Donna Dwyer | Justice at Last?: The Temporary Teachers Club and the Teaching Service (Married Women) Act 1956 | Labour History, 91

Justice at Last?: The Temporary Teachers Club and the Teaching Service (Married Women) Act 1956

Donna Dwyer^*

In 1956, the Victorian parliament passed the Teaching Service (Married Women) Act, removing the marriage bar in the Victorian Education Department. Introduced under the 1889 Public Service Amendment Act by liberal reformers with a profoundly gendered vision for the state, the marriage bar excluded married women from teaching, deeming them temporary 'outsiders'. During World War II, married women temporary teachers returned to teaching in considerable numbers. In 1955, their lobbying in the Victorian Teachers Union led to the formation of the Temporary Teachers Club (TTC) and the waging of a 'cooperative campaign' forcing the Department's hand on the matter of reinstatement, but at a cost: the denial of their superannuation entitlements. The TTC's campaign is not only an important and overlooked episode of feminist activism in an era renowned for conservatism; it is testament to the claim that women's achievements were hard won — a struggle, not a gift.

On 7 November 1956, Mrs Viv Reilly, Mrs Gwyn Dow and Mrs Claire Finniss were present in the Victorian Legislative Assembly to witness the passing of the Teaching Service (Married Women) Bill to remove the marriage bar in the Victorian Education Department. As the president and committee members of the Temporary Teachers Club (TTC), a pressure group within the Victorian Teachers Union (VTU) seeking permanency for married women temporary teachers, they were guests of John Bloomfield, the Minister of Education.¹ Although the women were victorious, they had been forced to accept one significant concession. Bloomfield had been a strong opponent of the women's campaign for permanency but had finally accepted defeat in a deal that denied married women teachers their right to superannuation entitlements.

This study focuses on an important episode in feminist activism in Victoria, when married women teachers held the government of the day to account over the exploitation of their teaching labour — a campaign that has gone unnoticed in the historiography of the VTU. Although Andrew Spaull and Bob Bessant have written extensively on teaching and teacher unions in Victoria, and Spaull in particular has focused on women teachers' struggle for equal pay in Victoria and New South Wales, the consensus has been that women in the VTU were fundamentally conservative and unlikely participants in political activism.² More surprisingly, this important episode in gender politics has not attracted the attention of feminist historians. For example, while Marilyn Lake, in her work Getting Equal, makes a case for the continuity of women's struggle for citizenship in the period between first and second wave feminism, there is, notably, no reference to the battle married women teachers fought for reinstatement in the Victorian Education Department in the 1950s.³

There are some good reasons why the TTC's campaign has been overlooked. While the traditional sources of teacher union history, the minutes of meetings, the Annual Conferences and the Teachers' Journal tell a part of the story, until recently the minutes and papers of the TTC have lain undisturbed in the La Trobe manuscript section of the State Library of Victoria, where Viv Reilly lodged them in 1976. Classified under the name of Reilly, they were not readily identifiable as teacher records and were retrieved only through the process of personal referral that played a significant role in their recovery.

This study forms part of the resumption in feminist/post-feminist interest in work on women teachers in the latter decades of the twentieth century. In Australia, Marjorie Theobald, Alison Mackinnon and, more recently, Kay Whitehead, in company with Alison Prentice and Kathleen Weiler and Kate Rousmaniere in North America, have written extensively on the feminisation of teaching and the relationship between gender inequality in teaching and the bureaucratic systems that governed education systems.⁴ Much of this research draws on recent perspectives in writing on women teachers' lives, exposing the structures that oppressed them whilst acknowledging their agency.

This study looks at the marriage bar in the Victorian Education Department, examining its operation over seven decades. In particular, however, the article focuses on the married women teacher unionists and the 'cooperative campaign' they ran to remove the marriage bar in 1956 whilst in pursuit of a career in the Education Department. This, of course, was all the more remarkable given that the 1950s are renowned for a renewed focus on domesticity and the family. In attempting to foreground something of the subjectivity of these women activists, this paper focuses on the way in which they positioned themselves in the VTU and the community to deal with the opposition they had encountered from the state since the introduction of the marriage bar in 1889.

