I read an interesting article the other day about female employment in Derry in 1939. It seems that over 15,000 local women and girls enjoyed full-time employment in the business of making shirts whereas there was no work at all for the men.

As any sociologist will tell you, this is how a matriarchal society is formed. But let us not fool with labels. This uneven balance of the sexes continued right up to the 1970s and may go a long way towards explaining why Stroke City males had sufficient leisure time to start the Troubles.

Those factory girls were special. I grew up with them; those cuffers, smoothers (they ironed the shirts), banders, front-stitchers, back-stitchers, sleevers, button-holers, and those whose expertise lay in the creation of collars.

Fifteen hundred of these girls, aged from 18 to 60, worked in a factory that squatted on the street where I lived as a child. These were strong, independent, attractive women. I was fascinated by their broad smiles and uniformly good teeth. I conclude that my childhood memory is accurate when I see old photographs of groups of women who were young back then; big smiles, flashing teeth, a fat person a rarity. None of these girls ever seemed down, depressed or a hair less than jolly.

Most of them were single but many were married with children. And most of the girls in my factory lived in the Bogside, where the male unemployment rate often hit the high 80s.

One might think that this would provide ample opportunity for a little healthy role reversal, but one would be generally mistaken. This was the mid to late 50s. Women did everything about the home. They prised the children from bed, got them fed, dressed and ready for school, ferried breakfast to the resting silverback male upstairs and then went to work. During daylight hours, the men listened to the radio, walked greyhounds, played cards, congregated around lampposts and on street corners, shot the breeze, played shove ha’penny, backed horses, wrestled with each other noisily, smoked dog-ends, hurled abuse at passers-by and spat on the pavement.

These were alpha males striving gamely to keep their end up in this Amazonian set-up. They didn’t have to try too hard. The extraordinary thing was that these working women did not expect the men to help look after the children or ease the burden of household chores. The women accepted the undisputed fact that men were men and shouldn’t be expected to cook and clean, even if they had nothing else to do.

As I say, these women were angels. I never cared much for the brusque men who gathered at street corners. They were outwardly boorish and often menacing. I suspected that they lived in quiet dread of being ridiculed or negatively bantered by their peers.

On summer days, I would often sit in our ‘good’ first floor front room, looking down across the street where I could see the girls working at their broad tables on the ground floor of the factory. I could watch them through the upper panes of the windows, always kept open to let in a little fresh air. I would open one of our big windows too, not to facilitate airflow this time, but rather to listen to the girls singing along to the instrumental music featured on old BBC programmes like Music While You Work which was piped onto the factory floor.

In the process I also noticed something unique about the women of Derry. When they sang along to the tunes on the radio they would naturally slip into three-part harmony.

Elsewhere in the world of the white man, groups of men or women who burst into song generally tend to sing the melody in unison. Only in Africa and in other countries populated by our darker brothers do people tend to sing three-part harmony during a knees-up.

There must be a thesis in there somewhere, along with the one about Irish traditional music having Moorish origins. Those’ll make the Ulster-Scots lobby sit up and pay attention.

But the girls would soon be gone. Their men got angry and rose out of bed to start the Troubles and the Taiwanese were learning how to backstitch and create collars.

The shirt factories would soon be silent and empty.

The women would go home to stay. Their men would barely notice ?