The ancient Irish gave tribute to the unique nature of woman in that the symbol they gave their goddesses was that of a Triple Spiral, which can still be found on pre-Christian monuments, such as Newgrange in County Louth. The Triple Spiral represented the cycle of birth, life, and death; the Maiden, Mother, and Crone – the never-ending cycle of infinitude. As the Song of Amergin expressed it:
I am the womb: of every holt,
I am the blaze: on every hill,
I am the queen: of every hive,
I am the shield: for every head,
I am the tomb: of every hope.
Overall, the women of ancient Ireland were quite a formidable lot.
Women were warriors, druids, physicians, poets and scholars and were on an equal standing with their men.
The free-spirited Queen Maeve (Mebh) for instance, became angry because her third husband Ailill boasted that it was his status that gave her honor and worth. She presented arguments that she was as good, if not better than he and demanded that her husband, “be free from cowardice, for I am brave in battles and it would be a discredit to my husband if I were braver than he,” and she continued, ‘it would not suit me at all if he were jealous, for I have never denied myself any man I took a fancy to.” Now Maeve, that’s just the kind of talk that caused St. Adamnan to pass a law at the Synod of Tara making women non-combatants. Before long Irish women were branded the weaker sex and all the Sile na Gigs were rounded up and replaced with statues of the Blessed Virgin, It’s been an up-hill battle ever since trying to win back some of the status we enjoyed back then. Perhaps one of these days the A.O.H. will allow women to become full members. And now that Mary Robinson is president I hear there’s talk that some golf clubs in Ireland are considering allowing women to take out full membership. Hallelujah!
Yes, the formidable power of women got turned into an argument against us.
James Flannery, in writing in this issue about the upcoming Yeats Festival of which he is director, brings us Jean Markale’s theory that the male fear of female power means that he “must keep her [woman] submerged at the bottom of the sea, or in the depths of a cave, and his conscious mind finds as much fault with her as possible, even as he secretly wishes she would rise again. For she is a reminder of all cults of the mother goddess, which were conspicuous for their lack of modesty.”
Oh, dear!
Well in our issue this month we feature some determined, strong-willed women who are anything but submerged. As a young widow Mary Higgins Clark turned to writing as a means of supporting her five children.
To date nine of her books, including her latest, Loves Music, Loves to Dance, have been included on the best-seller list. Anne Quindlen, columnist for the New York Times whose book Object Lessons also made it to the best-seller list, manages to combine a career and motherhood. Quindlen says that Irish men are full of bluster but “Irish mothers basically run things.”
This view is taken to the extreme by Rose (Maureen O’Hara) in Only the Lonely, as the mother who holds her son in servitude, and won’t allow him to eat yogurt because it’s sissy food, as Kevin Lewis tells us in his review of the movie, O’Hara’s first in 20 years. A woman to be reckoned with, she’s proved that it is possible to return to the screen after such an absence and still knock ’em dead.
Contrast that image with Edna O’Brien’s in The Myth of the Devouring Woman, she says that “too often they [Trish women] languish like Dido under the weight of doom, loss and rejection.” Mary Gordon has some interesting words to say on O’Brien’s women in her review of A Fanatic Heart. Also in this issue, Frank Shouldice reviews Josephine Hart’s book Damage, a tale about a woman who wields a dangerous sexual and psychological power over the male character, which ultimately leads to his destruction.
Happy summer reading.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the July/August 1991 issue of Irish America. ♦
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