Spinster Teachers

In the 1940s, a twenty six year old woman wrote into Home Chat magazine's problem page:

"I'm happy in my job, but I don't want to go on teaching all my life. I've had plenty of boyfriends, but I've always been unwilling to marry anyone who couldn't give me what I've been accustomed to. Now I begin to dread middle age, and long for the comfort of a husband and a home."

Before the 1944 Education Act, women teachers had to give up their jobs on marriage. Until then, women who had spent years getting an education and training to be a teacher, had to throw it all away on their wedding day. What a waste of resources for all concerned. On the other hand, those women who felt that teaching was their vocation and didn't want to do anything else in life had to resign themselves to a life without a family of their own. For those who, like most of us, desired a happy balance of both a family and a fulfilling job this led to a quandary like that described in the problem above. I would imagine though, that even if she had married after 1944 and kept on working, she would still have been expected by societal pressure to give up work when any children were born. And for her to continue working after marriage might, though legal, turn out to be a source of tension in the home. In those days, certain men prided themselves on a wife that didn't have to work. The stay at home middle class woman would remain an accepted norm for some time.

For those who stuck with their career in teaching in the days before the 1944 Act, working life might have been rewarding but it would have its bleak periods. Loneliness was a real risk, and the spinster teacher could be an object of ridicule. At this point I'm thinking about the fascinating 1938 novel "I'm Not Complaining" by Ruth Adam. The novel's narrator is a primary school teacher in the Nottinghamshire coalfield, something that Ruth Adam knew about first hand. As well as the observations of how life is for working class people in a depression, she casts a close eye on the doings of her colleagues and muses about her own life. Although confined to single status, the women teachers' pay is not that rewarding - showing the contempt of the powers that be to both working class children and unmarried women. Life didn't offer much in the way of compensations for the single teacher and they were looked down on by the mothers of the children that they taught. Those teachers might be clever, but they can't get a man and they'll never truly understand children because they don't have any. They really couldn't win. Another fine example of how the patriarchy wasted our time and our lives. 

 You might enjoy my book of short stories inspired by Joyce Grenfell

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