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

My mother married in 1959. I don't think she had to give up work when she married (she was a teacher) but she became pregnant within a month of the wedding and gave up soon after.

She went back to work part-time about 20 years later, when my youngest sibling was 4

My mother had a permanent teaching job in ths early 5as but had to give it up and just be on temporary contract once she got married.
Council rules, not her choice.
Strangely men didn't have to give up permanent posts

Your aunt sounds a bit old fashioned. My mum was born in 1943, and got married in 1964 - so same year ar your aunt. She have up work when my older sister was born, but went back part time when I started nursery and full time when I started school - she was a primary school teacher. She then worked full time until retirement.

In contrast, my MIL, who is a couple of years younger than my mum, gave up work on marriage and never went back. However I think that is more due to her fragile mental health than societal expectations.

So I think your aunt was old fashioned in the choices she made.

Ha! Jinx!

I have seen, in the HR file of an older female employee, a signed slip from her husband giving her permission to return to work after marriage. The slip was dated late 1970s (she'd been at the employer a long time obvs - now she's retired). The employer was a large public sector organisation in northern England.

This stuff is all a lot more recent than you might think.

My mum had to get a signed agreement from my dad for going back to work

NHS!

I'm so glad I asked this, in my family my aunt is thought of as a bit lazy and entitled

Your family sound rude and mean.

One of my uni lecturers told me you had to give up work because according to the law you had to 'obey' your husband.
My grandmother gave up work when she got married, but worked again later, running her own very successful guest house business.
she very staunchly advised me to work hard and to have my own money.

My granny, bless her, used to go on and on about her job in the civil service. She worked there for less than a year between leaving school and getting married. It was definitely the done thing in certain jobs/social circles and I am sure there are many women who still feel slightly resentful.

Teachers and nurses usually had to give up. A good friend of mine got married 2 years into her SRN training. She wasn't allowed to continue, although she was given her enrolled nurse certificate. That really affected her earning potential when she did go back, after her children were grown up.

Doesn’t matter if she had a cleaner in later life or not - she’s got every right to be pissed off that her opportunities were curtailed because she was a woman.

Yes depends on company you worked for and their company policy. No Equality legislation to back you up so like it or lump it. I had a great aunt who married in her late 20s as she didn’t want to give up her good factory job at ferranti. She only had one dc but all jobs after were cleaning type. Other jobs you could continue my grandma worked in a bakery in late 40s and my mum went to paid nursery and her auntie worked in a factory with a nursery onsite - as a result of the war. Made in Dagenham is a very watchable film if you are interested in stuff like this.

It used to seem strange to me that every single teacher in the Chalet School series 'had to' leave once they married ...

In fairness, @MayIDestroyYou, this seems to have been because Elinor M Brednt-Dyer envisaged a happy marriage as involving lots of jolly competitiveness as to how many babies you could crank out, preferably multiple births, while continuing to demonstrate that you were still an eternal Chalet Girl.

The bit I've never quite forgiven her for is that she appears to have forgotten that Daisy Venables was an award-winning paediatrician because at some point she has Daisy's doctor husband weighing in on something to do with their children's health as if Daisy had never before clapped eyes on a childhood ailment or injury...

I was told that to some degree it was considered shameful for a married woman to work, as it implied that the man didn't earn enough to support them

A touch of ageism again. An older woman can't possibly be believed. You may not like your aunt, or listening to the same stories over and over, but that doesn't mean she's wrong.

As others have said, it would depend on the employer, but it was very common for women to lose their job (as opposed to choose to leave) when they got married. I was born in 1955 and in the 60s I remember my mum getting very angry about this stuff.

Depended on employer and personal circumstances. Definitely society frowned on married women who worked and it was seen as a failure on the husbands part that he could not afford to keep his wife. My mum married in 1956 and worked in factory canteen until she had me. Her NDN was very shocked that she kept working after marriage.

My Dhs aunt married in 1934 and her husband went to Australia for 2 years with the royal navy, 2 days after they married. She was a nurse but gave up her job after marriage because it would be shameful for his status to have her working. Spent 2 years at home waiting for him to return!

I'm not aware of any jobs you would have had to give up when marrying in 1964 from the employer's perspective - that's my parents' generation now in their 80s/90s. That said it was still considered the done thing to give up work to look after children then - certainly where I came from, not least because there wasn't the childcare provision there is now and not many women would have earned enough to make it worth while. Go back a further generation, my grandparents/ great Aunts were born 1900- 1910 and women did have to give up jobs when married then, certainly teachers did anyway.

Depends on the job.

My mother in law talked of having to give up her job once she got married - because the jobs were needed by the men to support their families. She would have married in the late fifties.
My mother had to give up her job when her first child was born as there was no maternity leave etc. That was 1971. (Married in 1970 kept working then)

My MIL was on a teacher training course when she got married in around 1960, or possibly in very early stages of teaching career, and when she told them she was getting married they tried to get her to leave - the assumption certainly was that she should not be working when married. But she challenged it and managed to win a “trial year or two” of carrying on, to prove it would be ok, and she just kept going. They needed both salaries and she loved teaching and refused to give it up. I think it was quite unusual then, though, certainly in some circles. My parents are 10 years younger than my PIL and the difference between getting married in 1960 and in 1970 was massive - very different times.

My mother married in 1960, with no interruption to her professional training, and took the minimum amount of maternity leave over that decade. There was never any question of her giving up work; she loved her job and both she and my DF were ambitious for the family.

But I know what your aunt says was also true for lots of women. It used to seem strange to me that every single teacher in the Chalet School series 'had to' leave once they married ...

It varied, both my Grandmother's worked, one was a doctor nd the other a cleaner but my mother and MIL both gave up work when they married in the late sixties as their husbands wanted them to, it was a matter of male pride (at least in the working class area that both my Dad and FIL came from) that their wives didn't need to. I think later on they would not have minded if they'd gone back, some of their friends did, but by then they were all used to the situation and made the best of it.