In October 1932 the British Broadcasting Corporation introduced a marriage bar, stemming what had been an enlightened attitude towards married women employees. The policy was in line with the convention of the day; marriage bars were widespread in the inter-war years operating in occupations such as teaching and the civil service and in large companies such as Sainsbury's and ICI. However, once implemented, the BBC displayed an ambivalent attitude towards its marriage bar which had been constructed to allow those married women considered useful to the Corporation to remain on the staff. This article considers why, for its first ten years, the BBC bucked convention and openly employed married women and why, in 1932, it took the decision to introduce a marriage bar, albeit not a full bar, which was not abolished until 1944. It contends that the BBC marriage bar represented a quest for conformity rather than active hostility towards the employment of married women and demonstrates how easily arguments against the acceptability of married women's work could be transgressed, if seen as beneficial to the employer. Overall, the article contemplates how far the BBC's marriage bar reflected inter-war ideology towards the employment of married women.

In the conclusion to her chapter on women in the BBC in Women in Top Jobs, the sociologist Isobel Allen queried 'whether women had done as well in the BBC as might be expected' (Fogarty et al., 1971: 214). She pointed out that most of the very senior women were about to retire with no obvious female successors. 'There is certainly no reason to imagine', she continued, 'that anything like the situation in the early 1930s, when almost half the departmental heads in the BBC were women, could be repeated in the near future ' (1971: 214). Although Allen overstated the situation, many women had risen to important positions in the interwar BBC. This article will contend that a number of distinctive circumstances facilitated a progressive approach in this period: a combination of the BBC's newness, its pioneering spirit, and its modernity, which intersected with expanding educational and employment opportunities for middle-class women in the aftermath of the First World War.The BBC's independence from state control and its commitment to public service rather than commercialism is also important. The seeds of change which would gradually dilute the role of women are also discernible in this period. Bureaucratisation, professionalisation and a move towards conformity would increasingly masculinise the BBC, creating the discriminatory circumstances fully evident by the 1970s.The BBC of the 1920s and 1930s was uncommon in its treatment of women (see Murphy, 2016). Three women attained

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