What would I be doing at home all day?’: Oral narratives of Irish married women’s working lives 1936-1960.
Background to the study
There has been a virtual absence of academic concentration on women’s experiences of waged work in the Irish free state of the 1940s and 1950s.[i] In an attempt to address this deficit, the authors sought to conduct an investigation into women’s experiences of work in this period using an oral history methodological approach. This project, which commenced in 2000, has resulted in the collection of 42 oral history interviews with women who responded to a public call for participants and who were residing in the Counties of Cork, Limerick and Kerry.[ii] The narratives do not reflect a random or representative sample of women who worked in this period, however they do provide rich textured ethnographic accounts of women’s experiences of diverse kinds of waged work and associated issues. For the purpose of this paper, the authors have analysed these oral history narratives to reveal the patterns of employment for women after marriage. The selection of married respondents’ testimonies was guided by our desire to unearth the extent to which these particular respondents negotiated the home making, mothering role deemed to be the most appropriate for them at the time.
In the early decades of the new Irish State, Catholic ideology and statutory developments combined, to create a range of formal and informal barriers to the participation of married women, in the workforce. The role of motherhood was socially and legally sanctioned as the 'natural' role for Irish women. This was clearly evidenced by the 1937 constitution with Article 41.2:1 stating that "By their life within the home, women give to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved." Article 41.2:2 indicates the State's active support of this role for women asserting that "the State, shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home." The interchange of the words 'woman' and 'mother' in these articles indicates the strength of the ideology of motherhood in Irish society. This ideology has traditionally been buttressed by legislation and policy which hindered women's equal participation in the labour force. (Rowley, 1988). Legislative measures employed in the early decades of the new State limited the public role of women and copper-fastened their dependent status as guardians of the home. The 1925 Civil Service Act restricted certain jobs for men and legislation enacted in 1933 required female teachers to resign on marriage (Valiulis, 1995; O' Dowd, 1987). Five years later the lowering of the retirement age for women teachers from 65 to 60 again curtailed the work opportunities open to professional women (O' Dowd, 1987). Furthermore, a marriage bar introduced in the Civil Service in 1933 operated until 1958 for primary school teachers (O' Leary, 1987) and until 1973 for all other categories. A similar bar applied in many semi-state and private organisations like Aer Lingus and the Banks, until 1974. The labour market participation of working-class women was also restricted in 1935 following the introduction of the Conditions of Employment Act (O 'Dowd, 1987). The Act provided ministerial power for the prohibition or limitation of the number of women employed in any form of industrial work. These barriers to women's participation in the labour force were compounded by the discriminatory conditions of work they experienced. The practice of paying women lower wages for work similar to that being carried out by male colleagues, continued until the enactment of equal pay legislation in 1975 and pregnant workers were not accorded any rights until the passing of the Maternity Protection of Employees Act in 1981 (Beale, 1986). Furthermore the tax and welfare system was based on a male breadwinner model and was intrinsically biased toward female and in particularly, married female workers (Mahon, 1994). The official statistics which demonstrate married women’s low participation rates in the Irish labour force over the decades, are frequently cited to indicate the success of the legal and other initiatives taken to relegate married women to the private sphere of family and home.
Fahey’s (1990; 174) examination of PES data from 1926-1985 suggest that women’s overall participation in gainful occupations in Ireland remained fairly stable over the whole period at around 30%. Within the overall pattern married women’s participation remained low and was static at around 5% from the 1920s to the 1960s. During the 1960s and 1970s it began to rise so that by 1985, married women’s participation rate reached just over 20% (Fahey, 1990; 174). 90.3% of all married women described themselves as being engaged in home duties in 1926, rising to 93.7% in 1961, the major increase happening in the years 1946-1961 (Clear, 2000; 21). Commentators (Clear, 2000; Fahey, 1990; Daly, 1981) have however noted the deficiencies of such statistical data in interpreting women’s economic activity. Of two key approaches to labour supply measurement, the PES (Principle Economic Status) approach is most established in Ireland. This classification is used to categorise each adult according to his or her principal occupation. Fahey (1990) has highlighted a number of drawbacks of this particular approach where the measurement of married women’s labour activity is concerned. For example, women’s dual roles would have posed problems for classification. Thus it is generally accepted that women’s labour activities have been underestimated in Irish labour statistics and hence analyses derived from such statistics present an incomplete picture of women’s economic activity in Irish society. We hope to demonstrate in this paper the value of oral history enquiry in facilitating a more penetrative and nuanced exploration of the complexity of women’s working lives. The value of the oral history methodological approach is that it allows us to disentangle the messy threads of married women’s labour activity for the purpose of achieving a fuller understanding of how women have been economically active during their marriages.
Given the legal and social climate of the time and the statistical data presented, it is interesting to note that for the majority of married participants in this study, marriage did not represent the end of their employment biographies. Of the 42 women who told their stories, 38 women were married, 3 were single and one woman was in religious life. Ten of the married women did not engage in any kind of paid work after marriage while the majority, 28 women did. Of these women, two were employed on a continuous basis as teachers. Two others worked continuously in family businesses and one woman worked continuously for a farmer, in lieu of her family’s accommodation on his land. The remaining 23 women worked at some stage of their married lives. The composition of the study group contrasts sharply with the homogeneous home based, economically inactive group presented in statistical sources and sociological commentaries.
