“One man one job”: the marriage ban and the employment of women teachers in Irish primary schools

The Perspectives of Women Professors on the Professoriate: A Missing Piece in the Narrative on Gender Equality in the University

“…The State promoted a deeply gendered ideology which placed women firmly within the home sphere through a formidable alliance between the state and the Catholic Church. The gender restrictions imposed by the state throughout the 1920s and 1930s covered such areas as women's right to participate on juries, their right to take examinations to gain entry to certain positions in the civil service, and finally the ban on married women occupying jobs in the public sector [18]. While present-day Irish society is significantly altered from the early decades of political independence, significant residual gender bias is still evident.…”

‘I am amazed at how easily we accepted it’: the marriage ban, teaching and ideologies of womanhood in post-Independence Ireland

“…At various intervals single women teachers were valued over married and vice versa (Blount 2000;Goldin 1990;Whitehead 2003). The discourse surrounding the premium placed on single versus married women teachers testifies to the way in which women's marital status has been historically viewed as central to their identity as teachers (Redmond and Harford 2010). It also reflects the tension between the image of true womanhood and women's position as paid members of the labour force (Prentice and Theobald 1991).…”

“…This article examines the perspectives of 14 primary school teachers who were subject to a marriage ban introduced into the teaching profession in Ireland in 1932 which required that women primary school teachers who qualified after this date retire upon marriage (Redmond and Harford 2010). The aim of the article is to provide, through personal testimony, key insights into the gendering of teaching as a suitable profession for women in twentieth-century Ireland; how gender shaped social and cultural roles; Church control over women's training and employment; and the use of policy to deepen women's social and economic subordination.…”

“…The marriage ban applied principally to white-collar public sector jobs, prompting some scholars to suggest that it was influenced more by social consensus rather than economic imperative. Firing professionals would not create jobs for the semi-skilled or unskilled, the bulk of those unemployed in the 1930s (Redmond and Harford 2010). The emergence of a ban in Ireland was not unexpected; the country was, post-independence, metamorphosing into a deeply conservative, nationalistic country led by a fledgling government whose policies were closely shaped by an omniscient Catholic Church (O'Donoghue and Harford 2011).…”

“…The leader of the INTO at the time was married to a teacher and was thus personally affected by the change in rules, but the government were unyielding, justifying its policy by claiming that there were difficulties in finding replacements for married women teachers on maternity leave, even though women paid for and often arranged their own cover. 2 Arguably, the real crux of the issue was that married women teachers were in double-income families, often married to fellow professionals and thus enjoying a higher standard of living than many other families (Redmond and Harford 2010) as revealed in a government memorandum:…”