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)

My Nan (mum's mum) worked after her marriage to my Grandad in 1945 through the 50s to the 1970s firstly as a telephonist then as a general office worker in various factories, mostly in the South of England.
She took early retirement when my Grandad retired so she could spend time with him.
My Nan had to work to help with the bills but also, to get out of the home & have a life of her own really.

Her mother (my g gran) worked after her marriage in 1918 together with her much older husband (my g grandfather) until his sudden death in 1940 aged 58, helping him to run various shops & pubs in the Manchester area.

After his death she closed their grocers shop she then started work as a nurse in an Asylum; ending up as Matron of an Asylum before her early death in 1960 aged 63.

My other Nan (dads mum) was a bus driver after her marriage in 1940 as part of the War Effort.
When the war ended the male bus drivers came back from the War then my Nan gave birth to 5 children in quick succession.
Scandalously for those days she was then got divorced by my dads father who remarried a much younger woman.
My grandfather had become a successful photographer so he paid spousal maintenance for my Nan so she didn't have to work & paid maintenance for the children that were still at home.
He also allowed them to stay in their 3 bed home which he owned, and didn't sell it until my Nan (who still lived there) was in her 60s. Her eldest daughter & her husband who had made some money then bought her a house where she lived rent free until aged 90.

Also my g Gran Lily was one of the first women ever to join the Army and serve abroad - she joined the Women's Royal Army Corps approx 1917 & served in France near Lille.
She started work at age 14 as a weaver in St.Helen's near Manchester.
She met my g grandfather while serving in France, he was an army officer who was almost 20 years older.

I returned to work in the mid 1980s in the civil service after maternity leave, was one of the first women in my department to do this.

Yes it is common knowledge in banking that women (if they were lucky to get employed) only worked in basic admin jobs and were expected to leave as soon as they married.
I believe the civil service was similar

@CecilyP

Indeed so, and girls who stayed on into the sixth form were more likely to go to a Teacher Training College for which you only needed 5 O levels, rather than go to University. When I left school in 1969 some Colleges of Education were just introducing B Eds, for which you did need A levels. Non graduate teachers were paid less, I recall, so since they were more likely to be women, this was another piece of discrimination.

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. And yes, graduate teachers were much better paid. I don’t know if take up of the BEd was higher among male students; quite possibly!

quite likely more boys could get on a graduate programme as when the 11-plus system was countrywide, there were more places at grammar schools for boys than girls. so a pass mark for girl was higher than for a boy, in effect. i.i.r.c. about 30% of boys went to grammar school; 20% of girls.

Well although my mother lost employment due to marriage, and then seven pregnancies, my grandmother did actually “work” after marriage. Although that was during WWII when she was a member of the French Resistance. In history, I think more married women were working during WWI and WWII than from 1950-1970 because so many men were in the military so there was a shortage of workers. So we need to keep in mind that the generations of women from those wars were living in exceptional times.

@MissTrip82

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.

@MissTrip82
The fact that the working class women in your family have had to, and were able to keep working after marriage does not mean that other women did not have different experiences . Your last paragraph about the SAHM being only a recent thing is really ignorant . Have you not read the real life experiences others have posted on here ?

French Resistence - that must beat it for unusual occupations.

My Grandma used to work for Bournville she had to leave when she got married, it didn't stop her going back into the work place when she was older and times had changed.

The concept of a SAHM is a relatively recent thing, invented by the rising middle class as a status symbol.
It really wasn't we lived in a private mortgaged house in a wc area, a couple of the DM's worked not many. The Dad's did, the mother's drank tea and done a quick tidy before Ddad arrived home to a warm dinner and blockbusters.

My grandmother married in 1917. I don't know at what stage she gave up work but certainly had done by the time my mother was born in 1921 and never worked again. Not even during WW2 although she did some voluntary work then. So for middle class women it's at least 100 years. Does that count as relatively recent?

But housework was more demanding without the labour saving devices we have now, and with coal fires having to be made each morning in the winter.

I think it depends what you call "relatively recent" well-todo women mostly wouldn't have worked, but they would also have had household staff, possibly including a nursery maid or nanny, probably a cook or housemaid - you didn't have to be very well-off at all to have a general daily come in

This mostly changed after WW2 (though it started before then,) partly because of more household gadgets, partly because staff cost, partly because women realised there were more options available to them, and a lot paid better than skivvying. So while a lot of women were technically SAHMs, in that they were mothers and didn't work, they weren't necessarily doing the bulk of housework and childcare, as you might expect today, particularly before the second half of the 20th century - which in historical terms, is relatively recent.

A lot of WC women will always have worked, through economic necessity, and there have always been exceptions at all levels of society, so there was never a single story to be told.

I think that younger women forget how being at home can sap your confidence.

Back in the early 1960s they were trying to encourage married women to go in for primary teaching, and I tried to encourage my DM to take it up, because I think she would have been good at it. But she never did. By then she'd been out of the world of education for 25 years, not having had a terribly good education, and out of the world of work for getting on for 15 years, and it would have been too big a jump. She always felt under-educated - another one of those times when a girl's education just wasn't seen as being very important.

A lot of WC women will always have worked, through economic necessity, and there have always been exceptions at all levels of society, so there was never a single story to be told.

And of course as well as the husband's line of "My wife doesn't need to work", the middle class woman herself would feel that she was a bit better than the working class women who did have to go out to work, which acted as a reinforcing mechanism.

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

Ha! Not really. SAHMs always existed right from ancient times. Roman matrons didn’t have paid jobs, for example. The middle merchant class expanded dramatically during the Renaissance and these up and coming families copied the aristocrats both in the houses they bought, the clothes they wore, their manners, and also by their wives not working. The SAHM wasn’t “invented” by the middle class and a nonworking wife was a status symbol because it was what the aristocrats did.

