STRIKING A BALANCE THE ALLEN LANE FOUNDATION LECTURE
25th FEBRUARY, 1992 by PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON
I am very pleased to have been invited to give the 1992 Allen Lane Foundation Lecture. When I was preparing this lecture some weeks ago I was unaware of the events of the past fortnight which would pre-occupy us in such a painful way. Last week, as I sought to articulate the universal anguish and concern felt on all sides, as people addressed the issues posed by the tragic facts of that court case, I reminded my audience that by virtue of the office I hold it was neither appropriate nor indeed possible for me to be involved in that process.
Those events are so fresh in our minds that were I not to mention them they could form a sensitive and even distorting filter to your listening to what I have to say to you this evening. Instead, I ask you to stand back from immediate concerns and focus on a broader theme.
In my lecture I want to invite you to reflect with me on the broad area of the position of women both here in Ireland and in society in general. I have chosen to call this lecture 'Striking a Balance'. The syntax of the title will convey to you that notwithstanding the very significant progress achieved, I believe the balance is not yet right. Therefore, I think my responsibility, tonight, is to review in a reflective way the complexity which still remains in this whole area.
I will propose that striking a balance - in other words, the adjustment of power and participation and their exchange in a society in such a way as includes issues of gender but is not limited to them - may be a difficult task. But it is also a vital one. I believe it is one of the distinctive tasks of our generation. It is clearly not something to be approached with either complacency or ideology. Jane Austen wrote:
"Where so many hours have been spent in convincing
myself that I am right, is there not some reason to
fear that I may be wrong?"
Her words are a salutary warning to us all, and to me particularly tonight. For not only is a balance difficult to strike in this area; it is almost equally difficult to define. What one person calls balance another will call compromise. What one person claims as equality another will reject as privilege.
But I want to clarify the terms of my argument. I am here as a witness, not as a theorist; as a participant, not a scientific commentator. Nor can I hope to strike a balance or even define one tonight. But I can hope to commend to you that we all listen to one another on this issue, that we review our assumptions, that we take a candid look at our prejudices.
When I selected this title for tonight's lecture I was acutely aware that to many people the term striking a balance might suggest an evasive or overly-tactful approach to the issue of women's role and rights. I want to emphasise here at the start that the balance I would like to see struck is not an awkward coming-to-terms or a last minute compromise. Far from it. It must be a comprehensive re-assessment of the place and contribution of a woman in her society.
If the imbalances of the past came, as I believe they did, not simply from legislative injustice and economic inequality but from profound resistances and failures of perception, then it follows that to right that balance we must do more than review our legislation and re-state our economic structures. We must also fundamentally re-appraise our view of who and what is valuable in our society. We must look with fresh and unprejudiced eyes at the work of women, the views of women, their way of organising and their interpretation of social priorities.
To achieve this, we must, I believe, begin at the beginning and alter our way of thinking.
It will be one of my arguments tonight that at the moment equality between the sexes is seen to be a woman's issue. It is not. It is said to be a marginal issue. It is not. It perceived as a threat to the traditional structures of a society. And it is not. But because of these flawed interpretations the approach to achieving equality has been similarly flawed. It remains an ad hoc approach. We make legislative changes and appoint women in response to organised insistence and the pressure of public opinion. Therefore the accounting of progress is recorded less through deep and generous shifts in establishing thinking, and more by listing laws or doing a number count of the women in public positions. This ad hoc approach ensures that the issue of women's equality is starved of reflective thinking and careful planning. It is, of course, important that women participate more in all sectors of modern societies, but it is not sufficient. The elusive balance requires a more fundamental re-evaluation of the role, the worth and the contribution of all women to their society.
I propose tonight that if we are to strike a balance we will have to reflect. We will have to look closely and carefully at what is there now and how it can accommodate new energies and real creative forces which still remain outside the power structures of the established order. Such a balance needs to be struck. It will require careful thought and a listening posture. It will also require a clearminded analysis of how we absorb the creativity of women into our society and where we fail to do so. Only by listening and thoughtful analysis can we come up with the answers to these questions. I don't suggest to you here tonight that I have all the answers. But it has been one of the privileges of my first year as President of Ireland that I have been able to witness and to listen. I want to bring you the result of that tonight and to cast it in the form of an analysis of these energies and how we interpret them.
