A new phase of activism: women’s occupational organisations and married women’s paid work after the Second World War in Britain

Abstract

Focusing on the National Union of Women Teachers (NUWT) and the National Association of Women Civil Servants (NAWCS), this article looks at activism and campaigning for married women workers after the abolition of the marriage bar in both teaching (1944) and the Civil Service (1946). The article outlines the types of campaigning undertaken as well as the philosophical and ideological underpinnings in envisioning the married woman worker. Finally, the article places the campaigning both in the context of these two organisations’ longer histories and the distinctiveness of the late 1940s and 1950s in the history of (married) women’s employment in Britain.