Peter Baker (Letters, 5 July) reminded me that two young women teachers who got married had to retire from the elementary school I attended in the 1930s. Former women teachers whose husbands had died were, however, permitted to return to the profession, and there were two such teachers on the staff. When I moved to Kettering high school at the age of 11, there was one married woman teacher — our dearly beloved Mrs Huggett. By then it was wartime. Young male and female teachers were not exempt from military service, so there was a teacher shortage, and the rule about married women had to be relaxed though, as Peter Baker says, it was not abandoned until 1944.
However, single or married, women teachers were paid at five-sixths the rate for male teachers. When I entered the profession in the early 1950s, I joined the National Union of Teachers, which had been fighting for equal pay since 1919. It was agreed in 1955 and phased in over the next five to six years.
Betty Birch
London
• The log books from the board school in Irthlingborough (a small Northamptonshire town) show that it employed married women teachers from 1879 and through the 20th century. I wonder if this practice varied in different areas, as in Northamptonshire many married women worked in the boot and shoe trade, so it could not have been regarded as exceptional.
Jacqueline Bright
Denford, Northamptonshire
• I think that the ban on married women teaching was lifted before 1944. My mother had to give up teaching on marriage in 1935 but we moved to live with my grandparents in Doncaster in 1940-41 so that she could teach while my father was away with the RAF and they looked after me. Perhaps there were regional variations?
Tim Gillin
Chichester, West Sussex
• Annie Higdon took up the headship of Burston village school in Norfolk in 1911, with her husband Tom as assistant teacher. They had previously performed the same roles at Wood Dalling. Her radical belief in the rights of children in the face of the more traditional attitudes of the vicar and local landowners who dominated the school’s management committee, coupled with Tom’s recruitment of farm labourers to the agricultural union, led to the longest strike in English history. The Strike School was open for 25 years, until Tom’s death and Annie’s retirement. The strike is celebrated every September in Burston, where the Strike School building stands as a museum to the most famous married couple in the history of state schooling.
Nigel Gann
Lichfield, Staffordshire
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