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

[Winnabella]

Got an older female relative (aunt) who gave up work when she married my uncle (now passed away). They got married in 1964. My parents got married in 1970 and my mum carried on working. My grandmother carried on working until she was in her late 70s. But my aunt goes on about how it 'wasn't acceptable' to carry on working after getting married. She's not done too badly being a SAHM but does go on a bit about the sacrifices she made. She had a cleaner and a housekeeper to do the housework and she and my uncle had 2 children. My cousins often joke about how they had to wear their pyjamas for two weeks. My aunt came round on Sunday and she went on and on about the job she did just before she got married. It is a bit like she's been stuck in time - this was nearly 50 years ago now. Was it the case that women were frowned upon in the 1960s for working if they got married; and how come my mother and grandmother seemed to hold down jobs (my mum part time after I was born and before I started school)

Off track slightly, but I read a few days ago that America is one of only 4 countries in the world that doesn't have some kind of universal maternity leave/benefit.

*My MIL was a very skilled and clever woman who worked as a senior scientist. She didn't give up work when she got married, but after having a baby she had to go back to work, full time from the baby being 6 weeks old if she wanted to keep her job.^

Yes, this was more the norm. It was rare for an employer to keep a job open. For more entry level job at a time of full employment, it was possible to resign and reapply when your baby got bigger, that is if you could access childcare.

Yep, it certainly wasn't unusual. As she worked in a laboratory, full time was actually 5 and a half days a week for her as it included setting cultures on a Saturday morning to grow over the weekend.

Definitely true, until the late 1950s for example female bank employees had to be ‘single and between the age of 17 and 30’ . Even after that rule was relaxed women had to ask their employers permission to marry. The civil service required you to leave on marriage.

@JaninaDuszejko Australia was even further behind the UK on maternity leave. I got 10 weeks' paid leave in 2008 thanks to the grace and favour of my private sector employer. It took a few more years before legislation decreed that all Australian new mothers could get 18 weeks at the minimum wage.

Even now we still have to remind people that "maternity leave is not a holiday"!

I was refused a credit card from my bank without my husband’s signature in 1984

That’s very odd. I got a credit card no problem at all in 1983. Just filled in the form - no involvement from my husband at all

I think it was patchy. I was able to get a credit card even as a student (banks wanting students apparently didn't care about my possession of ovaries!). School friends who left school for work at 16 or 18 often experienced the requirement for husband or father to countersign.

I suspect company policies also varied along with branch manager discretion for loans. I had a dinosaur who refused to take my income as the main income because of mumbly reasons so we went elsewhere.

Like other posters I think I'm slightly shocked that such recent women's history isn't known.

My paternal grandmother definitely have up work when she married. My maternal gran was a more progressive character and continued to work even after having children. She was a cleaning lady, so not exactly a career but I think it was still unusual.

Officially the marriage "bar" was abolished in the Irish civil service was abolished in 1974 (when we joined the EU). But in effect, women were still "encouraged to resign" until well into the 80s. Joining the EEC also standardised the wage rates, there had been female (single only), single male and married male rates. Yes, single women were paid less than single men because they had fewer responsibilities.....and married men had to support their wife and any DCs (which were expected due to the lack of birth control).

When I was growing up, almost every person in school had SAHMs. There were a couple of teachers, 1 ran a play school, 1 worked in a shop, 1 PT nurse and 1 worked in an office because her DH worked overseas. Later on, a neighbour was a childminder as a few more got jobs when I was in my teens.

DM left nursing when she got married as there was no childcare available (she was overseas for 15 months with DF and already had me when she got back).

@TheKeatingFive

I’m in ROI and women were effectively forced out of civil service jobs when they got married, right into the 70s/80s. So yes, I’d believe it.

Same in Northern Ireland. If you wanted to continue working, you had to get your husbands permission.

It was only shortly after I joined an airline as cabin crew in the early 70s that they changed the rule about having to leave if you got married. The previous company-think was that your husband wouldn’t like it at all if you were away for a night or more. Who was going to cook his dinner and iron his shirts?

