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Women teachers - working after marriage

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by Small Town Girl (U1483784) on Monday, 28th February 2011

  
  Can anyone point me in the direction of some reliable information about when it became socially acceptable for women teachers to continue to teach/work after they married, please?
  
  During family tree searches, I've found someone - let's call her Mary - who married at the age of 20 in 1910 and who's only child was b.1918. On this daughter's marriage certificate in 1939 the father's occupation is given as "clerk", so it would appear to be a white collar family.
  
  I'm told that Mary was a teacher, but I don't know how likely it is that she would have worked as a teacher (or anything else for that matter) after she married.
  
  Also, would there be different attitudes towards married women working in private schools -v- state/council run ones?
  
  Thanks
  STG

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Monday, 28th February 2011

  Hi STG,
  
  Not really a proper source, and I don't know whether there were regional variations, but my great aunt was forced to leave her teaching job in the late 1930s when she married. She started again during the war when male teachers joined up, only to be sacked again after the war when the men came back. They then started employing married women again some time around 1950 I think.

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• Message 3

  , in reply to message 2.

  Posted by Small Town Girl (U1483784) on Monday, 28th February 2011

  
  That's rather what I thought too, cloudyj.
  
  Mary was married in Sheffield and her daughter was born there, but went to high school in Derby, so obviously sometime between 1918 and c1929 the family moved down the country a bit.
  
  
  

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• Message 4

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by CHRISTINE (U14504038) on Monday, 28th February 2011

  I am not sure if this will help but as a former teacher who graduated in 1964, teaching in an all girls grammar school in Surrey I was politely asked to hand in my resignation when I became pregnant in 1969. I was married!

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• Message 5

  , in reply to message 4.

  Posted by Small Town Girl (U1483784) on Monday, 28th February 2011

  Christine
  
  Seems hard to believe now, doesn't it?
  
  STG

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• Message 6

  , in reply to message 5.

  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 1st March 2011

  Not quite totally relevant but perhaps "South Riding" has brought it back to mind, in the early 1970's a colleague recounted how just a few years before she had attended a job interview for a school in a Yorkshire mining region. One of the governors asked her straight out what were the chances of her becoming pregnant. She said that she thought that was her private business, but that in fact she was not going to have any pregnancies [I forget now whether she already had children- or even if she was married]
  
  She did not get the job. But driving out of school she was waylaid by the Headteacher who said how sad he was that the governors did not appoint her. Apparently the problem was "the pill", for presumably she had allowed them to deduce that she was "on the pill". The way that she understood what he said and conveyed it to me, if she had not been "on the pill" they would not have appointed her for fear that she might get pregnant. But in that part of Yorkshire people tended to think that women on the pill were likely to be promiscuous, so really it was always a "no win" situation.
  
  Perhaps unlike Winifred Holtby author of "South Riding" she was not "one of them" and therefore a suspect outsider with dangerous ideas from "down south".
  
  Cass

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