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)

Women are also in danger of losing those sex-based rights and protections because 'sex' as a class is being legally eroded.

Yes!!

Because many women don't realise how recent was the overt blatant the discrimination against them, because of their sex. Not what they wore, or the sexuality. Simply because they were female.

And it's still happening.

Every single married woman in my working class family has worked throughout their lives. Every single one.

Many many families, for generations, have never ever had enough money to be able to carry an adult family member (by adult I mean from the age of 14/15, when they all started the factory/shop/pub/cleaning/service jobs they all had).

The concept of a SAHM is a relatively recent thing, invented by the rising middle class as a status symbol.

For people saying 'this sounds like the 1930s' - some of us are talking of our own experiences.

Yup. My final interview for the Diplomatic service included a question about plans for a family. This was the 1980s. When I opened my first bank account on going to university (late 70s), my father had to sign for me (although that might have been because I was 17, not 18 at the time).

Indeed when I was born in the late 70s, my 80 year old great-grandmother was still walking to and from the job in a hospital kitchen she’d had since she had her first child. My 60 year old grandmother was still working as a carer for disabled children, as she had done for thirty years.

@IntoAir

For people saying 'this sounds like the 1930s' - some of us are talking of our own experiences.

Yup. My final interview for the Diplomatic service included a question about plans for a family. This was the 1980s. When I opened my first bank account on going to university (late 70s), my father had to sign for me (although that might have been because I was 17, not 18 at the time).

I was asked, only 17 years ago, at an interview, whether I was planning to have any more children.

If people don't believe the truth that the female sex still suffers discrimination then they need to wake up.

Absolutely, our sex based rights are being eroded by the current gender debate.

I was asked, only 17 years ago, at an interview, whether I was planning to have any more children.

I’ve never been asked that. Not whether I was going to have any in the first place or whether I was going to have any more. Admittedly I’ve never had a high powered job where leaving would be a problem. Or perhaps I didn’t look particularly fertile.

I can sort of understand them asking with something like the diplomatic service where you’ll be posted abroad. Also women saying they had to leave the army in the 60s and 70s when you could be posted to a far wider variety of distant places like Hong Kong and Singapore. Of course they would never asked a man; they’d have just assumed his wife would be a trailing spouse. It would have blown their minds for it to be the other way round.

they’d have just assumed his wife would be a trailing spouse. It would have blown their minds for it to be the other way round. I wonder did they have a choice for the DF to resign? I doubt it.

This was still happening in the 1980s. I remember when I was a kid, going to a lawyer's office, and the reception lady had just come back from a honeymoon, and all I wanted to ask was "if you are married, why are you still working?" So clearly I got that thought from somewhere. That, and at school a riddle was "A man and his son come into the ER and need an operation. the surgeon says "I can't operate on him as that's my son" How is this possible" So they were pushing this rubbish down our throats in school in the mid 1980s still.

Sure, heaps of women ran their own businesses all throughout history, but there seems to have been a massive push for women to stay home after marriage from the 1940s. Must have been to "give the lads their work back" post war. oh and "know your place".

So in Australia at least for a while you were sacked from your job when you got married.
Even in Japan TODAY, women are expected to stop working once they marry. Probably why they aren't marrying.....

My mum got married in 1961 and gave up work when first baby arrived in 1963. She was expected to stay at home and look after the children. But she wouldn't have been able to work anyway as there was no family support, no nurseries and no such thing as a childminder.

I remember some of the kids at primary school in the 70s being pitied as they were latch key kids. Basically both parents worked and as there was no childcare option the kids let themselves into the house when they came home from school by using a key tied on a piece of string which they fished out of the letterbox.

Women that worked outside the home were always a rarity and we felt sorry for their kids!

I'm also shocked that the OP knew none of this. Women have had to fight tooth and nail to work.

My friend once told me that M&S didn’t employ married women. That female staff ‘had to leave’ when they got married. I always wondered whether it was true or not but could find a definitive answer.

My mum worked for M&S after getting married. However she gave up when she got pregnant with me. Didn’t have to though.

Yes, my DM had to leave her diplomatic service job when she married in the early 1970s, due to the marriage bar, which the Foreign Office maintained until 1973. Not so very long ago in the scheme of things.

Another book that's interesting is How Was It For You? by Virginia Nicholson, which is a social history of British women in the '60s. She's also written one on women in the '50s (which I've not read,) and Singled Out, about "surplus" women between the wars.

Experiences of marriage bars will have varied a lot. In education, it tended to vary according to which LEA it was. A lot of big corporates hung on to them for ages. Other jobs never had them - it was mostly "career-type" jobs, where women could be taking them from men. It was never as much of an issue with the sort of jobs that wouldn't be viewed as "men's" jobs anyway.

