This paper turned out very differently than I expected, more personal, and referencing a great deal of background material that was not in my proposal. My arguments (and my internal processes) seem to be both circular and linear, sequentially and simultaneously. In the end, I always "go back home", to the intellectual, yet essentially magical, attempt to create new thought-forms (or "memes" 1) and the conscious maintenance of existing forms I feel I can support. In the end, in my view, everything that involves humans is both political and philosophical, and we have a choice, always, how we will choose to experience and act upon consensual reality. That choice is, for me, a much more profound political action than any ballot I have ever cast or any demonstration I have ever joined in on. This paper thus represents a beginning, a first attempt to integrate the effect of ‘The Irish Mind’ (as presented during the fall of 1998 by Dr. Ruth O’Hara at New College of California) into my own "habits of mind".

It’s been more than twenty-five years now since I began to ask myself "what’s wrong with Irish (American) men?" The question arose after I ended my first serious long-term relationship, with a prototypical working class Irish-American man who had come to remind me all too definitely of my own relatives. It was a difficult question to answer, and I rather desperately sought out historical and cultural explanations.

In those days, a typical response to feminist (or indeed any woman’s) complaints about misbehavior or any sort of misogyny from male members of historically oppressed groups (most often African-Americans or Latinos, at the time) was in essence the denial of any personal responsibility for oppression of women (due to these male’s membership in a group without power in "the white power structure"). The idea, of course, as we still hear it to this day, was that women of these ethnicities (or oppressed classes) must understand, forgive and overlook their men’s flexions of damaged self-esteem and pride, put their own concerns as women on the back burner until political and social equality for their men was attained, and further, accept almost equal fault with the "colonial (or upper class) oppressor" for the "inevitable" negative behaviors like domestic abuse, criminal activity or unfairness towards women.

As I began to consider how this whole discourse applied to my father, my uncle, my brothers, my ex-partner, and Irish-American men in general, I experienced considerable despair. After a few months in the library, I had concluded that one must go back at least a thousand years to find a time when Ireland was free, and its men psychologically able to act reasonably towards women. (Here the historical fantasies of equal status for women in early Gaelic Ireland came into play…). I could not manage to accept that the men of 20th century Ireland were simultaneously brave, strong, effective freedom fighters, and helpless victims of oppression. At least not in relation to women.

Nowhere within the discourse of the time 2 could I find a space for me to explore these issues. I felt no connection with the modern images of Ireland and Irish-Americans I could find - Saint Patrick’s Day parades, drunkenness, leprechauns and an inexplicable inability to move beyond a thousand years of victimization. I had found no acceptable alternative but to revert, act as if I were only that new creation, an American, and deal with the myth of the melting pot as best I could.

So I did that. I married a secular Jewish man, participated in his family culture of liberal and Jewish politics, and left aside Irish and Irish American culture entirely. About 15 years ago, in the unpleasant aftermath of our divorce, I began attending Irish céili dancing lessons regularly, and was overcome with the sense of an empty space where my Irishness (whatever that was) could exist. As I had long since become unwilling to participate in any sort of Catholic or even Christian identity, and the news from Ireland was the same male-centered, violent political stalemate, I held myself apart,3 continuing to dance, and eventually involved myself in "Celtic Reconstructionist Paganism"4 as a means of contextualizing ancient Ireland , at least. Not until this year did I decide, not entirely consciously, to throw myself into modern Irish Studies, rather than Celtic Studies. My problem’s still with me. Not in every instance, but typically, historical or cultural discussion of Ireland after 1169 CE to the present moment can devolve very quickly into delineation of the struggle over the actual and symbolic ownership of Ireland between men, be they Gaelic/Celtic, Hiberno-Danish, Norman or English.

Any criticism of the status of women during this period becomes the fault of whoever is opposing whomever you’re talking to.5 This struggle as an inevitable symbolic continuation of the process that began, perhaps, during the rise of Celtic patriarchal hegemony circa 500BCE is very much about the necessary role of women as symbols of the land, and the need to keep actual living women from either changing those symbols, or ever wresting control of them back for themselves.

In light of my youthful dilemma over the contradictions of Irish history as I encountered it, it has been illuminating to uncover the underpinnings of the myth of a Golden Age for women in the early medieval period.6 I am equally wary, however, of current revisionism which asserts (however technically correctly), that all the extant legal evidence 7 describes oppressed second-class, existence for early Irish women, without considering the limitations of not only the source material, but modern understanding of it.

