John Lennon said "woman is the nigger of the world", and it has, to my mind, taken far too long for her to become
emancipated; there are some who would say she still has yet to be truly liberated or empowered. It isn't a shock to find
that even in Ireland, where the Gaelic order's form of egalitarianism between the sexes few world cultures have ever
seen, the paternalistic politics would preclude this archaic form of holistic interactively or power-sharing. For
wherever men gather together to debate the issues of the day, women are sublimated to the point of silence. Where
did this wholesale infringement of women's role in the societal governance begin, and why has it been perpetrated
even in our modern culture? It is important to regard the chains of biology as the great oppressor, for this is the
battlefield where the wars of sexual politics are waged.
We learned in Condren's Serpent and the Goddess that this consolidation of male power became obsessive
shortly after the introduction of Christianity into the Roman empire; a fateful interaction begun between the church
and state, one which would echo down through the centuries. The Catholic Church, being the bastard child of this
union betwixt temporal and spiritual power, began an intensive campaign to annihilate, or co-opt for their own uses,
every vestige of feminine power. The indigenous form of Irish Christianity suggests that the original message wasn't
about misogyny and the marginalization of the feminine, or at least this wasn't how the Irish characterized it. None
the less the activity of the body politic, like the body spiritus requires an exterior threat as well as an interior
scapegoat, and woman has been typecast in this role for millennia. For nothing strikes more fear in men of power,
than a woman confident in her own power attacking the injustices of his system of governance while appealing to the
emotive rationality of life, love and liberty. If our monogamous and territorial nature causes our innate need to
conquer and kill (inevitably leading to the destruction of our planetary environment), aren't the playful sexual
relations as displayed in the Tain or the marital guarantees in the Brehon laws, a much healthier depiction of a
socio-politically just society?
In the aftermath of the partition of Ireland, Margaret Ward suggests, "... the vital support of northern women,
particularly those in the trade unions, was lost to their southern sisters." Is this because the North was more
industrialized as a rule than the South, barring perhaps Dublin proper? The influence of this early Socialism on the
course of Irish Republicanism cannot be overlooked. It is this awareness of economic self-sufficiency on the heels of
the 'Great Hunger' which bears a greater scrutiny. The one male figure who stands out in Unmanageable
Revolutionaries as unattached to the paternalist school of thought is James Connolly, and that is largely due to
his Socialist leanings. Like so many of the revolutions of the time, especially those sparked by Socialist rhetoric, in
the end the corrosive persuasion of power corrupted their best intentions. This insured the few men at the top would
keep the mass of women in a marginalized space; granting emancipation with one hand and closing the gates to
power, especially economic, with the other.
"All my heroes (sic) are girrls" sings PJ Harvey in 'Stella Marie', and in Margaret Ward's book she would find
several. Four stand out as brutally dedicated to the cause of women's suffrage, Anna Parnell, Maud Gonne, Countess
Markievicz and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. Their greatest failing was in accepting that suffrage was a secondary
consideration to the Republican movement. Time and time again when the males within the movement where
indisposed due to incarceration or the threat of the same these women continued the war to throw off the chains of
colonial oppression. What a drastic difference between the ancient and the modem, when the country was fighting
for it's freedom, the women of Cumann na mBan had to plead to be taught how to use the weapons their
fundraising had acquired. Whilst CuChulainn goes to learn martial arts from two women renowned for the training
of champions; but that was in the North, where the aforementioned women were trained in military maneuvers. Yet
again and am when the men came back on the scene, the women were pushed from the spotlight back to the
periphery of supportive roles, particularly fundraising. The most common argument for the disempowerment of
women in the political arena was their importance to the family, in other words their biology. The fascists of Nazi
Germany thought as the religious right of today think, a woman's body is a place fit for the fallacious legislation of
men, lest they forget their subservient bondage to the seminal sex. De Valera and Hitler were just reflecting the
over two thousand years of mealy mouthed homage to Jaweh and his little experiment at clay molding and child
rearing, when they bought into this regressive lie.
When the right wing in this country goes a-courting women for their vote, and a man can't even get his name on th
e ballot in Ireland for the presidency, we can begin to see the stark and imposing edifice of paternal partition
crumbling like the wall in Germany. For six thousand years, since the sky-god worshipping Aryan steppe warriors
swept down from the far North and ground the agrarian earth-goddess worshippers under their steed's iron shod
heel we have been at the mercy of these testosterone-laden apes. The boundary between millennia tends to be a
tremendously fertile place for the articulation of new ideals with which to enter into the new and unknown time.
All of these suffragettes would find this post-modem edge as a great opportunity to finally address the inequalities
of sexual and socioeconomic politics. We have but to hold up their shining example of courage, strength and honesty,
to show those in the darkness of a sexist and bigoted existence the light.
Mom is gonna fix it all soon
Mom is coming back around
To put back the way it ought to be
-Tool