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)

I mean how does one 'look' fertile?

Quite easy - if you look as though you are aged 60 Plus, then it can be assumed that your childbearing years are over.

Yes it was true for most jobs. My mother married in 1966 and was promptly sacked for being married. The unemployment rate was very high at the time and the common knowledge was that a married woman was taking away a job from a man who might have a wife and children to support. This wasn’t as common in predominately female low paid areas of work such as teacher, dinner lady, cleaning lady, nurse, etc (this was back when you didn’t need a degree to teach or nurse). But any profession that was male dominated (and most of them were,...) yes women were absolutely sacked and also not hired because they were married.

Societally, it was also frowned on to keep working once married. Men were mocked and looked down on if their wives worked for not being able to support a wife. It was looked at that married women only worked if their husband was either an unemployed lazy scrounged or if their husband was so low income that she had to work. If in rare case, a woman managed to hang on to a professional job after marriage then again the husband was looked down on and it was said that the wife “wore the trousers” and he wasn’t in charge of his household.

Yes it was true for most jobs. My mother married in 1966 and was promptly sacked for being married. The unemployment rate was very high at the time and the common knowledge was that a married woman was taking away a job from a man who might have a wife and children to support. This wasn’t as common in predominately female low paid areas of work such as teacher, dinner lady, cleaning lady, nurse, etc (this was back when you didn’t need a degree to teach or nurse). But any profession that was male dominated (and most of them were,...) yes women were absolutely sacked and also not hired because they were married.

Societally, it was also frowned on to keep working once married. Men were mocked and looked down on if their wives worked for not being able to support a wife. It was looked at that married women only worked if their husband was either an unemployed lazy scrounged or if their husband was so low income that she had to work. If in rare case, a woman managed to hang on to a professional job after marriage then again the husband was looked down on and it was said that the wife “wore the trousers” and he wasn’t in charge of his household.

@Peregrina

I mean how does one 'look' fertile?

Quite easy - if you look as though you are aged 60 Plus, then it can be assumed that your childbearing years are over.

I don't think that's what the PP meant though!

@CecilyP

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

Ok. Your comment sounded as though you were dismissing my experience as not being real? Perhaps I misread.

Who was doing all this looking down on and mocking men whose wives worked in the mid 60’s? I was of an age when my mum and friend’s mums were going back to work as childcare was no longer needed. Most families were enjoying having 2 incomes and the extras it brought after years of getting by on one.

My parents got married in 1968 and had my sister in 1970 and me in 1972. I can't recall my mum ever NOT working. We had an after school housekeeper.

Who was doing all this looking down on and mocking men whose wives worked in the mid 60’s? I was of an age when my mum and friend’s mums were going back to work as childcare was no longer needed. Most families in that position were enjoying having 2 incomes and the extras it brought after years of getting by on one.

Who was doing all this looking down on and mocking men whose wives worked in the mid 60’s? I was of an age when my mum and friend’s mums were going back to work as childcare was no longer needed. Most families in that position were enjoying having 2 incomes and the extras it brought after years of getting by on one.

My mum was an unqualified tax accountant at the CoOp.

@CecilyP

Who was doing all this looking down on and mocking men whose wives worked in the mid 60’s? I was of an age when my mum and friend’s mums were going back to work as childcare was no longer needed. Most families were enjoying having 2 incomes and the extras it brought after years of getting by on one.

The rest of the neighbourhood/village. Those that thought of themselves as “respectable” and “middle class”

So went one of two ways, if the family could live on the husbands wage alone, the woman was looked down on for working. This happened in my family. We had a series of nannies and out and about I’d overhear lots of gossip about how uncaring my mother was for not being home with we children.

My mother had a PhD and was a published author, but sexism was so bad that the only job she could get was as a typing teacher. Back then employers were allowed to ask if you were married, how many children, etc. And they were allowed to discriminate against married women and mothers. Perfectly legal and expected.

If the family couldn’t live on the husbands wage alone, it was the man who was looked down on as a failure of a breadwinner. His wife was an object of pity.

@Ceara

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.

Exactly this.

I think it’s so important to keep it remembered that even a lot of the women who worked after marriage and children still had to give up their job

My nana’s 3 sisters worked after marriage, but all had to give up nursing. They ended up with cleaning jobs

Ok. Your comment sounded as though you were dismissing my experience as not being real? Perhaps I misread.

No, just saying I didn’t share it and speculating that maybe I was applying for jobs rather than a career. The rest was just my attempt at humour.