Let me begin with a backward glance. The last hundred years - I think we are all aware of this - have seen great shifts in the area of women's equality. During this period, in the West, in democratic societies, the rights of women came under scrutiny as never before. I think it is important that we don't grow complacent about this. We need to remember and celebrate - and never take for granted - the courage and persistence of those who brought about shifts of perception and legislation. They have changed our world. The past was a darker place for women than we like to remember. Yet we need to remember. Even the most cursory glance at it will show how far we have come and how necessary the journey was.
George Eliot once wrote "The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history". In Ireland, where we have a powerful history, we can provide a gloss to her statement. But whether you agree with her or not, I think we know that the recorded history of women is poignantly incomplete. My first backward glance, which suggests both the absence of the record, and therefore a corrective to that absence, is Virginia Woolf's comment in her essay "Women and Fiction".
"Very little is known about women", she writes. "The history of England is the history of the male line, not of the female. Of our fathers we know always some fact, some distinction. They were soldiers or they were sailors; they filled that office or they made that law. But of our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers, what remains? Nothing but a tradition. One was beautiful; one was red-haired. One was kissed by a queen. We know nothing of them except their names and the dates of their marriages and the number of children they bore."
Virginia Woolf's statement suggests both the strength and frustration of unrecorded history. How, in the second backward glance, I want to quote a remarkable Chinese woman called Qiu Jin who lived at the end of the last century. She was a poet and a journalist. She founded the Chinese Woman's Journal. In this extract from one of her essays she addresses the subject of education:
"My beloved sisters: though I am not a person of great scholarly attainments, I am someone who loves her country and her compatriots with all her heart. And isn't it true that we number four hundred million? But the two hundred million who are men have gradually begun to take part in the enlightenment of the modern age: their knowledge has increased, their outlook has broadened, their level of scholarship has risen and their reputation is advancing day by day. This is all due to the fact that they have access to books and periodicals. Isn't theirs an enviable position? But, alas, while these two hundred million men and boys have entered the enlightened new age, my two hundred million countrywomen are still mired in the darkness of the eighteen levels of their earthly prison, with no thought of advancing even a single stage. Their feet are bound small, their hair is dressed to a shine; they wear ornaments of buds and blossoms, carved and inlaid; on their bodies are silk and satin, rippling and shimmering. Their whole lives long they learn nothing but how to comply."
This is a bleak and persuasive challenge which Qiu Jin puts before her countrymen. Yet, in some sense, we recognise in it the tones of hope. It is, at least, forceful. Qui Jin is able to give shape to her criticism. But I am deliberately, in these examples, moving back in time and sketching the picture in darker tones as I go. So let me darken that picture again with a quotation from the book "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet A. Jacobs. Describing New Year's Day - which under the writ of slavery was auction day - she says:
"On one of those days I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction block. She knows that some of them would be taken from her but they took all. The children were sold to a slave trader and their mother was bought by a man in her own town. Before night her children were all far away. She begged the trader to tell her where he intended to take them: this he refused to do. How could he, when he knew he would sell them one by one, for the highest price. I met that mother in the street and her wild, haggard face lives today in my mind."
These three instances of challenge and suffering reach back through more than a hundred years of change and the necessity for change. It seems to me they have one thing in common. Though the levels of distress in them are certainly different - the quiet continuity which Virginia Woolf finds a deprivation Harriet Jacobs would have felt to be a luxury - yet they do share a vital element. They are all the accounts of articulate women. They are the claims of articulate women and made in the interests of those with no voice. The self-definition and eloquence in each of them reminds us, if we need to be reminded, that articulacy - often on behalf of and in place of the voiceless - is an essential part of women's equality. It is one of the ways in which the case has been pressed; it is one of the ways by which we ensure that it is not forgotten. It is part and parcel of the presentation I make to you tonight.
