Eumundi Voice - Issue 106, 14 November 2024

Lifting of the marriage bar

An important anniversary likely to pass by unnoticed on 18 November was the lifting of the marriage bar on that day in 1966. For the first time in Australia, married women could work in the Commonwealth Public Service. The marriage bar was inherited from Britain and even though the UK abolished it after WWII, it remained in place in Australia. State governments and many private sector employers followed the commonwealth’s example. Many women hid their marriages but were fired if their pregnancy became apparent.

The 1960s Menzies government considered that married women could not manage both home and work. In addition, a husband could provide for his wife and she was taking a job that should go to either a man or a spinster who needed an income. The marriage bar had the full support of the unions.

Things have improved enormously for women’s employment but anniversaries such as the lifting of the marriage bar are not just vague historical facts. They had a real impact on women and their families and lives.

My mother had to resign from a job she loved in the NSW Forestry Department when she married in 1954. I also worked with women in the Commonwealth Public Service in the 1980s who had been forced to resign as permanent employees upon their marriage in the 1960s. They resumed work as temporary employees but never caught up to the career path progression of their peers. Today’s advances were made off the back of hard choices for women not that long ago.