Odd, isn’t it, the way we once took for granted such a number of customs that negatively affected women.

Now, many of these traditions, once an unquestioned part of daily life, are, and rightly, viewed as archaic, cruel, bizarre and, in many cases, deeply harmful.

I wouldn’t describe a skort as cruel, bizarre or extremely harmful, but I would call it archaic.

But we’ll get to that.

In the meantime, back to the misogynistic Irish customs referred to at the beginning of this column.

There was symphysiotomy, a controversial, hugely painful and devastating operation on women in labour that went out of favour in most of the rest of Europe in the mid-1900s – but which, believe it or not, continued to be carried out in Ireland up to the 1980s.

The surgery, as I understand it, involves slicing through the cartilage and ligaments of the pelvic joint, or even, in some cases, sawing through the bone of the pelvis itself, in order to widen it and allow a baby to be delivered unobstructed.

Critics have blamed this absolutely harrowing and utterly terrifying medical procedure on what has been described as an unhealthy mix of a Catholic disapproval of caesarean sections, societal and institutional disregard for women’s autonomy and anatomy and, unbelievable as this may sound, pure medical experimentation.

It has been claimed that the operation left untold hundreds of women with life-long pain, disability, and emotional trauma.

In a newspaper interview several years ago, a woman described how she was given “gas and air and an injection,” before being brought to a room where her legs were tied up on either side of her body, and she was left trussed up and ready for the doctor, who arrived at the........

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