Mary McAleese is the president of Ireland. This is an excerpt from her commencement address at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

Mary McAleese, President of Ireland

Over 40 years ago when I was in my mid-teens, I announced at home that I had decided to become a barrister [lawyer]. The first words I heard in response were “You can’t because you are a woman.” It was the voice of our parish priest. The next voice I heard was my mother’s saying, “Don’t listen to him.” To my mother’s surprise, I heeded her advice.

A couple of years later, the same year that the first human walked on the moon, I started law school and our first text book was called Learning The Law by a very eminent jurist, Professor Glanville Williams. In a chapter ominously entitled “Women,” he stated his views that law school was no place for women and that our voices were too weak to be heard in a courtroom. That man had clearly never met my mother.

He reckoned the only thing to be gained by having female law students was the opportunity it provided to meet suitable spouses. I married a dentist just for spite.

… For centuries, our world has tried to fly on one wing, and it has not been a pretty sight as it struggled with the downstream consequences of wasting the talent and potential of that other wing, the women of the world.

In the developed world the story has changed profoundly in a relatively short period of time and already, for example, in my own country of Ireland, it is no accident that the peace and reconciliation that eluded us generation after generation for hundreds of years has at last come to pass, in an Ireland where women’s talents are flooding every aspect of life as never before.

… We are still in the opening chapters of that story… Just as women are beginning for the first time in history to come into their economic stride, the UN has predicted that the economic crisis will see 22 million women become employed worldwide in 2009. Women are already paid less, work more often in the informal economy with fewer rights… and it is girls that often get pulled out of school first when family finances are reduced…   A tiny fraction of senior management in the private sector worldwide are women. And of course, down to the very level of physical safety, in fewer than one in ten cases of sexual violence worldwide is the perpetrator charged.

So you can see there are still a lot of unwritten chapters in the global history of women and of humanity, for humanity itself awaits the realisation of its full potential as long as women are not in charge of their own destiny. But here in this great democracy you are in charge of your destiny — you dwell in real possibility and there are obstacles to a fair, just and free world that need the collective efforts of principled men and women. There is an Irish saying that “two shortens the journey.”  A bird flying on two wings has a better chance of getting somewhere than a bird flying on one.