Edel Coffey: The marriage bar clipped the wings of countless women
Edel Coffey: Marriage bar was jaw-droppingly discriminatory
Last week, I was on a beach in Spain, pretending to disconnect from work, news, the world, but secretly catching up on the day’s news programmes by night. While my family slept, I stealthily sucked up all of the news and opinions to be had, refilling my FOMO cup to the brim.
I don’t like to switch off. I honestly love my work and consider myself lucky to have it. So I was stopped in my tracks as I worked my way through RTÉ Radio One’s schedule in the wee hours, by the voices of some women who had called the Joe Duffy show to talk about their experience of the marriage bar.
For those of you who don’t know what the marriage bar was, it sounds like a terrifying and implausible plotline for the next series of The Handmaid’s Tale, but actually it was a real thing in Ireland between the 1930s and 1973, whereby women who worked in the civil service were forced to give up their jobs upon marrying. It sounds like something out of a Grimm’s fairytale, doesn’t it?
It was a jaw-droppingly discriminatory law that casually, cruelly and effectively clipped the wings of many women. The real clincher was, a lot of these curtailments were only discovered after marriage. While most women knew they would have to stop working when they got married, they could not have guessed at the many insidious downsides their new status of wife would bring.
These only became apparent when they tried to do something like lodge a cheque made out to them to their own bank account, or borrow a sum of money in their own name from their own financial institution. All of these things, and many more, needed the approval, in person, with a signature, of their husbands. These women were effectively reduced to the status of children, wards, people of no status.
One caller described her experience of discovering that her PPS number was no longer the one she had had her whole life, but had instead been changed to her husband’s number. She queried it with a civil servant at the time who bluntly informed her ‘That’s your number now. You’re half a person.’
Half a person. The phrase struck me as an accurate description of how some women must have experienced life under the marriage bar. Half a person. No longer a person in your own right, but now a person who existed only in relation to your husband, he being the planet where all the action happened, and you being a pale and distant moon that got to orbit him.
As I listened to these women of different generations talking about their loneliness after they stopped working, their sense of the world being ‘out there’ while they were ‘in here’, Alices trapped behind the looking glasses of their semi-d’s, I felt an unwelcome sense of recognition.
I’ve always been independent and couldn’t wait to start working again. I also remember how important work was to re-establishing a sense of familiarity and identity in a turbulent period of transition. It made me wonder how many of those women had had their sense of self and identity erased by the marriage bar.
As caller after caller told their stories of how they had been forced to leave their careers, I should have felt a growing sense of outrage, but the overriding feeling was one of sadness. These women told stories not only of being forced to leave jobs they loved, places of work where they had social lives, freedom and independence, but of being condemned to stay at home in isolation.
There was a sense of life shutting down, opportunities narrowing, and duty, obligation, and boredom setting in. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for these young women, full of hopes, ambition, and vitality to shelve their dreams of careers, creative expression, and adventure and turn their focus instead to the domestic.
Or maybe I’m making too much of it. I realise lots of women were and are happy to give up work to focus on home and children when they get married. Good for them. I’m all in favour of choice. The point is, there was no choice under the marriage bar.
It’s all ancient history now, I suppose, and I’m confident that wives are now seen as whole people in their own right, with individual identities, just like husbands, even if they may from time to time still find a letter addressed to them under their husband’s name or be seen as an employment risk if they happen to fall into a certain childbearing age bracket.
Perhaps it’s better to laugh in disbelief, and breathe a sigh of relief that that was then and this is now, but perhaps good to remind ourselves of this bizarre and surreal law from time to time, lest we forget.