There was no official mention of a husband’s suspicion of randy first officers slipping notes under your hotel room door saying ‘The door is open, come and kiss me goodnight’ but I dare say that was very much in official minds, too. 😂

@Beamur

Off track slightly, but I read a few days ago that America is one of only 4 countries in the world that doesn't have some kind of universal maternity leave/benefit.

US maternity leave is complicated. You only get the minimum medical leave as paid by the company and then health insurance is supposed to top up the rest. If you have good health insurance it can often be better than the UK eg 12 months fully paid, access to the best postnatal and antenatal services etc. If you don’t have health insurance that’s when you suffer - but in practice most legitimate employers top up the minimum leaves - so a lot of women get at least 3-4 months even in low paid jobs.

For people saying 'this sounds like the 1930s' - some of us are talking of our own experiences. I can remember adverts in the paper advertising jobs which state the male and female rates of pay for the same job - early 1960s.

I was a teenager in the 1960s too. My mother had given up work in 1948 before she was even expecting children, and never went back to work again. DH and DB are almost exactly the same age though, and MIL a couple of years younger than my DM went back to work in the early 60s and stayed in work ever afterwards. It could partly be regional - MIL had moved south whereas DM lived in somewhere which was definitely more of a backwater (which I left as soon as I could and never went back).

Not necessarily; it much the same for boys; college of education was something you could go to if you didn’t get high enough A level grades for university.

I don't think it was much the same for boys. The boys who tended to go to Colleges of Education were the ones who wanted to be PE teachers. If I think back to my brother's school the boys tended to do science A levels and could get into University with a couple of CCs, back then. At my girls school most did Arts A levels for which I recall the typical offer was BCC for university. An awful lot missed that - which might just have been that my grammar school was a bit rubbish. I don't think it was untypical though - I live in a different part of the country now and in the 50 years plus since leaving school, I have lost count of the number of married couples I have met where the man has a University Education and the woman was a primary school teacher, quite a number of whom I know topped up their Cert of Education to a degree in their 30s/40s.

Places of work like banks didn't allow women to wear trousers. I went to an FE college for one of my A levels. Part way through the year they relaxed the no trousers rule for girls, as long as they were smart and not jeans. The reasoning was that many of the girls at the FE college were doing Secretarial courses so wouldn't be allowed to wear trousers at work, but the college had obviously noted that times were changing.

We moved into a new house on an estate in 1963 - they had central heating which was a big plus point . DH had moved into a newly built house in 1961 - that had storage heaters - which was also considered a big advance. I don't know when automatic washing machines were invented but twin tubs were pretty common by the 1960s. Freezers seem to come along in the mid seventies.

My boss refused my request to wear trousers at work in the 1990s!

My DM worked for Midland Bank when she got married 1970 and it wasn't forced as such but it was certainly an expectation. She states it would have been very frowned upon if she had stayed din work and DF would have been considered lacking. My DF was the equivalent of IT support then (with brilliant stories of hundreds of punched cards with holes that were the computer ....including a bank manager running into my father , spilling the cards then taking 3 days to reorder them...by hand ). He was already in a role that in Wales in the 1970's wasn't considered a "real man's role " so they didn't want any further criticism.

To be fair they then moved to Poland and the US while Dsis and I were born and very young and in both places it was made very clear my DM shouldn't be working.

She is open now that the difficulty in getting back into work after a break is harder for women and has always encouraged Dsis and I to stay in employment when we can because getting back in if you need to is hard (well it was 35 years ago). That said DM is a complex woman who also partly looks down on us for our carers but thats the batshit part of her. She was actually very determined in our youth.

It wasn't easy though. Amazing. If someone told me DP or Exdh should support me just because I am female I would laugh like a drain.

Scary that a previous thread still shows some employers or agencies are too close to this issue for comfort for me.

She was a cleaning lady, so not exactly a career but I think it was still unusual.

That was really very common in the working class neighbourhood that I lived in. Mums would often take the baby to work with them. I remember seeing one of our school cleaners turning up with 3 babies/toddlers piled into a pushchair!

