The Marriage Bar
1930 · Personnel Record · Work 549 of 1,871
An open personnel ledger ruled into columns, short handwritten headings at the top of each column, a run of handwritten dates entered down the last column in the same clerk's hand, a pen and a brass inkwell beside it, a blotter, the ledger on a flat desk beneath a tall window on the left, an electric desk lamp with a green glass shade beside it, steel filing cabinets and a typewriter on a stand behind, the office reaching into shadow with dark unlit figures at the far desks.
- What it was used for
- The marriage bar was the rule that a woman lost her job when she married, and that married women were not hired in the first place. The economic historian Claudia Goldin measured how far it reached: in the surveys she analyses, 61 per cent of school boards in 1928 would not hire a married woman teacher and 52 per cent would not retain one who married; by 1942 the figures were 87 and 70 per cent. In a 1931 survey of 178 firms in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Hartford, 12 per cent had a formal policy of dismissing women on marriage and 29 per cent one against hiring married women; those firms employed 23 and 36 per cent respectively of all the women covered.
- What was new
- Nothing about it was technically new — what was new was that the rule came out of the modern personnel office and not only out of old custom. Goldin finds marriage bars precisely where the new personnel systems were being introduced: fixed salary scales, promotion from within, pay rising with years of service. Her explanation: where pay rose with years of service but output in routine office work hardly did, the bar ensured that women left after a few years and made way for cheaper beginners. The barb: the bar was at its strictest on the eve of America's entry into the war, at 87 per cent of school boards — and within a decade it had all but gone; in 1951, 18 per cent still barred hiring and 10 per cent retention.
What the sources leave open: All figures come from Claudia Goldin's NBER working paper no. 2747 (October 1988) and its Table 1. They are survey results, not full counts: the school figures from surveys by the National Education Association, the firm figures from two Women's Bureau surveys of the US Department of Labor. Goldin describes the values in the table row for 1942 as the position on the eve of America's entry into the war.