To want to settle a generation gap argument: older (female) relative is saying women had to give up work when they got married?

It was common in both public and private sectors at that time for women to be sacked on marriage, or if not immediately on marriage then on pregnancy. In the 60s the teacher shortage was so acute that young married women could teach but if they were pregnant had to leave before it showed as it was considered "not nice" for the children to witness a pregnant woman.

The law may have changed in the 70s but attitudes didn't and discrimination was widespread and hard to prove. This is on the downward slide again - pregnancy is still one of the commonest reasons for women losing their jobs. Professional women are more protected but but its still an issue that simply having given birth affects career prospects.

When I married in the late 80s DH was routinely asked (in front of me) if I worked. I was the main earner. It was common then for men to spout "my wife doesn't need to work" and women were certainly assumed to be working as their secondary interest, retaining full responsibility for the family even if they were brain surgeons.

My Grandmother was a teacher and had to resign when she got married in 1930 - they were desperate for her to go back in 1939 fir the war effort - but terminated her employment in 1946 when jobs were needed for returning service men
In the 1950s the bar was removed if she was willing to teach in a ‘special’ school
By the 60s when she retired she had worked her way back to mainstream - elevated to SMT with a special interest in SEN and apparently was well loved as a bit of an innovator (I ended up at the same school 10 years later)

This was the case with my grandmother, a nurse, in the 40s - she had to give up nursing when she got married

My dm was expected to leave work when i was born in the early 70s. I knew almost no one who had a working mum in those years

My mum married in 1969 straight from uni and carried on working (she worked as a metallurgist in a steel plant). Stopped when she got pregnant 2 years later.

Restarted when I was about 7 or 8 but as a teacher so about 10 years out of the job market. My one aunt (teacher) stopped when she got pregnant and the other stopped when she got married and was a secretary who married the boss. Both late 70s.

But my aunt goes on about how it 'wasn't acceptable' to carry on working after getting married

I presume it’s this statement that the OP is disputing as there are plenty of cases on here (my own mum included) who DID continue to work after getting married in the mid 60s, so it wasn’t ‘socially unacceptable’ as a widespread view.

It may have been that for her role in her company, this wasn’t allowed, it’s unclear from the OP though.

My grandmother was excommunicated from the Catholic church for wearing trousers.

My mum was a nurse and didn't give up on marriage in 1967, but they had expected her to. She won a RCN competition or something as a student nurse I. 63/4 and worked for 6 weeks in Denmark she said she was so shocked to see pregnant nurses and worried for their health, but realised it must be a thing not nurses not telling their employer as they had maternity uniforms 🤣. She realised quickly pregnancy wasn't a bad to work, and following her training married my Dad and inspired that pregnancy was not an illness or made you frail she trained to be a midwife following.
The hospital were not best pleased but they were experiencing nursing shortages and had recently lifted their marriage bar, however there expecting was nurses with older or adult children would return not young married stay.
When she was pregnant with me in 1969 she was given her letter of resignation which she refused, this time the policy was quite clear that pregnant nurses could not work for the hospital.
Fortunately for her she studied the policy and realised that the idea of a married women being employed and pregnant was so inconceivable it actually referred to unmarried staff.
When she went on maternity leave they actually paid her sick leave as they didn't know what to do with her, but by the time my brother came along 3 years later they had wised up, rewritten the policies and Mat leave was no longer paid. But more women were staying.
The only married women I knew who worked were teachers or in low paid employment. But my mum in many ways had an both a harder time but easier once she established she wasn't going anywhere she didn't have to find childcare , there where mums, grans, friends, aunties a plenty without work, to fill in and from age 5 I walked home and caught a bus to school and from 9 was a latchkey kid. If I was ill, she used to phone work and say I was ill, no sickness absence targets back then or not uses sick leave when you are not.

My parents married in 75 and I was born in 79 (eldest). My mum was a civil servant from 15 until she retired in 2001. I remember her saying that people tried to get her to stop working and it was frowned upon, but she was determined so she stayed in work FT

Mum married in 1974 and carried on working until she had my brother. No question of not working, but it was almost impossible once she had children. Very little part time work. Needed to be able to drive and access to a car otherwise logistically impossible. no accommodation in the workplace at all for mothers.

I'm not in the UK but women here worked after marriage - unless they didn't want to of course - but it was usual for them to leave work once pregnant.

My parents married in 1960. My mum left work shortly before the wedding.