All this comes near the heart of my argument. We cannot strike a balance until we right the imbalances which already exist. In the area of women's equality this has meant, and still means, re-arranging the order of participation and the access of self-expression, so that men and women have an equal chance to make their contribution and find their creativity in a society which neither owns and both share. But how are we to achieve this?
I began by saying that I am neither a scientist nor sociologist. And so the view I put forward now is very much based on my own experience. It is the outcome, partly of my background in law and in my family, and very much of this last year when I have been a privileged witness and observer. It is also necessarily limited to the experience of Western democratic societies, although I have had valuable insights into the extraordinarily creative role of women in developing countries, which - notwithstanding that that role differs in priorities and emphasis - has reinforced my overall view. Having made that careful disclaimer, I want to venture the idea that some of the ways in which women articulate their sense of a society and of the priorities within it seem to me to be very creative, very worth listening to, and often entirely different from the structures which are already in place. During this past year, so many of the women I have met are obviously articulate. The way they organise is, strikingly, an outcome of it. But it is more than that. Their ability to devise structures, to order priorities, to assemble an agenda and construe a commitment is not only eloquent. To me it often looks distinctive and creative and therefore a style of problem-solving which is different from the ones we are used to in the public and visible power centres of our society.
And yet I am not sure their vision is reaching the places in our society where such power is established. I am not sure these eloquent, original statements are being heard. The reason for this may well be that they are different. The visible and established ways of doing things - the law courts, the councils, the academies, the board rooms - are often respectful of tradition and governed by precedent. The structures I am thinking of - and which I have seen women proposing over and over again this past year - are original and often radical. They are not so much dismissive of precedent as unable to afford the delay involved in considering it.
I have come to believe these structures are different because they originate in a different set of perceptions. If we wanted to be historical, we could argue that they come from that silence Virginia Woolf described. Or they may have been excluded from the education Qiu Jin longed for. They may even remember the injustices Harriet Jacobs records. But aren't they all the more valuable for that? Don't they have a great deal to offer the structures which are already in place? I am not suggesting that one replace the other. I am arguing that they may have something to learn from each other, and they cannot do so unless they listen to each other.
If we do not listen to each other then I think all of us run the risk, not just of arresting progress, but of losing some of the momentum which has been gained at such cost and with so much courage. Many of us here are familiar with the term "the glass ceiling". It's a poignant image of a transparent barrier to the achievement and advance of women - a barrier which is hard to see and harder to prove. If - and in so far as - there is a glass ceiling, then I think it stands to reason that everyone is restricting by it, not just women.
More than two hundred years ago Mary Woolstonecraft said:
"I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves". The gaining of that power has not been easy. Mary Lavin once spoke of herself as "greatly preoccupied by the mystery of creativity". It has taken time for gifted women to exercise and fulfil that preoccupation. And during that time, progress - although we might wish it to be tidy and symmetrical - has not gone in a straight line. In fact it thrives on irony and ambiguity.
I tried to outline just now the idea of structures in a society listening to one another, carrying on a sort of dialogue which might modify both. This may seem far fetched. In fact, if we look at the area of women's rights, this has been happening for a long time in a sort of hand to mouth, unconscious way. Let me take one example. The whole cause of equality for women has often had to go forward as a protest movement. At different times there have been rallies, pamphlets, meetings, test cases in the courts. Today we see this movement in perspective, and we acknowledge our debt to it. We know it was often carried forward by isolated women under difficult circumstances and with triumphant effect.
But if we look closer for a moment we can see that the means of that advance - the printing press, the vote, the right to organise, the test case - these are all methods and modes of protest and progress devised by men of conscience, set up within oppressive power structures and often won at great cost. The plain truth is that, in the definition of women's rights, the freedoms gained by men have played an important part. So here we have one structure speaking to another - sort of dialogue which is both redemptive and effective. Is it utopian to argue that what has happened in an improvisational way - in the rush and instinct of protest - could continue in a rational and fruitful way in our day-to-day lives?
And yet, despite the need for such a dialogue, it is still incomplete. Many of us are aware that the creative energies of women are still very imperfectly absorbed into modern societies. Such energies are still thought of as appropriate to women's concerns - which of course they are. But they are less often thought of as crucial to the whole society. And yet they are.
