Changing direction

Women's groups? So-o 1990s. Wheel out the battered husbands, sobbing sports stars, celebrity dads. Newer, better, sexier. Isn't it always the same with those women, mouthing on about the same old things? Children, community, children, isolation, children, assertiveness, children, services, blah, blah. . . As if they needed lessons in assertiveness.

And what sort of image leaps to mind when that old chestnut "childcare" rears its head? Right again. Well-heeled, articulate, married women, of course, trying to have it every way as usual. And if the word "childcare" brings on a rash, where does that leave "women's groups" . . . still moaning on, God help us, about children and community and self-esteem and all that palaver?

Well, yes, they are. And very successfully, too. So successfully, that the perception reigns of an affluent, educated network of women, with little to do but plot the demise of men and lament the mellowing of Germaine Greer.

It was always thus. It suits some agendas to herd women of all types into a homogeneous group and to ascribe to that group generally, the flakiness, inconsistencies and U-turns of a vocal, well-heeled few. Ergo, women are festooned with easy choices, never know when they have enough and all at the expense of their shrivelled, emasculated menfolk.

The truth, alas, is not so clear-cut. Yes, women have made enormous strides in this country over the past 10 years or so. Meetings around kitchen tables which grew into local groups, which blossomed into centres of education, enlightenment and ultimately involvement in formulating national social policy, are the stuff of legend now.

But that journey for many was - and remains - anything but smooth. Women with small children and no economic independence; women with children reared but self-confidence shattered; women trapped in a succession of menial, part-time jobs; women isolated on sprawling modern estates or country backwaters; women thirsting for knowledge and self-development and better parental role models for their children; women whose growing confidence brings out the battering instinct in their menfolk.

Those "invisible" women from Donegal to Kerry, via Clondalkin and the Aran Islands, interviewed by Anne Daly for her poignant but uplifting documentary for RTE, touch on many of these. Although the word "feminism" is mentioned only once - and then only in the context of how women's groups might be perceived in rural areas "where people still associate `such groups' with strong feminism, with politics and women's campaigns" - it is remarkable how the issues echo the old, familiar themes.

These then, were the roots of the women's groups, the genesis of that "invisible movement" born of desperation, yet still feared and sneered at by some.

And what the programme also reveals is a taste of the battles still to be waged and won: the lack of a State childcare system, so vital to low-income women in particular; the lack of recognition for women's "invisible" work in the community; society's ambivalence around every woman's right to economic independence; the sense that a woman's work is worth less than a man's.

We are reminded that 42,000 women who work in the home were educated only to primary level; another 26,000 made it only to Junior Cert. Yet these same women are transforming their communities, running and managing these groups, while using them as stepping stones into third level education and attainments hardly dreamt of 10 years ago. And what price their achievements as role models for the new generations?

Invisible Movement, presented and produced by Anne Daly and Ronan Tynan, will be broadcast on RTE 1 next Tuesday at 10.40 p.m.