Just be glad it wasn’t bound feet on top of being barred from working.

In teaching, they often did. A lot of posts were only open to spinsters.

@Peregrina

A lot of WC women will always have worked, through economic necessity, and there have always been exceptions at all levels of society, so there was never a single story to be told.

And of course as well as the husband's line of "My wife doesn't need to work", the middle class woman herself would feel that she was a bit better than the working class women who did have to go out to work, which acted as a reinforcing mechanism.

I think it's often forgotten these days that the working classes were and are still not homogenous! And that for a long time in the postwar a working-class man's job was also meant to provide for a family.

We're so used to the disintegration of stable jobs and rocketing house prices that it's easy to forget that in lots of the twentieth century blue-collar workers also had stable jobs and a decent standard of living, and weren't always as precarious as many low-income communities and jobs are now. Some working-class women worked to support families - especially where there were many dependent family members or no male breadwinner. But there were also many working-class communities with had a strong belief that women shouldn't work and that a good working class man provided for his family. My paternal grandmother was scandalised at the thought of her daughters working - she believed in very rigid gender roles and even in the 1980s when I was a child, served every meal in order of oldest man - youngest man then oldest women - youngest woman! If a guest was a young woman she came last int he pecking order - the men of the house were kings!

In fact when my mum (a university graduate) had to go back to work in the 90s because the recession meant my parents were struggling financially, my dad's family - all very proud working class - were scandalised about how my mum shouldn't be working outside the home and that this reflected badly on my dad. They thought of women working as definitely a middle-class affectation.

My DGM born in 1930 worked from before she left school until the age of 85. Really she was forced into retirement by dementia and her driving licence being revoked.

My gran got married in 1949. She worked as a teacher until retirement aged 60, although she had a few years out when she had her kids. Both her mum and MIL also worked after marriage - but they were poor and it was the interwar period, so maybe more normal then? Who knows

I think she is right but also there are the women who had to work! Different expectations for different classes.

From ONS
“The employment patterns of women in the UK have changed significantly. For instance, according to the 1911 Census, about 28% of all women in England and Wales worked in domestic service.

Women’s employment changed significantly during the two world wars, and they played vital roles in war-related industries like the production of ammunition. While 23.6% of women were employed in 1914 (Anitha and Pearson, 2013), this increased to 36% in 1918. At the peak of World War 2, up to 90% of single women aged 18 to 40 years were engaged in national service activities. Therefore, the world wars transformed the structure of the labour market, creating opportunities for women in sectors that were formerly dominated by male employment.

Outside periods of war, women’s position in the labour market was more marginal. A combination of explicit rules and social norms meant that women faced limited opportunities to work, and where work was available it was often less well paid.

Since World War 2, the position of women in the labour market has changed radically. Industrial changes, incremental improvements in legislation and shifting social attitudes have all contributed to a significant increase in female participation in the labour market. Table 1 shows the number of women aged 16 years and over who were engaged in economic activity between 1951 and 2018 (in 10-year averages). It shows that female economic activity increased by nearly 2.5 times over the period 1951 to 2018.”

“We can learn more about women’s labour market participation by comparing female and male participation rates over time. Figure 3 shows a comparison of the participation rates between 1971 and 2018. The participation of women increased steadily over time, from 55.5% in 1972 to 74.2% in 2018. Although male participation remained higher, it fell from a high of 94.9% in 1971 to 83.7% in 2018.”

The above is all work, both FT and PT,

“The share of full-time employment taken by women has increased over time from 29.0% in 1984 to 37.6% in 2018. Legislative and cultural change are likely to be factors here, just as they contributed to overall rises in employment.

Historically, women have dominated part-time employment. In 1984, they accounted for 87.3% of part-time workers. While still in the majority, that proportion fell to 73.3% in 2018. Several factors explain the fall, including:

a rise in the age of women having their first child
an increase in the population (and especially that of younger women in the workforce)
the introduction of childcare vouchers and other legislative changes that facilitate mothers’ working on a full-time basis”

@CecilyP

I'm sure it was harder to work in some professions and I'm not denying the sexism. But your aunt would have also known a lot of women who were still working after they got married at the time, so I think she is rewriting history.

Yes I agree with this. I was a teenager in the 60’s and don’t recognise the world some people are portraying on this thread. It sounds more like the 1930s. The economy would have collapsed without married women working. It would have been impossible to run an education system. For more people married in those days and they married young. Yet the workforce did not consist of men and teenage girls.

Women did give up work when they had young children but tended to go back to work when there children were older. My mother and nearly all my friends’ mothers worked when I was at secondary school; they were all married (or had been and were now divorced). I don’t think any of our dads felt any shame or embarrassment about this either.

I don't think anyone is saying married women never worked, but it was more difficult for them, both because of social expectations and because workplaces could and did fire them or refuse to hire them.

Labour market participation by women rose dramatically over the last 50+ years. In most western countries that rise has largely been down to married women's increased participation. Cant find freely available data for the UK online, but the US's similar history is charted nicely here:
ourworldindata.org/female-labor-supply

My mum had to give up work when she got married in the late 70s / early 80s. She was in a male dominated field, faced a lot of discrimination, and there was no childcare available. No explicit ban on married women, but practicalities made it impossible. She never went back to that profession.

Yes it was the norm to give up work. I also know someone of the same era who couldn’t get a mortgage because she was a woman. She approached several banks but got the same result.

Covid pandemic has also decreased the numbers of working females due to sudden home educating and heavily increased caring responsibilities.