SO. THE 1960s. Suppose you were young, hopeful and female, with school behind you and the future stretching invitingly ahead with all its unknown possibilities. Unknown, but certainly not unlimited. Money dictated the first decision, whether or not you went straight to work. Let us dispose swiftly of your prospects if you hadn't managed to get as far as the Leaving Cert, or perhaps even the Inter Cert; or if you'd done brilliantly in both, but had a family waiting eagerly for your wages.

You could rule out virtually any skilled trade except hairdressing. Apprenticeships were open only to boys, and in practice only to boys whose fathers were in the trade. You were probably headed for that 43 per cent of the female workforce then employed as factory operatives, shop assistants, waitresses, servants or farm workers.

For those whose families had a few bob to spare for further training, there was sharp competition to gain entry to those occupations classified in the 1966 census as "lower professions", or nursing or teaching. In 1966, nurses and teachers were an elite, amounting to only some 12 per cent of the 281,000 women at work. Most girls aimed at working somewhere near eligible men. Secretarial schools were thronged. Secretary/typists, and clerical workers in banks and offices, made up another 20 per cent of the female workforce. Fewer than one per cent were in the "higher professions", employed as doctors or lawyers, or in the upper ranks of business, management or public service. To aspire to these heights, a girl needed a university education.

Very few got it. Third-level education as we know it hadn't been invented. Beyond primary school, education had a price tag, and university was the exclusive preserve of the privileged. Then, as now, girls consistently outperformed boys at secondary school, but even well-off families with professional expectations for their sons balked at paying to educate their daughters.

This was one of several points mentioned in the 1965 Investment in Education report, which noted sadly that of those who achieved honours Leaving Certs in 1963, 43 per cent of boys but only 19 per cent of girls went on to university.

The report, produced to address the woeful inadequacies of the Irish educational system, highlighted a number of urgently-needed reforms, among them the inequalities fostered by the curriculum in girls' schools. Almost all secondary schools were single-sex, and most girls' schools were strong on languages and history, weak on science and maths. In 1968, only 161 girls took honours maths at Leaving Cert level, compared with nearly 2,000 boys.

The overwhelming majority of girls who did make it into university did arts subjects. Without maths and science, careers in medicine, business or architecture were closed to them.

But did it matter? Who wanted to be an engineer or bus driver or airline pilot? Whatever mutterings were beginning to be audible elsewhere, most of that decade passed here with barely a murmur of feminist discontent. In the 1960s, girls shied away in droves from anything that might suggest they lacked femininity. They poured out of school convinced - rightly - they were revelling in freedom their mothers couldn't have imagined.

They had counters full of cheap cosmetics in the now long-gone Woolworth's, Mary Quant haircuts and, from 1967 onward, the libertine mini-skirt. The world was at their varnished fingertips, quite literally: one push of a button brought pop music from pirate radio station, another produced immediate images of elsewhere on the flickering black and white screen of a brand new RTE.

"Career" wasn't in their vocabulary and neither was "equality". As the European Economic Community began to take shape, there were a few distant rumblings about equal pay, a principle endorsed by the trade union movement since 1888. But most females worked in all-female jobs, which made comparability very difficult, and in professions such as teaching, single men and women were paid one rate, and married men something higher. In the 1960s, women earned on average a bit more than half what men earned per hour. It's no wonder Woolworth's did such bustling business.

The impetus to change wasn't there, because in the 1960s most girls aspired only to the career of wife-and-mother. A job was something to fill the time between school and wedding. Put another way, in the 1960s the only career open to most girls was wife-and-mother. Either way, girls hoped to find in marriage exactly what boys hoped they would find in their jobs: security, status, satisfaction and self-fulfilment.

The sole goal was the wedding ring. That too had a price. First, you lost your job immediately if you worked anyplace with a "marriage bar". This included the entire public service, the semi-state bodies and such major institutions as banks and, indeed, trade unions. That isn't to say you wouldn't be re-hired. Married women were frequently taken back on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis, usually at less pay and on a lower grade than they had enjoyed, if that's the word, as single women. The "temporary married" was a familiar classification in many places, including such big establishments as Aer Lingus.

If your employers did tolerate married women, the Revenue exacted its toll. Wives paid more income tax. In turn, their husbands gained something in the tax-free allowance. But an unmarried couple was indisputably better off after taxes than the married couple next door. It says something about the social taboos of the time that so few availed of this jolly inducement to live in sin.