There is a danger, here, of accepting uncritically an evolutionary theory of historical progress, which can be shown to derive directly from the very earliest revisionists we have evidence for - the Christian monastics of the 6th and 7th centuries.8

As Frances Devlin Glass has so succinctly pointed out:

"it (Fergus Kelly’s Guide to Early Irish Law) is flawed by it’s brotherly sidestepping of feminist agendas and it’s repetition of a view of history and patriarchy which more recent feminist scholarship suggests might be due for the application of a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion. It is, I suggest, time for a new edition of relevant parts of the Senchas Már and Cáin Lánamna (the "law of couples") by a team which should include a feminist language scholar, jurist, and historian." 9

If we accept Eavan Boland’s view 10 - an orthodox, "merely ornamental" poetic fusion of national-romantic images of women, we are led to conclude that these symbols of sovereignty, crucial for full citizenship 11 in Ireland as nowhere else in modern Europe, are held firmly outside the grasp of actual women in modern Ireland. We might very well then have hold of a continuous thread, a still active morphic field, stretching back into the Neolithic. Through historical and geographical accident, this transition from Neolithic to Iron Age society happened relatively recently (from a European historical perspective) in Ireland, and held sway longer.

We are so provided unusual access. The bare bones of this sublimation of the living women of Ireland into mere symbols show more distinctly in Ireland than elsewhere. A rational and almost inevitable political context – the struggle as we have it today - can then be theorized.

Each step along a chain of analysis leading to the present, if we follow this framework, can be supported, or at least easily examined, by viewing traditional historical sources through this lens. Such analysis does require accepting a different approach to cultural evolution and history – a "new paradigm", as the saying goes.

‘However, there is one aspect on which this approach is very different. My work proceeds from the premise that if we look at our cultural history from a perspective that takes into account the whole of humanity (both women and men) and the whole of our history (including our prehistory), certain patterns or systems configurations that cannot be seen using the traditional male-centered approach become visible. Specifically, my work verifies something that most of these scholars still ignore. This is that the status of women and the "feminine" in a social system not only shapes our personal life options as women and men; it also profoundly affects the totality of a society’s organization. Every institution is influenced by the status of women - from the family and religion, to education and economics - as well as by whether stereotypically feminine values, such as nonviolence and nurturance, are able to attain political and economic priority. In this connection, I want to emphasize that when I say "stereotypically," I mean just that. Men can also be non-violent and nurturing. As many feminist scholars have pointed out , what is considered feminine or masculine is primarily a cultural rather than a biological matter.’

Eisler’s model is one very detailed exploration of an overall approach which allows us to escape from what Irish-American philosopher Mary Daly of Boston College calls the "foreground" of modern discourse, and to focus upon the "background" of human social experience. All of a sudden, the very bones of history are thrown into brilliant relief. Thus a different kind of discussion (naturally including women equally as social actors) inevitably begins to take place. Using these tools, as radically illuminating as x-rays of the human body, moves us from a circularly discursive stalemate towards the possibility of change. At the level of premise it no longer matters very much whether the rise of Indo-European patriarchy was the result of alien intervention , habitat shift from climatic change, disease-mediated mass male social psychosis, or even the advent of literacy.

At the level of modern premise, also, it now becomes possible to bring the perpetual "problem of women" out of the back closet of history and into productive social discourse. For me personally this seems to meet the criteria for a necessary "third order change" (The double bind theory of schizophrenia ). We can finally progress beyond the question "What’s wrong with Men?" and its cognate, "What’s wrong with Irish men?" that have been a baffling, inexplicable, irrational subtext in my life since infancy, and begin to make some sense of it all.

When my father (William J. Bergin,1915-1992), said to me defensively in 1989 "You were never a child. You were always in control of things" – what could he possibly have meant, and in what way is that connected to my topic? Is it possible that this is a personal manifestation of an Irish male worldview that clings tenaciously to a fearfully respectful view of Woman as symbol and individual woman as dangerous Other?

So by the time all these ideas began to coalesce, I had long since grown weary of arguing in circles, and could not see any positive result or potential of continuing to run through a maze offering only

A: radical feminist separatism (a narrowly constructed woman’s identity artificially isolated from men) or
B: liberal feminism ("gaining acceptance as one of the boys") or
C: socialist - feminism (with its dogmatic links to modernist political economy).

I must confess that the Mediterranean fixation of most writers led me to undervalue pre-history, archeo-mythology and literary symbolic themes as a basis for political analysis and strategy during the long years I was focused primarily on US social and political issues. It was only when I returned my attention to Irish history and the genealogy of my own family that I took a more thorough and accepting look at what was happening in this branch of feminist thought.

