You never hear anybody getting all excited when all four of those waiting on tables in a cafe are women, or all four of the cleaners late at night in the office are women. Oh, no. The usual woman-haters have been having such a field day with their sneers at the presidential candidates that you'll forgive me if I say something serious that I mean.
I look on the feminist project as the great project of my time on Earth, and I'm happy that I've lived to see it have some success. A baby girl born in many parts of the world, including Ireland, has a much better chance today than she would ever have had before of using the whole of her unique self's potential during her life. There are many comic aspects to this presidential campaign, and I hope to laugh as much as anybody over the next few weeks. But it will play its part in the liberation of women.
Women candidates in themselves are not ridiculous. The self-esteem of the candidates and what it says to other women is not ridiculous. But it is not all that significant either. Especially when the candidates were put in place, on the whole, by powerful men. When the day dawns when Ms X, the leader of Fianna Fail, and Ms Y, the leader of the Labour Party, and so on decide who will contest the Presidency, that's the day I'll get excited.
Still, competent women in public life are the kind of thing that the heroines of Irishwomen's liberation - only 25 years ago - wanted to see. They had great faith in the idea that substituting women for men in existing institutions would transform the institutions.
This turns out to be hardly ever the case. You can have substantial legislative change, as we have had, and you can open up opportunities to girls and women. And still women never get their hands on real power. Still they're out there on the margin. The culture in which women themselves and what are thought of as women's pre-occupations and women's values are sincerely believed to be self-evidently inferior to male values can remain quite untouched.
That is why the most stunningly unexpected news in the contemporary story of women's liberation is not this presidential election or any other, but the huge shift in values signalled by the intense mourning for Princess Diana.
The British people, and many others, came out and said that from their hearts they valued her. Her. That girlish woman, so often light and lost. Her admirers were not marshalled by anybody and did not come out as a mob. They came out individual by individual, couple by couple, family by family. They asserted their identification with what she had lived for.
And what had she lived for? Why, her children, she said. And love. And these are what young women all over the planet live for and have always lived for. The mourning for her indicated, amazingly, that these values are now held by men, too.
Yet the girl on the bus reading a Mills & Boon novel, or the single mother on welfare defying society by having another child because she loves children and thinks she's a good mother - no living adults could have been more despised by the men who run the world.
Such women aren't even thought of as having values, or as being capable of meaningful choice. They're thought of as outcrops of the organic world, the barely animate. Nobody cares how well they do the job of motherhood they undertake, and nobody cares how well they give and receive love.
Yet, unexpectedly, those nobodies found a laureate in Diana. Out of the peculiar accidents of her uncommon life emerged a doughty champion of the most common woman's destiny. Shopgirls' values you could call them. If you were full of contempt, and slightly old-fashioned, that's what you might call the values that Princess Diana stood for. But you wouldn't say that in public. Not now. They agreed with what she thought of as the good and the right. They understood the terms in which she justified herself to herself. The answer she returned to the question "What is my life for?" was the same minimal but intensely powerful one that humble young women the world over would make, too, if anyone asked their opinion.
She believed that she had been a good mother. Most of the women on the planet have no other sphere to shine in: it's be a good mother or be good for nothing. She validated their work. "I'm as thick as a plank," she murmured in her graceful and self-deprecating way, because women aren't allowed to say that it takes intelligence and vigour to make a good mother, even if the world never recognises those qualities.
It is thought to be a small ambition, to be a good mother. But is it small? Is motherhood brainless? Are brains what the Hillary Clintons have, whereas all the Dianas are just wombs on legs? Or are there several kinds of brains, though the world hasn't begun to distinguish them?
As for love, it is the determinant of you and your children's destiny. Who you get, and who gets you, and what he's like, and how you get on, is the event of your life. (It is a huge event in his life, too, but he is not so dependent on it.) The precondition, almost, of loving your children is being loved yourself. Diana felt perfectly entitled to look for "love". She'd given the conventions her best try. She'd married for "love" and in good faith.
If her husband didn't love her - the modern rule goes - she was, morally speaking, free to try James Hewitt or Dodi Fayed or anybody. It is somehow assumed that she wasn't looking for love just for personal gratification. You look for love to make you loving. Love is now about nurturing, not passion. A woman's version of love is in the ascendant.
I went to Kensington Palace Gardens the day before they took away the flowers, when the park, on a hot autumn day, had become an Indian scene, with grey dust covering the great swathes of bouquets and candles and balloons and night-lights.
As I began to read some of the many written outpourings I felt that almost anything could be argued from them. It was necessary to be simple, to open my heart, almost. And, at its simplest, what the tributes to Diana had in common was naked, unashamed emotion. They were offered with pride to a woman who never did anything qualitatively different from what women have always done (even if her opportunities for caring - like hugging AIDS victims, or campaigning against landmines - were more dramatic than most.)
I remember once writing about the Irish language and the surprise of finding it surviving in the most unexpected way, among completely unregarded people. Similarly, the advance feminisation (if not feminism) has made in the culture of our time has been revealed, as a complete surprise, by the response to the tragic death of this young woman.
Compared to that revelation, our sudden gender-consciousness here in Ireland is a small thing. It is fun, and it is interesting. But it isn't, as the claiming of Diana's values as the people's values is, a profoundly important event.