‘I am amazed at how easily we accepted it’: the marriage ban, teaching and ideologies of womanhood in post-Independence Ireland

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the perspectives of 14 primary school teachers subjected to a marriage ban in Ireland between 1932 and 1958. This oral history study provides a unique platform to examine the construction and articulation of these women’s historical memories. Interrogating their perspectives on the marriage ban provides an important window into the social and cultural world in which they lived, the norms and dominant values they encountered, and the ways in which they negotiated their own individual consciousness within a specific cultural framework. Specifically, the analysis of these women’s testimony generates significant insights into the gendering of teaching as a suitable profession for women in early twentieth-century Ireland; how gender shaped social and cultural roles; Church control over women’s training and employment; and the use of policy to deepen women’s social and economic subordination.