Teachers in the inter-war years

[prid2019]

I read recently that there was a marriage bar for women in some of the professions, including teachers, between the First and Second World Wars. Although it appears to have been unofficial and there was the 1919 ********** Disqualification Act which should have ruled it out. But the attitude among some local authorities seems to have been that married women shouldn't be working as they were depriving men of work! Does anyone know if this 'marriage bar' applied to women teachers in Liverpool? I ask because I originally thought that my grandmother (my dad's mother) came to Liverpool in the 1920s with her family to take up a teaching job but I'm not sure now.

Thanks

[MaryA]

I always thought it was an occupation that needed to be retired from, like nurses, when marriage came along, but I don't know when this practice stopped, certainly before about the 1950's. But surely you are right that women, even married ones, must have taken the place of men when they went to war.

[prid2019]

Yes Mary, because they certainly did a lot of 'men's jobs' in the First World War. It looks like the bar was repealed in 1944 and I've just found a site which shows women headmistresses at Liverpool schools in the 1926 Gore's Directory so perhaps the marriage bar didn't apply in Liverpool. Unless there was one rule for heads and another for the teachers!

[AndyJ]

For what it's worth, I have a couple of married women in my tree (one pretty distantly related) working as teachers between the wars. The first was a music teacher who qualified in 1921, married in 1924 and was teaching in an outer London school in September 1939 at the time of the Register. The second was widowed in 1918 so possibly a special case, but taught between around 1920 and her retirement in about 1932, in Surrey as far as I am aware.