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VISIONS OF LEADERSHIP OPENING ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON TO THE GLOBAL FORUM OF WOMEN

DUBLIN, 9 JULY 1992

I am very aware today that this is not just a conference about leadership.  It is also - even if nothing were to be said openly about it here - a forum about perceptions of leadership.  In fact I know well that perceptions of leadership are one of the concerns of this gathering.  But even if this were not the case, just the fact of you being here today - with all the excellence you bring from your various fields - guarantees its presence as a theme.  None of us here today can be unaware that we live in a time of enormous change, advance and challenge for women. one of the real adventures of this time is that women - when they undertake a commitment or a job - are not just getting that job done or honouring that commitment.  They are also changing the perceptions of the way in which things are done.  They are altering time-honoured and entrenched ideas.  And, as far as I am concerned they are doing so for the good.

 

And so I welcome you today to what are really two different contexts.  The first is the context of this forum.  I know it will be exciting and worthwhile.  I am particularly sorry not to hear some of the exchanges and papers which I know will add so much to it.  But there is another context: one which is less visible, and I welcome you to that also.  It is the context of a change which cannot be measured.  It is the frame in which a great new advance is happening.  There is no exact way of quantifying it; there is no scientific data to put forward about it.  What is happening is not accurately recorded and has never entirely been admitted.  The nearest we get to a record is precisely a forum such as this which notes and preserves the change.  Yet I know - as do many of you that as women lead, they are changing leadership; as they organise, they are changing organisation.  As they re-state the skills of administration, of law, of the arts and the academy, women are handing them on in a fresh and radicalised form.  I know that many of you in this room are doing just that.  And so I welcome you to a context which you yourselves are creating and which you will add to in Ireland because of your discussions.

 

The distinguished American academic Carolyn Heilbrun wrote a book called Writing a Woman's Life.  She has this striking quotation in it:

 

"Let any woman imagine for a moment a biography of herself based upon those records she has left, those memories fresh in the minds of surviving friends, those letters that chanced to be kept, those impressions made, perhaps on the biographer who was casually met in the subject's later years.  What secrets, what virtues, what passions, what discipline, what quarrels would, on the subject's death, be lost forever?  How much would have vanished or been distorted or changed, even in our memories?  We tell ourselves stories of our past, make fictions or stories of it, and these narrations become the past, the only part of our lives that is not submerged." (p.51)

 

In a certain way, we are all writing the story of a woman's life in this generation.  I think we know it.  We are conscious that it is a different story: more challenging, more articulate and more available to future generations.  It will not, I believe, be such a heartbreaking story as the ones we inherited from the past: full of silences and incomplete in terms of aspirations and achievement.

 

To start with, there have been enormous privileges and advances in this generation from the ones just before it.  We are the beneficiaries of a strong woman's movement.  We have seen equality laws passed and new opportunities created.  When I worked as a lawyer I took some of those very cases in the areas of equal opportunities, equal status and participation in society.  So I had the privilege of seeing, at first-hand, a vital and necessary change as it was formalised into law and turned from an issue of protest into precedent; almost, it seemed, overnight.  And law has had a significant part to play in all this.  During those years, Emerson's statement was often in my mind: "The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand".  It was part of the work of my generation to turn that rope into something that would do good service.  Although nobody would say that the process is complete yet, there have been real and tangible advances.  I think we can allow ourselves to hope now that no woman of gifts and vision and determination in the Western world need sit down as Emily Dickinson once did and write the poignant lines: "This is my letter to a world/That never wrote to me".  I think there are increased opportunities at every level.  There are real vistas opening out in front of us.  We can see out and we can go out, and with every day, and every new report of a woman achieving a new distinction and making good use of it, we expand the vision and the horizon.

 

I feel particularly close to these questions and issues because since taking office some eighteen months ago I have witnessed the way in which such changes are happening.  Which is not always the way we might expect.  I have been in situations and circumstances where women played a vital role in changing both an event and the perception of it.  And I, in turn, changed my view of what leadership was, and could be, in observing the living example rather than the theoretical concept.

 

I suppose the most vivid example of it would be the women of various groups in Northern Ireland whom I visited in Belfast and who came to see me in my official residence, Áras an Uachtaráin.  They live in times of stress.  They come from different traditions.  But what I was most aware of was neither of these two features of their world.  I was aware of something they had in common rather than what divided them from each other: I took away from every meeting with them a wonderful sense of their deep commitment to their families and their community.  I could see how they sustained those families and that community with their story-telling, their vision, their humour, their sense of purpose.  And while they had a common purpose, I could also observe that in their coming together individuality was guaranteed.    In fact, they had an enormous relish for the distinctive person, the difference of method and the divergence of opinion.

 

I mention this because it is a particularly vivid example to me of the way in which women are changing the circumstances they find themselves in.  To go back to the idea of writing a woman's life, I think we can see a fascinating detail about this generation of women.  Certainly there are individuals who achieve eminence and visibility in terms of leadership.  They are visible and exemplary; they encourage and illuminate the context they enter.  And I do think you can fairly argue that they are indeed re-writing and re-stating the idea of a woman's life.