If we don't have the answers to this anomaly then the next best thing is to pose the questions. We have - in women, in their organisational abilities, in their creative approach - a major resource. It is not being fully used. And yet we know that there have been extensive changes and real progress. So in time of legislative reform and visible advance it seems both inconsistent and disappointing to be talking about a fracture between one structure and another, a lack of communication between one group and another. But as I said at the start, striking a balance requires generosity and fresh perspectives rather than logic or programmatic thinking.
We have to accept that resistances and missed opportunities frequently do not happen at visible levels. Every society maintains an invisible life where attitudes and assumptions are formed. Every society is hostage to this unseen place, where fear conquers reason and old attitudes remain entrenched. It is here that the chance phrases and small asides are made which say so little and reveal so much. If we are to go forward we need to look at attitudes and the language which expresses attitude. And all of this can be locked into very small details. I think we are aware that very often if something - whether a book or a social issue or an occasion - is said to be for women, there is often an inference, even today, that it is only for women. And from there it is a short step to suggesting that it is merely for women. If we are to strike a balance, if we are to re-adjust participation and enrich our society with dialogue, we have to revise this way of thinking. We cannot be legislated into new attitudes or mandated into them. We have to arrive at them by the very processes for the want of which attitudes harden and prejudices go unchallenged. In other words, by perception and consensus.
All of this has been very much at the front of my mind in the past year. I have witnessed these energies for myself. I have many examples. I could make a composite for you of the hundreds of welcomes I have received, the striking excellence of the committees of management, the co-operatives, the facilitators and support groups which I have been privileged to observe. I have seen these energies in community and information centres, counselling, educational and care groups, creative workshops and artists' collectives. I don't want to make a false or over-inclusive assessment of different achievements. But it is true that many of these occasions and many of these projects seem to me to have been put together with the distinctive organisational skills I have mentioned. I could talk about very small details which remain in my mind. After all, I was trained in the law, one of the oldest of the organisational sciences. It is based on precedent, and one spokesperson interprets the issues on behalf of many. I think that is a way in which many of the established organs of our society work. From that background, it was fascinating for me to observe - even in a preliminary and unscientific way - a different style of doing things. Often everyone in the group spoke to me. Everyone was encouraged to have their say. There was an alternative running order. I am not saying this sort of detail represents a hard and fast difference between women's groups or community gatherings and the rest of society. But I do suggest that there are fresh, improvisational responses in these groups to the contemporary challenges of our society.
*Caoinfhulaingt an focal Gaeilge atá ar "tolerance". Glactar leis gur bua í seo atá ag mná agus gur bua í atá riachtanach ag tógáil clainne.
Ach tá caoinfhulaingt chomh riachtanach céanna ag tógáil pobail áitiúla agus comhphobail idirnáisiúnta. Níor tugadh an bua seo agus buanna éagsúla eile do mhná chun iad a choinneáil sa teach. Is cailliúint mór í don phobal áitiúil, don stáit agus don chomhphobal domhanda nach bhfuil aitheanthas cuí a thabhairt do chomh-pháirtíocht mná sa saol poiblí.
Cuireann sé iontas mór, agus áthas mór orm freisin, an fás atá tagaithe ar ghluaiseacht na mBan in Éireann agus an méid grúpaí atá ann - rud atá soiléir dom agus mé ag taisteal ar fuaid na tíre. Tá súil agam gur féidir liom mar Uachtarán spreagagh a thabhairt do na grúpaí seo go léir, ach ba mhaith liom a rá go bhfuil sibhse féin ag tabhairt spreagadh domsa, agus go bhfuil súil agam go mbeidh muid ag dul ar aghaidh agus ag forbairt lena chéile. Gura fada buan sibh go léir ins an dea-obair atá ar siúl agaibh.
*"Caoinfhulaingt" is the Irish word for tolerance. It is generally accepted that tolerance is a quality that women possess in child rearing.
But tolerance is equally necessary in building up local communities and the international grouping of communities. Women don't possess this quality so as to be kept at home. The fact that due recognition is not always given to women's participation in public life results in a huge loss to the local community, to the state and to the international community.
