When Jack Holland was six, his grandmother refused to hand him back to his parents. The boy had run away from Highcliff Gardens, a Protestant housing estate on the outskirts of Belfast, where his family had just moved. His school uniform was outing him as a Catholic, resulting in beatings and taunts from Protestant children. Fed up, he had fled.

His sanctuary was Mary Murphy Holland, his strong-minded granny who lived in a two-up, two-down terraced house on Drew Street off the Falls Road. When Richard Holland, Jack’s father, came looking for his son, he was told that the boy was staying put. Murphy Holland would raise him away from the bullying and torment of Highcliff. And she did.

It was 1953 and probably Holland’s first encounter with a matriarchy. Murphy Holland wouldn’t have known it at the time, but her brazen act represented an epiphany of sorts for her grandson, instilling in him a deep respect for women.

Next week Holland’s latest and last book, Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice, will be published.

“His grandmother was deeply influential,” says Jenny, his daughter. “She provided a sense of safety and protected him.”

Her father is not around to enjoy the fruits of his work. The writer died of cancer in May 2004, two weeks after he was diagnosed with the illness. At the time of his death, then aged 56, he was a highly respected journalist and author in New York, where he lived with Mary Hudson, his American wife of more than 30 years, and Jenny.

His dying wish for the book to be published was carried through by his wife and daughter. “The project has been very emotional for us,” says Jenny, 30, who followed her father into journalism in New York.

“There was a sense within the family that this was going to be his opus, his big contribution to writing and history and thoughts.”

Misogyny, according to her father’s book, is the world’s oldest prejudice. He travels back in time with the concept, pulling out an array of striking historical examples to prove his point. “Misogyny, the hatred of women, has thrived on many different levels, from the loftiest philosophical plane in the works of Greek thinkers, who helped frame how western society views the world, to the back streets of 19th-century London and the highways of modern Los Angeles, where serial killers have left in their wake a trail of the tortured and mutilated corpses of women,” he writes.

“From the Christian ascetics of the third century AD, to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan in the late 1990s, it has directed its rage at women and tried to suppress their sexuality.”

We don’t need to go back to ancient history to find examples of blatant discrimination against females. It has followed through time, “uniting Aristotle with Jack the Ripper, King Lear with James Bond”. Today, in many parts of the world, practices such as veiling, seclusion and clitoridectomy are still part of society.

Atrocities such as ordered gang-rapes in India, North Korean prisoners watching guards beat their newborn babies to death, and the infamous Lex Julia, a Roman law that made it illegal for a wronged husband not to prosecute a straying wife, dominated dinner-talk in the Holland household. “It was a fairly grim task,” recalls Jenny. “Over dinner he would be describing witch burnings. The actual tone of the book is extremely light, but he had to catalogue these atrocities.”

Holland writes that Belfast, the city where he grew up, had its own peculiar hatreds. “Catholic girls who dated British soldiers were dragged into the street, bound and held down (often by other women), while the men hacked and shaved off their hair, before pouring hot tar over them and sprinkling them with feathers. They were then tied to a lamp post to be gaped at by nervous onlookers, with a sign hung around their necks on which was scrawled another sexual insult: ‘whore’ .”

His history lesson does conclude on a positive, hopeful note. Women have progressed, with the help of like-minded men, and centuries of misogyny are finally fading out, he believed.

Born in 1947, Holland was raised in a mixed Catholic-Protestant working-class family. Elizabeth, his mother, was poorly schooled. With a certain arrogance, Holland said she was his inspiration for writing, because he could give people like her — uneducated but naturally intelligent — the opportunity to lift a bulky text written simply and understand it like the rest of us.

For those who knew Holland, who spent much of his career writing about the Troubles, the exploration of misogyny was an unusual choice.

“My father loved history and he loved women,” says Jenny. “These are the two factors that brought him to the topic of misogyny, one substantially different from the Northern Irish political matters on which he built a career.”