They bought a house and the mortgage could only be calculated only on dad’s earnings as it was expected that the wife would not have a wage after they married.

They had 3 children and mum returned to some part time work when the youngest was about 8. So about 13 yrs after getting married.

One of my grandmothers was a housemaid until she married in 1901 at the age of 23. She didn't work again, but brought up her niece and her own children.

My other grandmother never worked at all. The 1911 census says she is 'at home' and that is how it stayed. Her younger sister did work, as a welfare officer, until she married in 1945.

My mother was just 20 when she married in 1940. She had been moved from her existing office job to do war work and she carried on until 1946, when my Dad came out of the army and her job disappeared anyway. She never worked again.

My aunt on the other hand, my Dad's sister, was widowed at the age of 22 and went back to work in a knitwear factory as soon as she could. She then re-married and had another child, and went back to work again. She actually worked pretty much straight through from the 1930s until retirement in 1976.

I got married straight after graduation, so by the time I hit the job market in 1977, I was already married. That did not seem to affect anything day to day, but when I got pregnant in 1982, I was the first woman employed by that provincial law firm to take maternity leave, which caused all sorts of consternation amongst the partners. There were a couple of part-timers who had left to have children and subsequently come back, but I was the first to protect my job and my rights.

"She really wanted to be a journalist and a writer."

I think this says it all - she had a dream, but she was prevented from pursuing that dream by societal expectations and her own individual family circumstances and the expectations of those around her at the time.

My mum (born in 46) always drilled into me to make sure that I had a good job and never to rely financially on a man, because so many women of her generation lacked financial independence and had to ask their husbands for money for housekeeping and things they needed for themselves. It kept them in a childlike state of dependency, when what they were desperate for was independence.

For a lot of years, I resented her advice, because being a working mum is so much tougher (in my personal opinion) than being a SAHM. I would have loved to have been a SAHM so I wish she'd encouraged me to find a rich husband breadwinner instead of focus on my career (I've ended up as the main breadwinner). However, I can understand that for those women denied the opportunity to have a career and financial independence it would have been very frustrating to watch others have those opportunities.

On the subject of Mortgages....... I was interested in buying a flat and had sufficient for a deposit. I tried to make an appointment at the Halifax Building society to apply and was told that they didn't lend to single women. That was 1977.
I left with a cheque for my entire savings.

She was not married, but had children.

My mother was born in the late 1920s and she always worked. She got married in the mid 60s

Mu mum worked. She worked from the age of 15 up until retirement.

Wow, this thread is such an education. I was aware this was "a thing" of course, but not how recently. My Gran taught at a secretarial school both before and after having her children in the fifties, and later went on to become a teacher trainer for the rest of her working life, in the North East as well. She must have really been quite unusual; I've never fully appreciated that.

Re female teachers not being allowed to wear trousers. As recently as the mid 90s it wasn't allowed at our school until a teacher turned up wearing them, was told by the male HT that it wasn't allowed and asked him what he was going to do about it! Nobody had had the nerve to stand up to him before that.

We were even told we had to wear skirts to help at the school coffee morning or summer fete

When I was pregnant the first time and having a tough time with my boss my Nana told me about her Mum.

She was a secretary in the colliery office. Once she married she wasn't allowed to work anymore. However, the wives who didn't have children were expected to "help out" around the colliery village. She was basically expected to "help out" by doing her job for free for two years until she got pregnant. She only had two children and had a lodger so she ended up often being the one in the row that looked after other children while other women had cleaning or laundry jobs and still helped out in the office as well.

When her husband died in a mining accident she was given 16 days notice to leave the cottage as it was only for colliery employees.

She ended up marrying the lodger 21 days after her husband died purely for financial reasons. They, in turn, took in another lodger who my Nana was fairly confident was actually her step-father's partner.

This was the 40s, but apparently the set up was exactly the same until the colliery closed in the late 50's/early 60's.

In about 1973 a woman walked into the school staffroom wearing trousers, sharp intakes of breath all round. She asked the Head if he thought women should be able to wear trousers and he said No, so she started to remove them! From then, trousers were allowed.

That's brilliant!

My aunt worked for Natwest bank and had to leave when she got married in around 1975. She also wasn't able to avail of the cheap mortgage which was offered to male employees, (my dad got one)

My mum had to give up her job as cabin crew in the late 60s when she got married. The only employed single women. She took her engagement ring off when she was working.

Not quite the same but my mother was sacked from her office job in 1971 for having the temerity to get pregnant to a man that didn't want to marry her.