Woman to woman

Noreen Byrne (58) was chair of the National Women's Council from 1995 to 1999. Before that, she worked for the Well Woman Centre and the Coolock Community Development Centre in Dublin. She is self-employed as a management consultant to the voluntary sector. She has two daughters, is divorced and in a second relationship.

Emma Byrne (33) is a childcare consultant. She is married with two children and pregnant with her third.

Noreen: After Emma was born, I decided I needed to talk to someone about the Pill. I went to my GP, who was a Protestant, which I'm sure was significant. And God, it was great. I was carrying so much fluid, but it was so liberating. But when I talked to my neighbours about it, they were all really shocked. It wasn't that I could die . . . Emma: It was that you'd go to hell when you died. Noreen: I gave up my job as a secretary when I got married in 1964. I was 21. Emma: Just. Three weeks after your 21st birthday. Noreen: It was a mutual decision to separate. Your first serious relationship, it was expected you would get married. I genuinely believed it would be a 50/50 partnership. Looking back, how could it have been equal? I still believe you can't get real equality in this society because the caring role of women is expected to be delivered for nothing. It has to be recognised for its economic value. It should be counted in the GNP. The debate about childcare has happened, not out of a desire to give people a quality of life, but about the imperatives of the economy. You should be able to say: "Right, I want to work part-time - what are the solutions open to me?" Emma: I've never worked full-time since I had my first child. There's this huge denial by the State of the women who are innovating in their lives to create the best situation for themselves and their children. There's this whimsical debate about women in the home and out of it - but all women are in the home. No one else is there at 2 a.m. when your child has chicken pox. Noreen: If an economic value was put on that work, it would inform all of the policies around childcare. The focus of 1970s feminism was entirely on the workplace. I never agreed with that. They were all educated women who had good jobs, but my background was working-class. But still, my life is so different from my mother's life. We do have more choices. Emma: What I always resented about my mother's generation of feminists was that it was much more black and white. Once you were being very clearly oppressed, it was clear you had to get into the workplace. But we had so many choices. I'd like to see the kind of struggles that women like me are coping with manifested in political debate.

Kathleen O'Neill (52) is co-ordinator of SAOL, a project for women drug-users in Dublin's north inner-city. She was an activist with the KLEAR adult education facility in Kilbarrack. She is separated and has four children.

SiobhAn O'Neill (19) is studying applied languages at DCU.

Kathleen: I was married and a mother at 19. There were cultural pressures on us to get married and, for working-class women, it was a way out of the family home. But I've always been driven by equality. I was the eldest of 13 kids and my mother had two sets of twins. When I was seven, one of them got sick. We didn't have a blue card for free healthcare because my father had been invalided out of the British army. The man at the door told us we couldn't see the doctor. I told him: "You can't stop my mother seeing the doctor!" And I kicked him. My mother gave me a box. But when I got home, my father gave me half-a-crown. Siobhan: When you're a kid, you're embarrassed by everything your mother does. She just made it worse by making it political. Kathleen: When we did the picket outside Dr Steeven's Hospital, I had no expectation of you going on that picket. [Last year, Kathleen campaigned for appropriate residential care for her autistic son Sean, Siobhan's twin.] Siobhan: I did it for Sean.

Kathleen: Were you "morto"?

Siobhan: I wasn't "morto" because it was feminist. I was "morto" because it was my mother!

Kathleen: There's something which you don't know. I'm thinking of running in the next general election as an Independent, campaigning for special needs, special education and health.

Siobhan: Christ. Growing up with a feminist mother, I wasn't allowed to have Barbies or read Enid Blyton books. One year, you did give in and buy me a Barbie, but the next year I got a blue BMX. I think I always did recognise inequality. Even in school - the teacher would only let the boys play football. I called him sexist.

Kathleen: I think being independent will be a factor for my daughters. Do you want a relationship?

Siobhan: Yes . Kathleen: Do you see yourself having a child? Siobhan: No. I'd say I'll be a cool auntie. I want to live in five or six countries. Maybe after I've done all that. Kathleen: I'd say you'll have 10. Though there's nobody good enough for Sinead (28), and Roisin (26) isn't interested, she just wants to go scuba-diving. They didn't need a way out.

Edith Loane (74) is an honorary member of the National Women's Council and president emerita of the World Federation of Methodist and Uniting Church Women. She qualified as a doctor. A widow, she has four children and lives in Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.

Barbara Fennell (47) is a farmer's wife with two children, in Clonmel, Co Tipperary. She works part-time in a solicitor's office.

Edith: I was never a bra-burning liberal feminist. But women felt forced into pretty aggressive statements. We were doing it for your generation and for my grandchildren. We understand what we tried to do, but it's a question of where it's gone since.

The differences between the North and South - of the world - are no better. I remember talking to women in Africa about contraception. In Ireland, we came through that, but the problem was theological. Culturally, they [the Africans] just couldn't say no [to sex]. Barbara: I would be more like my father than my mother. I wouldn't have done what she did; I'm not an extrovert like her. But I didn't mind her doing it.

Feminism was always there. I would expect women to have their equal share in life; we didn't know any different, growing up. Edith: In this society, there's too much being demanded of women. We ought to be moving to give more maternity leave, more paternity leave, and being much more flexible about unpaid leave. Two of my daughters work outside the home and they managed to take six months off after having children - but the difficulty of that is going back to work. Barbara: It's very different being on a farm to being in a town, and a lot of friends would have gone out to work, but I'm glad I was at home for the children when I see the rat-race some women are in. Children grow up so soon and now mine are fleeing the nest.Edith: I think women have threatened men who are trying to be the "head of the house" type of role. When you think of the role models they had growing up - the man who put his feet on the table and the paper in front of him and the TV on and he wasn't going to wash dishes! It's going to take another generation to change things. Our salvation is the caring part of our nature.