Whether or not there were formal marriage bars in place, there were social expectations, and they change more slowly than company policies or legislation. Whenever employment legislation is brought in, there will have already been some employers who had voluntary policies offering maternity leave or additional health and safety measures, but most will need the legislation to force them to implement such things. It's 51 years since the Equal Pay Act, and we still can't take it for granted - especially when it comes to extras like bonuses rather than base pay. There are still plenty of employers who avoid employing women in their fertile years, though they will say something like, "his experience was a better match," rather overtly admit to breaking the law. And if they do employ women, "well, she won't want that promotion, because she's got children," "she wouldn't consider a transfer to the office in that country," and so on - rarely do they actually ask the woman in question.

I work for an organisation which is pretty good as a woman's employer, but I still have female colleagues who've been advised not to have more children if they want to progress and so on. Not in my own department, obviously... there aren't any other women,besides me.

Really sad how many women are doubting the lived experience of other women.

There wasn't a blanket law against working after marriage or childbirth, it was variable depending upon jurisdiction, employer, role, education etc and of course things changed rapidly throughout the latter half of the 20th century.

Poor women continued to work, those in certain roles continued to work and highly educated women in senior roles would have been better placed to challenge rules and stay in roles.

It is also sad the number of people saying "well she could have gone back to work on the 70s/80s" without recognising the barriers that prevented women from returning to work. It wasn't easy to just return to your old job, women going back to work after several years out of the workplace would have been limited to what they could do unless they had certain qualifications. Childcare was limited/non-existant, and part time roles were less common. Plus there were attitudes and social norms applying pressure.

At my school in the Midlands in the 80s most of the fathers were in skilled manual roles with a few lower managerial. Only one child in my class had a full time working Mother and it really stood out. As a black woman too she probably faced a huge amount of prejudice. I recall negative comments about the father doing the school run, he worked permanent nights to ensure there was childcare. Other children had stay at home mums or mums who did a variety of low skilled part time jobs in evenings or during school days. Many were dinner ladies, lollypop ladies, or worked as school secretaries or receptionists, others cleaned, one was a child minder despite the slight disapproval of children being left with professional childcare, one was a bar maid which was considered a bit disreputable. My Mum had a qualification and was able to find a lower level part time role within her sector and was able to work around school and my Dad's job, but she was in the minority. Just because women were allowed to work doesn't mean it was easy.

We need to listen to women's experience so that we can ensure that we don't go back to the bad old days.

That did have paragraphs 🙄

It has got paragraphs on my screen...

I’ve never been asked that. Not whether I was going to have any in the first place or whether I was going to have any more. Admittedly I’ve never had a high powered job where leaving would be a problem. Or perhaps I didn’t look particularly fertile.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make? @CecilyP?

I mean how does one 'look' fertile?

I had one child, aged 2. The director of the company asked me if I was planning any more kids?

My mother and grandmother both worked still after both marriage and children.

With my grandparents, in the 50's and 60's they shared household chores and childrearing. She did most of the cooking, but he'd wash and and do most of the cleaning etc and do packed lunches.

This was certainly true right up until the 1970’s. My Aunt worked after she was married in the mid-50’s, but only because she concealed the fact that she had got married by wearing her wedding ring on a chain under her top. The minute she was pregnant she quit in fear that the employer would find out her deception and blacklist her ( but she never worked again after becoming a Mum).

For anyone who's interested, Dan Snow's History Hit podcast has a fairly recent episode about the history of working mothers.

My mum gave up work on the insistence of my father. He didn’t like the fact she earned more (a job in ICT for a large company with huge prospects and she was very clever so would have progressed well). She was sad about it but said it was the done thing.

I can sort of understand them asking with something like the diplomatic service where you’ll be posted abroad.

It was "sort of" illegal, even then.

I think the class thing is significant here: yes, working class women have always worked. But worked - generally - in jobs without pensions, with low pay, with little security, and no promotion - jobs, rather than careers, which could be organised around childcare and domestic (unpaid) labour.

So important that women's stories - of fighting to be able to work, or of wanting to but being unable due to circumstances or social expectations - keep being told. It's all still so recent really - all in living memory or touching distance of it. And you only need look at the disproportionate effect of lockdown on mothers to see how easily things can slide backwards again.

I mean how does one 'look' fertile?
I’ve no idea; it was meant to be a joke.

MIL had to leave the army, as she outranked the man she married.

My mother and grandmother both worked still after both marriage and children.

With my grandparents, in the 50's and 60's they shared household chores and childrearing. She did most of the cooking, but he'd wash and and do most of the cleaning etc and do packed lunches.