at Trinity College Dublin, said the reason for this was partly because, since 1990, the language of feminism had been co-opted by the media and by politicians to give an impression that equality had been achieved.
"However, there is not yet substantive equality for the majority of women," she said. "Even those women who appear powerful - the pop stars and presidents - only represent figurative and not substantive power. The danger is that, because we see these women in positions of power, we become complacent. We must be careful that our women pop stars and presidents do not become `Celtic tigers' - modern images of success which serve to obscure deep-rooted inequalities in our society."
Ms Bacik said she wanted to discuss how the Virgin-Mother image of women had been shaped over time in Ireland. First, the Virgin image had long been present as a symbolic form - well before de Valera's comely maidens started dancing at the crossroads. The organised church had a large part to play in its construction. She added that in the book, The Serpent and the Goddess, Mary Condren described the way in which patriarchal theology was consolidated in Ireland; how the power of the Goddess - Brigid - had to give way to Mary, the Virgin Mother, with the coming of Christianity to this country.
"Brigid was metamorphosised from Mother Goddess to Virgin Mother and, eventually, to Virgin Saint - the cult of motherhood was replaced by the cult of virginity. Mary is held out to women as the alternative to Eve, but she is an impossible ideal.
"Her virginity makes women's sexuality problematic, casting non-virgins in the role of temptress to men, symbols of Eve. Thus, the Virgin/whore dichotomy has developed, with virginity set up as the model for women, and sexuality set up as `the other'. . ."
Ms Batik said the image of virgin was not so powerful in contemporary writing now that there had come an awareness of its artifice - its perniciousness. "Apart from the Rose of Tralee, no one may expect young Irish women to be virgins anymore but the labelling of women who are seen as sexually liberated or free, continues."
In her paper entitled Virgins, Mothers, Pop Stars and Presidents, Ms Bacik said it was implicit and, at times, explicit in the abortion debate that women were not to be trusted as mothers; that they were liable to turn on their unborn children. So-called "pro-life" slogans emphasising the danger of the womb reinforce this notion. The unborn must be protected from the mother, the receptacle in which it resides. It was often present in sentencing decisions: judges tend to penalise women more harshly if they are seen to have transgressed their "natural" maternal role, she claimed.