This paper focuses particularly on perceptions of appropriate roles for married women, the narrators’ own experiences of employment after marriage, their status as workers and the challenges they encountered in reconciling their work with family responsibilities.
Perceptions of married women’s roles
The perception of a married woman’s role as one very much confined to home and childcare was a recurring theme in the women’s testimonies, yet the notion of the married woman worker created a certain dissonance, as identified by some of the women interviewed. The importance of the homemaker role and the personal fulfilment it brought was highlighted in many narratives. Other accounts romanticised married life, while a few transcripts revealed how some women feared the role and the limitations they believed were associated with it.
Elizabeth Shorten worked as a nurse in hospitals in England and in the Irish army from 1947 until her marriage in 1955 described a married woman’s role as ‘homemaker and mother.’ Kathleen Fitzgibbon who worked in a factory in the same time period described women’s place as ‘in the house, the home. You were just a woman.’ Pauline Lee who married and worked in England and Wales in the early 1940s recalled that it was expected that women would ‘get married and have babies.’ Kate* a dispatcher in a sweet factory gave up her work when she got married in 1940. She explained:
I mean when you married you married for good…. And you married for… if you were blessed with children well you were to stay at home and mind them till they were you know adults… It was an unheard [of] thing, women going back to work in those days.
Maureen* who resigned from her secretarial job when she married in 1950 noted that:
Well women weren’t really educated to a high standard in those days because it always…. You always assumed a woman would get married, stay at home, have children, and that was the end, become a housewife.
Maura Canty resigned from her secure pensionable job as a telephonist when she married in 1951, despite being in the unusual position of earning more than her husband at the time:
So I used always say, when we got married that he married me for my money. He had three pounds and six and I had what was it? - three pounds, six and six. I was earning more than him.
Many of the women interviewed reiterated the prevailing view that mothers were at the heart of the home and the family and that they had special qualities for this role that men did not possess. Kathleen Fitzgibbon made this point:
...the women have the children and the women is geared for children, I think. I mean there is a difference. …My husband the time didn't know their ages. You'd have to tell him when they were born, you know. I dunno is it because they're reared that way or.. I still think they think differently, don't they. And I think the woman's, well, she should be the main point behind her children…But the woman I think is the main where the family is concerned…. But in family life, I think, the mother has a more important role than the man. He should help, like. I'm all for him helping.
Maureen O’ Mahoney who married in 1942 and resigned from her job as an office worker voiced a similar opinion: 'and a mother had something. She mightn’t have thought so herself but I mean she was the focus, the pivot of the home really.'
These views reflect the prevailing construction of a married woman’s role and for many women the prospect of leaving work for marriage was taken for granted, was not distressing and for some was perceived very positively. Joan Griffin a civil servant who resigned from her employment when she married in 1966 expressed this acceptance in the following way: 'I didn’t think any more about it because we were conditioned into that. That when you married you gave it [work] up.' Mary O’ Sullivan Greene who resigned from her office job very soon after marriage acknowledged that she did miss work but that:
…they were the times and….. you accepted the way of life…..I wouldn’t have had to leave but it was the done thing. I actually went back for a while for a month or two because the girl who replaced me didn’t stay and they asked me to come back. I’m sure if I wanted to I could have stayed on but I was pregnant then. People generally minded their own children.
Margaret Smith* who finished her job as a writing assistant in the civil service when she married in 1957 recalled that she was ‘quite happy’ about leaving her job and she believed that for her, motherhood and work were not compatible: 'I wouldn’t have continued anyway. Certainly having a family would have decided me straight away to give it up.'
Maura Canty a telephonist who married in 1951 viewed married life very positively, perceiving it to be liberating, freeing her from the routine associated with her work. She claims she was '…thrilled.’ I was going to a new life altogether and I could stay up as late as I liked.' Similarly Catherine Walshe who left her job as a civil engineer when she married in 1953 recalled:
I was delighted…. Oh God, I remember walking up the aisle and the thought of never … babies, I was going to have loads of them and of course they didn't need any work. I knew nothing about anything and I floated up the church. That I'd be with him for the rest of my life and no going back to work. … Every step, 'God I never have to go to work again, isn't that marvellous.' We were eegits, absolutely green.
Mary Taaffe who left her job as a poultry instructress when she married in 1953 had a contrasting perception of what marriage would mean. Talking about the independence her job and her single life had afforded her, she commented:
.. there was one big snag in it. I would have to give it up when I got married. I mean I was looking for a man alright but not to marry….. I thought God how can they do that, they [women] give their whole time talking about feeding babies and changing them and that sort of thing. I thought dear God, protect me from that.
Given the pervasiveness of the view that a woman’s role was predominantly home based, economically inactive and the expectation that women would terminate their employment upon marriage, the notion of the married woman worked met with a certain amount of resistance. Margaret Smith* described what she believed to be the general attitude to married women workers during the 40s and 50s.
I think that the attitude then was – don’t forget that this was a time of severe unemployment – and the attitude was, and it was certainly my attitude, and I’d say it was generally held, that it would be unfair to have one household with two people working and another household with neither working, that it was fairer all round to have one breadwinner.