My parents married in 1953. My mother carried on teaching full time to 1961 as she was supporting my medical student father for most of that time (he was doing exams until he as 30). They wanted to buy a house so put off children until I arrived in 1961. I think people being forced out on marriage from teaching at least was well before 1953.

The rest of the neighbourhood/village. Those that thought of themselves as “respectable” and “middle class”

Maybe I never heard it because I grew up in London and from a more working class background. There was definitely some objection to mothers of young children working and talk of ‘latchkey kids’.

It may have been more common by the 60's, but in the 50's I was sometimes referred to as a "latchkey child" and it was not complimentary to my parents; very much the expectation that, when you got home from school, SAHM was there to receive you. It was seen as a reflection on the husband's earning capacity.
My godmother trained as a teacher just after the end of WWII, and it was still relatively unusual for married women to be teaching; it was assumed that a "Mrs" was a widow.
But it is certainly true that the NAS (National Association of Schoolmasters) began as a breakaway from the NUT (National Union of Teachers) because they disagreed with equal pay for women teachers - a position long since abandoned, to be fair. Men needed to be paid more, because their earnings were assumed to be supporting a family.
But at the beginning of my teaching career, I was part of a campaign for equal pension rights for widows and widowers. Men and women had the same deduction from their salary, but widows were entitled to more than widowers.
And had I been ready to get a mortgage on my first little flat, my savings and income would not have been sufficient without a male relative to stand as a guarantor.

I'm a child of the 70s and I was a latchkey kid.

My mother HAD to give up work when she married. It was policy at the company she worked for. She married in the 60s and worked for a bank.

My gran carried on working in an office when she got married, (Scotland) she was born in 1926. My great aunt born a few years later only qualified as a doctor after she got married, and carried on working. They were solidly working class though, I think that might make a difference.

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.

I suspect that if this was asked during a lesson by a teacher, it was designed to uncover and make you aware of unconscious bias.

My late MIL gave up work when she married in 1954. I always found it strange, especially as my mum worked all her life. If she hadn’t we would have starved! My dad never earned much and they were hard up even with both of them working. I guess she was a good role model in that sense at least, as we grew up taking it for granted that we would all have to work for a living.

My maternal grandmother, born in 1895, was widowed with 4 children in about 1930, when my mum was 10 ish. Mum was the 3rd. There was no social security so it was sink or swim, Nanna became a children’s Nanny, and later a housekeeper, in order to keep her children from the workhouse. She married the man she was a housekeeper to, he was an elderly bachelor and they had a happy few years until he died. She had a comfortable last few years thanks to him.
My paternal grandmother, in the east end of London, was widowed when pregnant with her 10th child, in 1918. She had no profession. Again, there was no social security. She died in 1935 , in the asylum of the workhouse, I’m not sure whether my dad ever knew that, he always told me she’d died when he was a child.
The local extended family helped and all the 8 surviving children, including my dad, born in 1915, were educated. 2 of the boys became pharmacists, others went into accountancy, teaching, the girls married well!
This is just 2 generations back from me.

Men needed to be paid more, because their earnings were assumed to be supporting a family.
My mum still believes this clap trap!
I survived a round of redundancies and mum asked who lost their job. When I told her the name of the bloke she couldn't believe it.
She was saying you would have thought that they would have kept him on. When asked why she was saying 'well you know , He needs a man's wage' After going through all the ridiculous arguments about ' a man's wage' I pointed out he was single with no ties and I have two young kids and Dh's business has just folded so I was supporting everything she still could believe I got the job over him ( even though I was more qualified and was getting better results and interviewed well!) The year this happened? 2016 😂😂

My grandmother worked her whole life in schools. She got married in 1961 and worked after all her 3 children were born. My great grandmother worked her whole life too as a seamstress although she did do this from home.

many men had to inform their employer if they intended to marry, as they would have greater responsibilities, might need more money

Economists call this the [male] "marriage bonus" and it's still a thing: men's salaries go up when they marry, women's generally go down.

@irresistibleoverwhelm yes as an army brat I lived all over Uk and saw the differences, being a scot saw them when we visited “home” too, south east was way ahead of things generally speaking.