This developing hermeneutics of archeo -mythological symbolic analysis neatly circumnavigates arguments about who’s to blame for Ireland’s past and current social woes – is it the Church? Is it the Normans? Is it the English, or Cromwell, or Elizabeth I or Hugh O’Neill?

Is it men altogether or only some men we need to either castigate or assassinate? It allows us a way to develop new futures, manipulating the symbols we live amongst, creating them anew . This, I believe, is the power Eavan Boland’s expresses in her work. She is neither unique, nor alone, though clearly gifted with imbas. Women of Ireland are writing from a context expressed in every culture, as they set to work with the tools they have to put things right.

Suddenly the point of laboring over language and habits becomes visible. Finally, a good reason to care about poetry and literature beyond the immediate sensory gratification of a well-drawn image, and the value of literary deconstruction reveal themselves. What I’m talking about here is a productive meeting of feminist post-structuralism and archeomythological humanism as applied to Ireland, resting firmly upon the analytical base of transformational generative grammar.

Language and symbols are by their nature generated between and for humans. I make a distinction here between what could be called facts or "deep structure" and discourses or "surface structure".

Thus, we are constrained to reconsider essentialism, (as applied to women and to Irish history ), to look at the flow of Irish history as a symbolic continuity, a "morphic field" whose characteristics have adapted over time with the influx of literacy, Christianity, the Roman Church, Vikings, Normans, the various categories of English, and in fact the whole of European history.

So, what, if anything, differentiates Ireland from the rest of Europe in this regard, and how do I connect this to the early Irish law tracts and the status of medieval women? So far as I am aware, there is no book yet published which pulls post-Norman Irish women from the shadows as a group, the way Land of Women does for the early medieval period. There are essays, and collections of essays , but they all seem to treat of singular women, in great detail, to be sure, but still singular, finding their way through the landscape by force of will and sheer personal power. I was much struck by a line from Brendan Kennelly’s introduction to Ireland’s Women -

"The history, or herstory, of Irish women is rather like that of the Irish language - much talked about but little heard."

The arrival of the Normans, to the extent that they combined conquerance with social assimilation, accepted the ancient social compromise of Woman as giver of Sovereignty . Over time, Norman lords became Anglo-Irish, especially by marrying Irish women, and by using those marriage alliances to extend and solidify their territorial claims, adopting the Irish language and participating in the raid-and-litigation social structures of their neighbors. Their arrival thus did not affect the status of women as much as is often thought. The English did not ever blend themselves into this stream of legitimization through symbolic gift of the land goddesses of Ireland. (By English, here, I mean most specifically the 15th and 16th century plantation and colonization strategy.) Hence the groping backwards for a [male] source of affronted entitlement, not from modern nationalism, but ancient right of conquest, kept alive in the symbols used to describe Ireland today.

We see the traces of that earlier compromise with the possibly matrilineal Neolithic inhabitants of Ireland in the law tracts remaining to us, and in the epic sagas of those Celtic interlopers. We can begin to guess a little of who they had to compromise with, in the passage graves of Newgrange. We can ask ourselves how or if Vikings and Normans fed into this system, and what exactly it was.

We have, in the end, some choices to make with regard to the study of history.

Ériu, Banba, and Fódla met Amhairghin Glúngheal, chief poet of the Milesians, on the road and bargained with him that they would sanction colonization of Ireland on condition each of their names would be on the country forever.

How do we approach this idea, accepted as historical fact by many even today? Could it be that whoever met the Sons of Mil on the road (in whatever fashion it occurred, the arriving Celts would inevitably have met indigenous women) are direct symbolic ancestors of that Aiofe, daughter of Diarmat MacMurrough, bartered to Strongbow, (not the actual woman, of course, but her image) all the way down to Cathleen ní Houlihan, the Old Woman of the Roads and Dark Rosaleen? If this is so, could it have been much different for women of the intervening period? Can we possibly conclude that there are two distinct lives lived by every Irish woman throughout history…

At the surface, the public face, their symbolic importance to, and individual subordination by men as images of sovereignty. And deeper, individually and amongst themselves, what they made of it as individual social and economic actors.

If we say this, then we are in most dire need of tools and attitudes such as I have been exploring here, and more. The problem’s still there, but perhaps "those emblems are no longer silent." (Boland)

And maybe it’s something else entirely.

Molly ní Dana
San Francisco, California
December 1998

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