 

But there is another dimension to women's leadership in this generation.  It seems to me particularly apposite to the title of this forum which is Visions of Leadership.  I think women are changing the old concept of leadership in more than one obvious way.  Through seeing and participating in so many varied occasions over the past year and a half I have become increasingly aware that it is not just individuals who give leadership among women.  It is also communities.  It is gatherings.  It is all those subtle, interactive networks of women.  I spoke about the group of Belfast women who so impressed me in this regard.  I could give many, many other examples.  I have seen women organising in many different kinds of environment, under very different stresses.  I have seen their involvement in health and sports, in the arts and education.  In all these areas their community sense is both creative and contributory.  I think it is more than that.  Through their community sense women may well be establishing a new kind of leadership: one that does away with the traditional relationship between the individual and the group.  One that is enabling and empowering of the individual and the group.  They are revising the old division, put in place by a more traditional society, where the successful individual was sharply differentiated from, and considered superior to, a community context.  This may have been a source of effectiveness.  It could also be - we have all seen examples of this - an opportunity for arrogance and breakdown in communication between collective ideals and individual ambition.  I have seen this done differently by women in challenging situations.  When women lead, when they contribute and articulate their purposes in a society, it seems to me increasingly that the individual woman and the community of women work together in a fresh and radical way.  This method of dialogue and co-operation blurs the old distinctions and heals the old divisions.

 

I am especially aware of all this in the context of the developing countries.  I count myself very lucky to have had opportunities as President to meet and talk with women from such countries.  I have in mind those women from the South whom I met in the context of networks such as DAWN, standing for Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, and WIDE, Women in Development, Europe.  I am also aware that these networks have influenced the Council for the Status of women and Banulacht here in Ireland, to encourage and support local community groups who are ready to go beyond their own self development and broaden into issue awareness on a regional and global scale.  Those contacts confirmed my sense of the increasing importance of networking between networks of women.  But they also brought home to me how the role of women in developing countries - combining community and individual leadership in a continuum of generous and imaginative acts fosters insight about how to manage the difficult and sometimes intractable problems of their countries.

 

If I had to nominate the single most distinctive, creative and optimistic aspect of women in leadership, it would be this one.  It is the one which seems to me to be least likely to reconfigure all the old weaknesses and inconsistencies of leadership in the past.  It seems to me appropriate and persuasive that women would not be content with just readdressing the idea of traditional leadership.  The glory and struggle and self-deception of individual leadership is an important part of our Western heritage.  But it is also a flawed part.  Too often traditional leadership took very little account of that slow, unglamorous but enabling process I have just spoken about: where the consultative interaction between individual and community went ahead - to the singular glory of neither but to the infinite benefit of both.

 

In a lecture I gave for the Allen Lane Foundation earlier this year I spoke of how impressed I was with the skills of organisation which women bring to their purposes.  It seems to me, as I said then, that problem-solving by women can often be fresh and radical and unexpected when they are in situations that require it.  In all these situations it is that dialogue I just spoke about between the individual woman and the community of women which is so empowering and effective.  It can show itself in very particular ways: ways that would be easy to miss.  Often when I met a group or entered a discussion it was as small a detail as that everyone in the group spoke to me, and not just one individual. just something as tiny as that, hinted to me that women were setting a new agenda for leadership and achievement.  An agenda that was more concerned with participation than elite stances; that had more of a community running order behind it than an individual project.  When I think of the new vision of leadership which women propose I do think - of course - of individual women in the arts and sciences and politics who have made a difference.  But perhaps most of all I think of this quiet, radical, continuing dialogue between the individual woman and the collective woman - each able to interchange roles without rancour or difficulty.  I have felt privileged to see that enabling dialogue in action.  And I feel it is an index of the deepest and most creative initiatives being taken today in any forum of action independent of gender or nationality.  But I also want to sound a warning note about it.  It would be very easy for any one of us as women, placed in positions of responsibility, to ignore this dialogue in favour of the older methods of traditional leadership: where individual action is as accepted as solitary reward.  I think it is one of the most creative duties of leadership to take the other approach: to foster that dialogue between community and individual which is so much a part of the visionary leadership of women in a new age.

 

It seems to me exciting and appropriate that as women are adding to the product of leadership, they are also changing the process.  It will be one of the truest gifts we can give to coming generations: a more open, flexible and compassionate style of administration and a new relation between the individual leader and the community leadership.  I know many of these ideas will be canvassed during this forum and I wish you well with them.

 

Those of you who have come from outside Ireland will no doubt have heard the phrase Mná na hÉireann, Women of Ireland.  I now greet you as Mná an Domhain:

 

Tá mná na hÉireann molta agam

- Sean-scéal sin eadrainn tá.

Anois, a mhná an domhain mhóir

Fearaim rómhaibh fáilte is grá.