FACING THE CHALLENGE ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT, MARY ROBINSON, ON THE OCCASION OF THE OGDEN LECTURE BROWN
19 OCTOBER, 1991
A hundred years ago this University opened its doors to women. A hundred years ago women were granted access here, through Pembroke College, to the wealth of new knowledge and the treasures of old learning. More than a hundred years ago the American poet, Emily Dickinson, began a poem with these poignant lines:
"This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me."
In those two contrary images - one of marvellous access, and one of silence and enclosure - is contained much of the adventure and paradox of women's progress. I feel privileged to come before you today, and report to you from a vantage point of history. As a woman and a lawyer, and as the Head of State of a modern European country, I feel I can raise issues here today, not with the detachment of hindsight or the speculation of the outsider, but - as indeed so many of you yourselves are - as a witness and a participant in the great advances and reforms which have changed our world.
When James Manning was granted a charter by the Rhode Island Assembly in the spring of 1764 and opened the Latin school there, and when in 1770 he took his fledgling college to Providence, he stood at the beginning of great things. His perseverance guaranteed their survival, but we know that for many women those great things were at the time inaccessible. We have to remember the words of the writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward in her autobiography "Chapters from a Life", published five years after Pembroke College was founded. I think we may take her words as fairly general and representative:
"I was taught the old ideas of womanhood,
in the old way, and had not to any important
extent begun to resent them."
I think we would now acknowledge that many external circumstances and unquestioned injustices made the 18th and 19th centuries a dark time for women. Marriage laws, laws of property, arrangements of inheritance and - above all - the elusive, mercurial web of assumption in which a society can imprison itself - all these militated against women defining their goals or expressing their vision.
We meet today in very different circumstances. We meet on the occasion of a centenary of progressive and hopeful enlightenment. And we meet in the spirit of its enactment. During my stay here I saw one of the wonderful libraries attached to this University. Today, a woman can come into this University and its library, open a book and read it and know that the consequences of that encounter can be richly explored in action and event. Yes, she can become a lawyer, a doctor, a writer, a social scientist. Yes, she can take the kernel of the first engagement with knowledge and explore it to its ultimate logic in and out of her life. A hundred years ago that long line of development would almost certainly have been disrupted, somewhere along the way, by one constraint or another, one convention or another. She would have married OR she would have taught OR she would have contemplated the world of science as a possibility. Today we know that those 'ors' have become 'ands'.
But although a hundred is a memorable unit, progress is not a symmetrical matter. Freedom does not come in round numbers. We know that there is a great deal of work ahead if women are to have the opportunity to make a contribution commensurate with their visions and talents.
Through my work as a lawyer, through my experience in the home and at my work place and as a member of the Irish Senate, more importantly, through the continual meetings I have had as President with women right across the political and economic divide in my own country, I can confirm that there has never been a more exciting time for a woman to offer her abilities to society. Many of us here today have seen the development of freedoms and opportunities for women which were simply not foreseen when we were younger but whose presence is now happily taken for granted by a new generation. Many of us have rejoiced in the emergence of the right answers. Today, here and now, I feel I should take this opportunity to urge on us all - on myself as well as you - that we continue to ask the right questions.
Just about the time that Pembroke College admitted women, my country, Ireland, was approaching its hour of test and challenge. We stood then at the very threshold of our freedom. Our language, our culture, our self-perception were all radicalised by the single-minded and steady commitment of that generation to self-determination. No such progress is ever easy. It never happens without cost and upheaval. Nevertheless, in one generation we regained our laws, our right to pursue our language, our right and title to our heritage, our right and title to give a true account of our past. Above all we regained the vital structures of law and democracy which allowed us to set down our freedom in fact. These were momentous things, but as history goes, they happened quickly, almost overnight it seemed. Perhaps we should not be surprised. We have seen that happen in the recent past in societies where people have determined on self-determination. On 9 November last, the day I was elected President of Ireland, I noted that it was exactly a year to the day from when the Berlin Wall came down. We have seen this summer in the Soviet Union what happens when the power of human dignity, the longing for human self-definition, breads through constraints which seemed unbreakable.
But of course that is never the end of it. In our case, in every case, freedom brings new challenges and difficult questions. How will we use it? To what good will we put it? Where will we go with it? In Ireland we have answered some of these questions, but by no means all. Whatever we have achieved, and there is much that we are proud of, owes a good deal to our ability - the ability of any free society - to question what we have and where we are going. We have been fortunate in many ways. We have had great and testing writers. We have had true patriots.
We have a populace whose patience and fortitude are a historical byword. Nevertheless we are still in the process of self-definition. And I think we are helped by the very fact that we have kept our folk-memory of darkness and repression. When Yeats spoke of the "Indomitable Irishry" I think he had in mind a people conscious of their past but not overwhelmed by it, bringing the good omen of their refusal to yield into their future.
Freedom brings challenges and difficulties. One of the difficulties we face now is an outgrowth of the very progress we have made. We cannot yet say as Sarah Orne Jewett does at the end of Foreigner:
"They'll find it rough at sea,
but the storm's all over".
Despite new laws, elements of change and real advance for women the storm is definitely not over. I do not think anyone would say that the changes made in a women's world are complete. There are still outstanding matters. There are still, as I have said, hard questions to be asked. And I would not recommend these questions to anyone as much as to us - we who have been a part and parcel of the changes which have been made. Are all those changes for the good? And how do we relate the dreams and plans of the past to what Wallace Stevens has called
"the exquisite environment of fact."
Those of us who have pleaded equality cases through courts have seen how something written in a book, decided in a courtroom will reverberate back into the lives of women, opening up possibilities, ventilating individual circumstances.
