A man in the Áras is not a loss for women, but a sign of equality at work

Why? Because, these are the days when it’s a given that a woman can be president, or anything else she wants to be, including stay-at-home mother

THE funniest point made, early in the presidential election campaign, was that it was really time for the lads to have a go. Two female presidents was enough. More than. Give the girls an inch and they’ll take a yard, or whatever a yard is in metric. Let a third into the Áras and a dreaded pattern of dominance would be established, with men everywhere disenfranchised and getting their little boxer shorts in a twist.

The election of Michael D Higgins as our ninth president allows boxer short twists to unwind. No threat, boys. Out of nine, we — the feisty sisterhood — have so far won two goes on the Magic Presidential Roundabout. One-and-a-half, really, because of the early departure from office of Mary Robinson.

The change in presidential gender didn’t cause much of a stir, partly because whoever suggested it was time for a man had the wit to shut up when he got one. But that, in itself, is a significant marker indicative of progress. Just as nobody seriously pushed the line during the election that it was important to Man na h-Éireann to have one of their own as president, so no woman felt diminished when one of the women candidates didn’t make it on election day. Why? Because, these are the days when it’s a given that a woman can be president, or anything else she wants to be, including stay-at-home mother.

It’s not all thanks to a former Playboy Bunny, but a lot of credit must go to Gloria Steinem, now, in her seventy seventh year, working more hours a week than most people would consider reasonable.

She had a dire upbringing, did Ms Steinem. But she did have two advantages. Beauty. And brains. Both of which propelled her into high-profile journalism in her early twenties, when one of her early assignments was to infiltrate Hugh Hefner’s army of girls wearing rabbit-ear headbands and satin swimsuit decorated at a crucial spot with a fluffy bunny’s tail, all the better to titillate you with, my dear, when they bent over to serve drinks. She looked gorgeous as a bunny girl in the photographs decorating the resultant magazine feature. But what made the piece she wrote go around the world at the time and find its way into collections of essays ever since, was her exposé on just how painful was the tight outfit worn by the Playboy Club waitresses who were forced to tittup around on stiletto heels carrying aloft circular silver trays, ready for placement in front of ogling men who regarded those waitresses as sex workers of a kind.

(Not that the men, back then, would have used the term “sex worker”, but let’s not even think about what they’d actually have called the girls.)

That magazine article was a first step in the Steinem march towards feminism, that challenging ideology which holds that women are human beings, just like men, with the same rights. At the time, that was not the general understanding of a woman’s proper place.

In the US, after World War II, the women who had gone to work to keep the home factories turning out vital products while their menfolk served in various theatres of war, were later immortalised in the US Mail stamp of “Rosie the Riveter”. They went home to raise the baby boom generation, look pretty and be financially dependent on their husbands. In Ireland, they could be fired just for being women, their best chance of power and influence was in joining a religious congregation, and, if they were in the civil service, not only did they lose their job on marriage, but thereafter, if they even wanted a library card, they had to persuade their husband to sign for it. Today’s great phrase “We are where we are” applied neatly to women in the middle of the twentieth century. They were where they were and they could like it or lump it.

Then came the angry brigade of “educated, articulate women” (as disapprovingly described by an Irish politician of the time) who weren’t having any of that. One of the leaders was Gloria Steinem, all flying hair and aviator sunglasses. Media — at the time and since that time — separated the glamorous feminists like Steinem and the blonde, baby- voiced Letty Cottin Pogrebin from the others, which in turn helped fan the flames of a scorching envy among feminists like Betty Friedan. Abigail Pogrebin, Letty’s daughter, wrote an oral history of Ms magazine, (in a recent issue of New York magazine, nymag.com) of which Steinem was a founder, fundraiser and figurehead. It touches on this disturbing need among her ideological sisters to demean the woman who never chose to become the acceptable (because pretty) face of feminism.

Part of the problem was that Gloria didn’t look as if she’d survived the childhood from hell. Her family was always poor and trailer-transient, and when she was little more than a toddler, her mother sank into a severe form of mental illness from which she never re-surfaced.

When her father and older sister left, Gloria was ten and her mother’s sole carer.

A scholarship to university lifted her beyond that, and the women’s movement defined who she became. It brought her fame and painted her into such a corner that when she married at the age of sixty six, outrage was expressed that she had betrayed all she had fought for. Her response to this was to mildly point out that the institution of marriage had changed “out of all recognition” in the last half century. (In a sad replay of her early life, she spent much of her three married years caring for her new husband, as he died of brain lymphoma.)

The definitive books were written by Friedan, Morgan and Greer. When Steinem published, she seemed at such pains to prove herself unexceptional that some of her essays ended up as New Age-y excursions into confidence-building. To this day, the New Age language persists, as in a recent comment on Hillary Clinton’s “changing the molecules in the air” by her presidential candidacy.

That said, the fact is that the travelling troubadour, the itinerant preacher, the media missionary for the rights of women was, and still is, Gloria Steinem. She has spent a lifetime deflecting personal criticism and negativity to her ideas. Sometimes with humour: “When people asked in a hostile way if — I was a lesbian, I always said ‘Not yet.’” Sometimes with a shrug: “I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.” Sometimes with foreboding: “Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”

Neither Mary Robinson nor Mary McAleese could have become President of Ireland without the influence of a woman who has put beauty, brains and a life of care into promoting the rights and potential of women throughout the world.