International Women's Day: Young women think the struggle for equal rights is a thing of the past, and they have no need of feminism. But they're wrong, writes Anna Ross.

Warning: International Women's Day can change your life. A year ago today, a colleague and I, two fortysomething Irish women, sat down over a coffee to discuss a work matter but found ourselves instead, given the day that was in it, talking animatedly about the lives of women.

Both of us had benefited from the movement that the 1970s called "women's lib". Thanks to it, we had had choices denied to our mothers and grandmothers. We both had paid work that we loved, together with rich family, social, intellectual and creative lives. We knew how lucky we were - just about as lucky as women with children get to be.

But our conversation was no self-congratulatory backslap. On the contrary: we were bothered by a world that seemed to think such progress by a small group of women was enough. In our eyes, what had been achieved was a noble beginning, yet others thought the job was done, and still others believed it had all gone too far. How could they, we fumed, when women earn - in countries where the gap is narrowest - an average 20 per cent less for doing the same job as men? When in most economies single women and their dependent families make up about 90 per cent of the welfare budget? When most companies refuse to change work practices to acknowledge dependants at home, thus forcing many women out of employment?

To us, it was clearly written in the financial figures: although there were a few who achieved economic success, women - wherever they lived in the world, in rich or in poor economies - were the world's largest pool of cheap or free labour.

And the heady days of women's lib were no more. The women's movement hadn't gone away but it was no longer a unified entity. While money was the issue that most grabbed us, other women were more exercised by problems with health or violence or sexuality. Some had formed pressure groups around legal or political campaigns. Others had moved into service provision - the rape crisis centres or domestic violence organisations. Still others were engaged by feminist spirituality or literature or the arts.

A look at the line-up of International Women's Day activities on the National Women's Council website (www.nwci.ie) gives an indication of the variety of concerns encompassed by the contemporary women's movement.

This fragmentation is a logical response to the complexity of contemporary women's lives. When you have, for example, a law forbidding married women the right to work, you have a direct, identifiable target. But how do you target a global economy that is based on unpaid domestic work at home and sweat shops abroad? Or an ever-expanding sex industry that spews its view of women into our corner shops and living rooms? A pop-culture that makes us and, most noticeably, our daughters, hate our very bodies?

It's all connected but it all feels so vast and complex, even before you begin to factor in questions of class and race distinctions between women. Many of us respond with exhaustion or apathy. Our individual efforts seem so puny, and we have so much else to do - work, relationships, family responsibilities, not to mention fun and fulfilment.

Historically, this has been the pattern. Women's advancement has never been a straightforward progression but a series of ups and downs. It is heartbreaking, for example, to read with hindsight the writings of early 20th-century Irishwomen who thought their activism was the start of what would be a forward march through time, unknowing of the blows that lay ahead in the 1920s and 1930s.

Today we are, once again, in such a fluid "post-feminist" moment. The advances of the 20th century, such as progress toward equal pay, are beginning to move into reverse, and surveys show that young women today think the struggle for equal rights is a thing of the past, and they are doing just fine without any need of feminism, thank you very much.

As soon as these young women come to have children, however, they are likely to find that things look different. Research published this week by Harvard Business Review is revealing: 57 per cent of the women in Stanford University's class of 1981 are no longer in the workforce. From three different graduating classes from Harvard Business School, only 38 per cent of women remain in full-time careers.

Put another way: many of the most privileged women in the most privileged nation on earth find they cannot keep their job and have a life too. (What hope for the rest of us?) And all the while the world of work and money powers on, refusing to budge, oblivious of the damage it wreaks on its workers - men as well as women.

As we sat in that coffee-shop a year ago, considering such matters, we were faced with a choice. We could either sit by while the gains made by that brave generation of "women's libbers" were rescinded, or we could use some of the skills amassed in half a lifetime of work to continue the good fight. We pushed the coffee cups aside and rolled up our sleeves.

A year later, we have a book, the first in a series - The Woman's Way to Wealth - and are in the throes of setting up an organisation to support and foster its principles (www.wealthofwomen.com). Our techniques aim to heal women's often vexed relationship with money, and we also want to redefine the very concept of wealth so that it encompasses money, yes, but also the other riches of life - family, health, creativity, balance.

So on this International Women's Day 2005, we offer you again the shocking United Nations finding that galvanised us into action: that women do one-third of all the paid work in the world and two-thirds of all the work in the world, paid and unpaid, but receive only 10 per cent of the world's salaries and own only one per cent of its property. A revolution is still needed to turn those figures into 50:50, a revolution that is long overdue. Each of us has a choice. We can shrug our shoulders. Or we can find a standpoint within this multi-layered movement and join in pushing the revolution on. If not now, then truly, when?

* Anna Ross and Bernie Purcell will launch and sign copies of their book, The Woman's Way to Wealth, in the Irish Writers' Centre. Dublin, this Thursday at 6pm. The event will include gospel singing, belly dance, hand massage and more. Details from info@wealthofwomen.com, 086-1675272.

* Today at 6pm Amnesty International will be meeting on Curved Street, Dublin, to march to the Dáil and call on the Government to put an end to violence against women. The International Women's Day Festival concludes at 8.30pm with a concert in Temple Bar Music Centre featuring Nina Hynes, The Jimmy Cake and Jeff Martin.