A Marriage Bar of Convenience? The BBC and Married Women's Work 1923-39

Abstract

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.

Deviant typicality: gender equality issues in a trade union that should be different from others

“…It is arguable that the determined striving for recognition of acting as reputable employment contributed to containment of women's place within the fledgling union. Locating this aspect of the union in its early industrial setting, the BBC introduced a Marriage Bar in 1932, which Murphy (: 4) argues was also the conformist product of a desire for ‘the trappings of convention and respectability’.…”

Don’t tell them I can type: negotiating women’s work in production in the post-war ABC

“…The paradigm of the dutiful married woman pervaded the post-war ABC and fostered a dual class of female workers: on the one hand, for the majority of these female workers, a career was determined to be a secondary agenda, with family duties their primary mission; on the other hand, there was a small group of women experts committed to their career with the socio-economic freedom to negotiate lives outside their domestic duties. Kate Murphy’s (2014) research on women in the early years of BBC radio highlighted a similar duality in its treatment of women, mirrored in later years by the ABC.…”

Feminist avenues for listening in: amplifying silenced histories of media and communication

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