New laws, unconstrained opportunities, a close and vigilant analysis of injustice - all these are things we can be proud of. Many women in this room, many men in this room will have been, in subtle and direct ways, part of that progress. They will have struggled for it, argued for it, enacted it and sustained its growth. But we would be foolish if we did not realise that complacency has always been the nightmare of reform. It is a spectre that stalks every progressive tendency, every worthwhile initiative.
Therefore I would say that - whether we look back or forward - the best companionship we can offer to any process of reform, any unfolding of new freedom, is to set ourselves the difficult but necessary task of asking questions and challenging appearances. In a sense some of my own most rewarding involvement with the progress of women came in that form. When I worked as a lawyer before the Irish and European courts I was fortunate enough to be involved in some of those changes as they affected my own country, cases which, for example, resulted in the removal of discriminatory taxation of married women, the full participation of women in the jury system in Irish courts, the introduction of legal aid, the abolition of the status of illegitimacy and achievement of equal pay and equal opportunity in the workplace.
I think we have to consider clearly and boldly where we have come from and where we are heading. Women in many countries now have structures available to them which are both shelters and doorways to a future progress. But laws are not assumptions and no civilised consensus can take the place of practical solutions. Above all, we can see now that the cause of women is inseparable from the cause of humanity itself. A society that is without the voice and vision of women is not less feminine. It is less human.
So how can we guarantee the continued advancement of human progress through the progress of women? We can begin by questioning the assumptions we ourselves have about our identity as women. This means reviewing - and perhaps changing our views of - the past as well as the future. There is always a danger that - in the name of progress - we will factionalise the past and prescribe the future. That we will tell women how they lived and how they should live. Instead of telling, we have to listen. Instead of prescribing we have to listen. The women of our past were real and complex people. It is more important than ever before that we return to them with open minds, conscious that theirs were real human lives.
And we need to listen to those lives. That act of listening many well be a painful and demanding act, but it must also be a rewarding one. In the case of women who lived their lives long ago in centuries where disease and prejudice and repression blocked the advancement of women, it can seem that - with some exceptions - we are listening to nothing more than their suffering. But this is not the case. We are also listening to their survival, to their achievement of courage, to their tenacity. Of course that is an ambiguous achievement. It was gained at cost, against injustice, and in circumstances which make us draw back and flinch today. But we need to celebrate it all the same. We cannot turn aside from the power of that survival simply because we deplore the circumstances which necessitated it.
If we are to move confidently into the future as women, as citizens, we must return unafraid to that past. We must revisit in spirit the pioneer woman in Iowa, the Irish woman on the Blasket Islands, the native American mother of small and imperilled children, the slave woman in South Carolina, the woman keeping a diary on a Plantation at the height of the Civil War. In a sense, the more progress we have made and the more conscious we have become of the hardship and inequity of these lives, the more we have fled their images. But if we are to possess our future, we must not desert our past. And if we return to it in the right spirit of imaginative understanding, for all its pain and our ambivalence, I think we will feel as James Baldwin did when he wrote about his childhood in "The Fire Next Time":
"In spite of everything, there was in the life
I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing
and surviving disaster that are very moving
and very rare".
In the present, we need to listen to the lives women are living, which may well be beyond the agenda of prescribed reform. We need to value those lives, to cherish them, to honour them. Above all we need to avoid the arrogance which is the danger of every orthodoxy. Feminism has its source in the belief that certain structures and certain shelters can enable women to express their vision and achieve their contribution. I like Mary Woolstronecraft's comment. She said
"I do not wish women to have power over men
but over themselves".
Feminism, however you theorise about its, has been all about this. About women getting power over themselves. Nevertheless there is a real danger that we will put too narrow an interpretation on this. Despite the great achievements of the past few decades, I think everyone now admits there were some mistakes. Women who were forced to describe themselves as "just housewives" - these are indicators that some women felt excluded on the one hand and, on the other, that a movement which is all about the freedom and excellence and independence of women was marking out some ways of life as appropriate and some as oppressed. We want to be careful about this. So I think we have to watch and listen to women getting power over themselves and call that feminism after the event. Not before.
In other words, no ideology can determine vision, no set of precepts can prescribe contribution. Whether a woman is in the home with young children, or on her own, or with her chosen companion, or in the workplace - we must know that on each and every occasion her life can speak to us out of its power and self-possession if we will listen to it. We must never dictate the vision of that life or constrain it by our own narrow interpretation of what is "right " for women. And I think this applies especially to women of other countries, other faiths, different lifestyles. If we simplify them by our sense of what is appropriate for a woman to be thinking and doing, then we are limiting the very cause which we support.
Do we as women value the activities and concerns of so many women in home-making and bringing up children? If we do not sufficiently value these activities, and the skills involved in them, how can we persuade society as a whole of their value, and of the importance of ensuring that these activities are more evenly shared between parents and supported by society, so that they do not oppress women or hinder the realisation of their full potential? If we perpetuate the low status accorded by society to these activities and concerns, a low status which further reinforces the poor self-image of many women, by focusing our energies as feminists on encouraging women to 'achieve' amore 'significant' role in society, are we not to an extent perpetuating the oppression of women?
As human beings we depend on one another. Just as we are stricken by any one act of repression, so all our humanity is honoured by the progress of any part of it. I want to salute this University for a hundred year contribution to that progress. And I want to associate myself, on this occasion, with Emerson's words to Walt Whitman at the start of his career:
"I give you joy of your free and brave thought."
In my inaugural speech as President of Ireland last December I said:
"As a woman, I want women who have felt themselves outside history to be written back into history, in the words of Eavan Boland, 'finding a voice where they found a vision'."
Here in Brown University you have valued that voice for a hundred years and I am grateful for this opportunity to salute you.