I am delighted to be able to witness at first hand as I travel around the country the enormous increase in women's groups and to all such groups, but I would like to say that your own activities are a tremendous inspiration to me in office and I hope that we can go on and develop together. Long may you continue this important work.
But of the large number of women's groups I have met there are two occasions I particularly want to mention because they symbolise the energies I have witnessed. Early last summer I was invited to the village of Headford near Galway to launch a network of women's groups along the Western seaboard. It was a joyous and celebratory occasion which marked the linking of 43 such groups stretching from Achill to Bohola, Clifden to Letterfrack, Tuam to Galway. It included old and young, traditional and feminist. I can still picture the faces in that packed hall and the shared commitment to valuing what they were doing.
Earlier this month I went to Belfast. In the morning I met with groups of women - some of whom I had met before - and I was their guest. They spoke to me about the concerns of their local areas, the common problems and interests, the projects which are going forward, their deep commitment to family and community. They came from all parts of Belfast, from Derry and from right across rural Northern Ireland. I was fascinated and moved by their conversation, their energy, their story-telling, their humour and their warmth. And one thing struck me with great force. In such groups, it seems to me, individuality is safe. There is a great relish for the distinctive person, the difference of method, the divergence of opinion. A profound sense of the richness of diversity, and its importance, came from their discussions and their respect for each other. Their presence and courage are an enormous resource to their society. I may say, it came as no surprise to me to learn that many of these groups, both in the West and North of this island, had obtained valuable support from the Allen Lane Foundation.
There are real rewards in looking afresh at the way we balance the contribution of women and the structures which are already in place. Where women have gone from individual groupings to collective effort I think it has been strikingly for the good. A practical illustration is the whole area of voluntary effort. Women have shaped the voluntary effort worldwide. Their contribution has a fresh, problem-solving look to it. It by-passes bureaucracies and it fills in the crevices between the rhetoric of help and the reality of providing it. Any study of the voluntary sector in modern society shows the same spirit at work. Just as women have infused the voluntary sector, so they can infuse and enrich the established structures of society.
In the past year I have used one of Yeat's phrases so often that if his estate were not out of copyright I might be accused of having infringed it! It's that beautiful remark he makes when he is talking of building a national theatre. He speaks of "a community bound together by imaginative possessions". In Ireland we know how strong that bond can be. In a dark moment, in an otherwise luminous text, Peig Sayers writes:
"Those whom I had known in my youth . . . they all fell, they were all cleared out of the world. Those who had been there before them had met the same fate. God help us, where are their works today? Others are in their places without the least remembrance of them".
Her words remind us of the task of remembrance and the need to count and conserve our imaginative possessions. And in this community they are many. We have a powerful culture, a literature which celebrates it, a balance between tradition and the contemporary which many nations would give a great deal to have.
You may have noticed, almost as a sub-text in what I have been saying tonight, that I have repeatedly brought the names of women novelists into my argument. The woman novelist proceeds, by imagination and daring, to do something which I propose we also need to do. She proceeds creatively to uncover and reveal what I think we now need to consider and revise. In other words, she gets at the invisible life in a society. As Kate O'Brien said of Fanny Burney: "She breaks new ground".
If we are to conserve our possessions, if we are to use our resources, we need to give some time and thought to an imaginative re-structuring. I believe we need an imaginative re-assessment of our attitudes and needs as a community so that we can bring to the centre those energies which are still just at the margin. Once and for all we need to commit ourselves to the concept that women's rights are not factional or sectional privileges, bestowed on the few at the whim of the few. They are human rights.
In a society in which the rights and potential of women are constrained no man can be truly free. He may have power but he will not have freedom. Above all, if we continue to interpret the rights of women as the rights of women only then we will miss the opportunity to draw into our society those powerful, enriching energies which it so needs.
And it is for nurturing those energies that I want to finish tonight by drawing many of you here in this room, who have benefited from their wisdom and generosity, into the thanks I offer the Allen Lane Foundation for sustaining those energies.
At my inauguration as President 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 had found a vision'."
The Allen Lane Foundation is to be commended for having valued that vision and for consistently supporting its expression.