@groovergirl - absolutely there didn’t need to be an official marriage or motherhood bar for employers, educators and trainers to discriminate and prevent women and girls from accessing and entering education, training and workplaces

@alexdgr8 we didn’t get first freezer till ‘86 microwave ‘88 and that was because dad got a bonus

@TheAlphaandTheOmega you were lucky, I had a nightmare finding one for dd (ASC) even though we were in an albeit small city at the time. ASC was other end of city and with rush hour traffic I had to negotiate altered hours and shave 30 mins off my lunch break just so I could drop off and pick up on time. Several frantic days where an accident or roadworks delayed me and I’d have to pay a fine to ASC. I always let them know I was on my way and often they knew before me as they’d heard reports on the local radio

@givemesteel - genuinely wondering how old you are because the changes were VERY. Slow to work their way through, there weren’t a lot of options PLUS in the late 70’s and early to mid 80’s unemployment was very high so it was hard for ANYONE to get a job. I’m wondering if your social history knowledge is a little lacking? Plus for many who lived rurally/semi rurally there were - and still are - precious few employers anyway. This all means it’s almost always an employers market - they have the power, that’s why legislation has been necessary to MAKE them treat employees decently and fairly.

so I think she is rewriting history don’t think it’s ops aunt doing that!

@brefugee I first became aware of it when a babysitter of ours told us her CO had REFUSED her permission as he didn’t approve of her fiancé! Outrageous!

@EL8888 sorry I didn’t mean to be off, just found your comment odd. The civil service even now the depts have great disparity in terms and conditions of contracts. I’ve worked for mod admin in civil service as ex was army and it allowed me to transfer at times and keep a job, other relatives work or worked for hmrc, dvla, passport office, fco, dwp etc all have very different ways of working and of recruiting.

Certainly any roles that involved overseas travel or assignments were very much not seen as “suitable” for married women and definitely not mothers. It was this attitude led to some of my female relatives transferring to other depts upon marriage and children even if they didn’t want to, lots of pressure put on them. Little short of hazing really.

My mother and nearly all my friends’ mothers worked when I was at secondary school; be very interested to know what type of jobs, very hard to get into more “career” than “job” positions after a long time out of the workforce

@beamur I have family in USA and their attitudes to sick leave and maternity rights are shockingly far behind the rest of the world! They seem to have a system of allocated sick days that they have to judge whether it’s worth taking a day off and using up a day of their allowance, mothers are pressured to return to work fairly quickly after birth.

Very annoying the number of posters expressing scepticism who I am fairly sure these eras were not in their living memory. Don’t dismiss the ACTUAL experiences of those of us who went through it.

although I strongly suspect that we are going backwards again.

I very much sense that too

@peregrina I wonder what today’s 20/30 something women and even men would make of this tv show?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheTwooofUss(1986TVV_series)

I had friends that were a cohabiting couple in the early 90’s which their parents grudgingly tolerated but when she became pregnant (planned) the parents all then insisted they get married, lots of arguments and tension and the couple eventually capitulated as they were being ostracised by their whole families! Heartbreaking! They are still together and have had more dc but I think they would have even if they hadn’t married.

Well, of course, even in the early seventies, quite a lot of women were already pregnant (shock, horror) when they got married

This made me smile - I was the first woman for several generations who WASN’T pregnant when they married in my family.

This also raised the school leaving age to 15 and was implemented in 1947. not sure this applied in Scotland, all but a few of my relatives of parents generation (born ‘40’s and ‘50’s and ‘60’s - big catholic families I have an aunt and an uncle who are closer in age to me than to my parents their siblings) left school at 14 inc both parents.

And on the back of that, I have asked if this can go into classics.

Excellent idea

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

Totally agree, also agree that younger women often don’t truly understand/comprehend WHY this is a problem as they haven’t lived how it was

@countrygirl99 we have a similar tale in my family, one of my grans sisters had a similar situation. If people learned she had left her husband despite the fact he battered her she received much criticism.

Admittedly I’ve never had a high powered job where leaving would be a problem. Or perhaps I didn’t look particularly fertile.

As I said in an earlier post I have been asked such questions in interviews this century for nmw part time retail jobs! So hardly high powered. I don’t think I look particularly fertile either (and I’m not)

I can sort of understand them asking with something like the diplomatic service where you’ll be posted abroad
Why? Why is it any more problematic for a woman/mother to do such a role than a man/father?

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.

Definitely - it’s damn hard even now to get back into the workplace after a long break. Employers all want “recent experience” “recent references” etc

MIL had to leave the army, as she outranked the man she married. a boss I had with mod civil service was disciplined for marrying a man of a Lower rank even though he was in a different branch (navy) - this was late 1990’s! He was not affected at all.

My ex - who was passed over for promotion many times because he’s a lazy jobsworth got promoted a few months after dd was born as his boss thought he needed the extra money now he was a father. This was in 2001!