Thinking back to my friends at school during the sixties, only three had mothers that worked, one a GP, one a hospital doctor and one a radiologist. All were notable for having up to date domestic appliances; one had a wonderful machine for peeling potatoes. She needed it because she had six children... More importantly, they had supportive husbands who encouraged them to work, and cleaning, cooking and childcare help.
All the others were SAHM, and some did voluntary work, as did my own mother - as a qualified and experienced nurse, she volunteered at a baby clinic. Oh and yes, she, like others, was expected to act as an unpaid secretary for my father, and entertain from time to time.

For people saying 'this sounds like the 1930s' - some of us are talking of our own experiences. I can remember adverts in the paper advertising jobs which state the male and female rates of pay for the same job - early 1960s.

Yes I remember that, Perigrina, and ads aimed at school leavers too - not married men with families to support. But what I don’t recognise is women being forced to give up work on marriage - having a baby, yes - having to move for your husband’s work, yes - simply for being married, no.

My aunt in Ireland had to leave the bank she worked in in the early 70s. Presumably that was because of the marriage bar mentioned upthread. I believe she and others were later hired back but at a lower salary as married women!

Mind you even in the 80s over here, a man told me that when he got married he received a pay rise because of his new family responsibilities. Performance had nothing to do with it. The Big Bang changed that attitude in the City apparently.

*I was a teenager in the 1960s too. My mother had given up work in 1948 before she was even expecting children, and never went back to work again. DH and DB are almost exactly the same age though, and MIL a couple of years younger than my DM went back to work in the early 60s and stayed in work ever afterwards. It could partly be regional - MIL had moved south whereas DM lived in somewhere which was definitely more of a backwater (which I left as soon as I could and never went back).^

My mum married in 1946 and gave up work 11 weeks before I was born in 1953. She went back to work with the same employer when I was 9. We did live in London though!

But what I don’t recognise is women being forced to give up work on marriage - having a baby, yes - having to move for your husband’s work, yes - simply for being married, no.

Yes, I think that the War probably put paid to the idea that women gave up work on marriage, but the expectation for middle class women at least was that you worked until your first child was on the way and then gave up work. I can remember being in a job in the mid seventies where one woman was pregnant and the boss came along with draft of a job advert for her replacement. To which she told him that she wasn't intending to resign. This had him completely flummoxed.

I can also remember a girl leaving school in the late sixties and her mother not wanting her to get a job but to stay at home. This was considered very odd and very old fashioned though and it wasn't long before the girl went out and found a job.

I don't think it was much the same for boys. The boys who tended to go to Colleges of Education were the ones who wanted to be PE teachers. If I think back to my brother's school the boys tended to do science A levels and could get into University with a couple of CCs, back then.

True, but not everyone got a couple of CCs. College of Education had more female students but there were a fair few males who didn’t get the required grades for university and went on to become primary school teachers. Another alternative was art school; I’ve had a couple of male friends who went to art school having failed 3 science A levels. One now, age 70, is a very successful artist!

@CecilyP

For people saying 'this sounds like the 1930s' - some of us are talking of our own experiences. I can remember adverts in the paper advertising jobs which state the male and female rates of pay for the same job - early 1960s.

Yes I remember that, Perigrina, and ads aimed at school leavers too - not married men with families to support. But what I don’t recognise is women being forced to give up work on marriage - having a baby, yes - having to move for your husband’s work, yes - simply for being married, no.

IT happened on a large scale whether you remember it or not. My MIL was obliged to leave her job as late as 1975 when she got married.

es, I think that the War probably put paid to the idea that women gave up work on marriage

Nope,

Art school yes! There were loads of those, which sucked up the slightly more avant garde students, who set fashion trends.

As I recall the career path marked out for a nice middle class girl c. 1965-70 was that you left school, went to a College of Education, got engaged at the end of your first year, got married as soon as you left College, taught for 2-3 years and then had your first child.
I was determined not to do that.

By 2000 or so, many more choices had opened up for women, although I strongly suspect that we are going backwards again.