The next turning point was pregnancy. Since maternity leave didn't exist and few bosses wanted to keep mothers on board, pregnancy for most women meant compulsory retirement. Your chances of dodging pregnancy until you wanted it were considerably reduced by the legal ban on artificial contraception. The Pill didn't count, though; medically, it was means of regulating the menstrual cycle. By 1969, about 25,000 Irish women were on the Pill, officially suffering from irregular periods. Women would inform the doctor that they needed to regulate their periods before marriage, in order to employ the rhythm method of birth control. This was such common practice that obliging doctors referred to the treatment as "the engagement Pill."

All this was as nothing, however, compared to the loss of adult citizenship. As was rightly stated in Chains and Change, the 1971 publication of the Irish women's Liberation Movement, "upon marriage a woman in Ireland enters a state of civil death".

Before the Married Women's Status Act of 1957, a wife had no real right to own property, sue or be sued, or enter contracts. In practice, for many years afterward wives still found it almost impossible to make any financial arrangement - hire-purchase, charge account, insurance - without their husbands' consent, which is one reason so many resorted to illegal money lenders.

Under law, a woman was regarded as her husband's chattel, and that law wasn't dumped until 1981. Her domicile was his; If he happened to be in England, legally she was also in England, regardless of where she actually lived. That law didn't go until 1990, when Mr Justice Barr described it as "a relic of female slavery".

A married man was obliged to support his wife, but only to the level of what he decided were her needs. He was not obliged to tell her what he earned, although she had to disclose her earnings to him. Any money she saved out of the housekeeping was legally his money to spend as he liked. She was not entitled to any of his savings, no matter how much she had contributed to them. And if their property wasn't in both names, he could sell the house and its contents without her knowledge.

PARENTAL rights were also allocated to married men. The children's allowance was theirs by law. Until the 1964 Guardianship of Infants Act, fathers were the sole legal guardians of their children, with the absolute right to decide on their education, religious training, health.

Finally, if a man was thoroughly fed up, he could desert the homestead until he was in better form. Upon his return he automatically resumed all marital and parental rights. A married woman who jumped ship forfeited all her rights, including access to the marital home or to her children.

Enough to drive a woman to crime? Many of the women who appeared before the courts were accused of the kind of petty thievery that had to do with the feeding and clothing their families. These crimes didn't require a jury; just as well, as Ireland was one of the last states in the western world to admit women jurors in 1976. ( Wolfe Tone's "men of no property" weren't admitted either; an Irish jury consisted of 12 male householders.)

In a sense, the difficulty with family laws in those strange years was not that they were designed to oppress women but to burden men. The assumption appeared to be that men would behave responsibly only if all responsibilities were foisted upon them. The snag was that if they failed, women were punished. If a man was irresponsible enough to die without providing for his family, for instance, his widow had to prove near-destitution to get a non-contributory pension. This was so small she had to work if she possibly could, whereupon she promptly lost her pension.

But the widow's plight was at least respectable. The woman whose husband had simply absconded was a figure of shame and entitled to nothing. Her only hope was to wrest something out of the social welfare system. To do that, she had to prove she'd made every effort to locate her wandering spouse and coax him back, that he left of his own volition, and had sent no money at all for at least six months. One night's fumbling attempt at reconciliation, or one guilty fiver sent home by post, was enough to place the supplicant woman back at the end of the queue.

Her only other means of redress was a court order against him. All a man had to do to avoid that little problem was to take the ferry to England, where Irish court orders were not enforceable.

Deserted wives, too, went to work if they could. Of the 281,000 women at work in 1966, just nine per cent - 26,000 - were married. The great majority had no choice, and were in the very worst-paid jobs. A steamy laundry room lacked femininity, but at that point in their lives, femininity wasn't much of an asset.

These are broad brush strokes, no more than a rough outline of what women's lives were like in the 1960s, only what we knew about then. There was a lot we didn't know about. Single mothers, for instance, didn't officially exist. There were only statistics on illegitimate births, between one and three cent per year. Gay rights were unknown since no one, officially, was gay. Abortions were possible in England, but before 1967 they were difficult and expensive to obtain. In any case, they weren't discussed; neither was infanticide, rape, incest, domestic violence or the sexual abuse of children. They didn't figure at all in the unraised consciousness of the 1960s.

And then, at last, came the 1970s with the Commission for the Status of Women, and the Irishwomen's Liberation Movement was born.