Female voyage explores the heart of issues

Female voyage explores  the heart of issues


Áine Ryan

UNRAVELLING the mythic journey of women through the ages, through socio-economic and cultural repression, through personal liberation and communal revolution, song and dance, laughter and tears, story-telling and poetry is the hallmark of Turas na mBan. The third annual gathering, held in Westport over the weekend, provided a challenging forum during which a prism was put on the contemporary ramifications of gay marriage, society’s view of women’s role in the home, as well as a lecture by Professor Bo Almqvist of UCD on ‘Peig Sayers: A Reassessment’; a presentation on ‘Women in Song’ by Seán Garvey, as well as a number of other talks on the myths of matriarchy and medieval spirituality.
Extolling the ‘natural madness’ of courting in Pontoon’s Ballroom of Romance as a young Mayo woman, Marie-Louise O’Donnell opened the gathering with an odyssey through ‘the whole ritual of life’s theatre’ that was the sepia-tinged world of her grandmother and aunts. Denise Horan, the Editor of The Mayo News, chaired a discussion that measured the progressive path of social change from the fiction created by Edna O’Brien to a world that now accepts the insularity and narrow-mindedness of the sacking of teacher Eileen Flynn in 1982.  

Love and Social Change
THE GOVERNMENT’S Civil Partnership Bill was compared to past segregationist policies in South Africa by academic and activist Dr Ann Louise Gilligan. Addressing the conference on the subject of Love and Social Change, Dr Gilligan observed that institutions creating separation and segregation never worked. She said that civil partnership rights were not marriage rights and therefore diminished the equality of treatment of gays and lesbians in Irish society.
“One of our greatest challenges – a core challenge – in Ireland today is to accept and respect diversity. In order to have real equality, not only do we have to accept our sameness, equally importantly we must accept our differences,” she said.
Her partner, Dr Katharine Zappone, expanded on the basic quest for freedom which was at the heart of the couple’s love story and their campaign for constitutional change.
“This is about the whole notion of having the right to marry the person we choose to love,” said Dr Zappone.
She cited their marriage in British Columbia in September 2001 as ‘a society recognising their normality’ and thus affording them fundamental equality.
Dr Zappone also said that Ireland was on the cusp of ‘a new confident stance on the separation of Church and State’. She added that ‘there was a growing lack of tolerance for intolerance’.
Dr Gilligan and Dr Zappone are fighting a legal battle to have their Canadian marriage recognised in the Republic.

Have women got it right?
Asking ‘Have women got it right?‘, journalist, Victoria White, challenged Eurostat statistics that define women who work in the home as ‘economically inactive’.
“The women at home rearing children, caring for the elderly, cooking, cleaning, and working for and in their communities are seen as having no economic role,” said Ms White.
“In fact their economic contribution is massive. The economist Gabriel Kiely has quantified the contribution of Irish homemakers as being worth €23.5 to the national economy,” she continued.
Victoria White also argued that with the onset of recession, it was timely to redefine the real value of parenting.
“We are at the end of a whole phase of capitalism, and now is the time for valuing things like time and love. To value parenting at home is to value in the manner of a new era, which demands we look at societal capital and environmental capital, not just Das Capital [by Karl Marx],” said Ms White.
She concluded that many women did not want the time-poor, economically-driven lifestyle of early second millennium free market capitalism.
“Women do not have what they want, but I do not believe they want what men have. I don’t believe many men want it either,” she said.
* ‘Turas na mBan – Celebrating the Journey of Women’ is organised by community development group Meitheal Mhaigheo which was established in 1991.