The opposition to married women's employment had its roots in the profoundly gendered culture of nineteenth-century Victoria and the ideology of the nineteenth-century liberals who targeted the married woman teacher in the 1889 Public Service Amendment Act which introduced the marriage bar to the Public Service.⁵ Two decades before the Harvester Judgement of 1907 established a minimum, wage for adult male workers, Victorian liberals had a gendered blueprint for the state of Victoria. As Stuart Macintyre has explored in his work Winners and Losers, the family was defined as a male breadwinner with a wage sufficient to support a dependent wife and children.⁶ On a number of levels, the professional, independent married woman teacher was an affront to the liberal reform agenda. She had to be controlled and contained.

The Origins of the Marriage Bar

The specific story of the development and operation of a marriage bar in a profession offering career opportunities for married women adds an important element to the project of women's history. Their stories, told against the grain of our contemporary understandings of the period, add to the account of the development and operation of a marriage bar (encapsulated in a Public Service Amendment Act) in a profession that had traditionally been colonised by women. As Desley Deacon's detailed study of the state and the public service in New South Wales has shown, middle-class men sought to establish new bailiwicks for male dominance, and teaching was one domain men wanted to reclaim.⁷ The dealings of the nineteenth-century liberals with the married woman teacher would resonate in the lives of married woman teachers for decades to come.

In anticipating the opposition it might encounter, the state's crafting of the 1889 Public Service Amendment Act was astute. The bar was to apply only to women who married after the passing of the Act, avoiding confrontation with those married women currently teaching. The bar had its genesis in the recommendations of the 1883–84 Rogers Templeton Commission into the administration and organisation of the teaching service in Victoria.⁸ The Commissioners' brief was to deal with the problem of patronage, which was rife in the service. But there was another agenda.

At the outset, the Rogers Templeton Commissioners noted that the teaching service was more attractive to women than men and they were taken aback at the extent to which women had so successfully infiltrated the service. The Commissioners focused on the power and status of the married woman teachers holding first-assistant positions. These teaching matriarchs were experienced, highly qualified and well-paid women who, as heads of separate departments for female pupils in large, highly sought-after metropolitan or country schools, wielded considerable authority. Furthermore, these women had astutely capitalised on parents' demands for separate departments for the teaching of girls, and in doing so, established a significant power base. As Marjorie Theobald has argued, there were good reasons for the success of entrepreneurial women teachers, particularly married women teachers, entrenching themselves in the teaching services. They were highly valued for the moral propriety their presence lent to the teaching of female pupils. Indeed, educational administrators in early colonial Victoria and New South Wales had specifically sought qualified teaching couples as heads of their prestigious Model Training Schools for precisely these reasons.⁹

The Rogers Templeton Commission proved a turning point in the state's relationship with the married woman teacher. The Commissioners' difficulties in reconciling a service colonised by women, particularly married women, was reflected in their Third Report which contained a section criticising the employment of married women teachers. Not surprisingly, the Commissioners expressed concern about the authority of women teachers over men and their monopoly of first-assistant positions. They queried the ability of married women to manage their home duties and their teaching and administrative responsibilities, and reaffirmed old prejudices about the propriety of pregnant woman teaching in public. They were particularly concerned about teaching wives supporting men without occupations or men outside the profession of teaching. They considered that if a married woman were to teach it should be as a sewing mistress and preferably in the same school as her husband.¹⁰

At the same time, parliamentary debate prompted strong criticism of the married teaching partnership which, it was claimed, drew two large salaries from the state. The first classified roll in the Victorian Government Gazette, published in 1885, the year immediately following the release of the findings of the Rogers Templeton Commission, bears testimony to these claims. Of the 28 women teachers at the top of the highest division for women teachers — the second division — 15 were married women, among them partners in well-known teaching couples.¹¹

The political context of colonial Victoria clearly had some bearing on the Commissioners' preference for the dependent married woman. As Audrey Oldfield has pointed out, the issue of women's rights was more firmly established in Victoria than it was in any other Australian colony. In 1884, the year in which the Commissioners delivered their report, Henrietta Dugdale and Annie Lowe had formed the Victorian Women's Suffrage Society. Female suffrage was not well received by certain powerful sections in Victoria. The Victorian Legislative Council, the most representative of power and privilege of all the Australian upper houses, consistently opposed female suffrage and was one of the main factors delaying the passing of female suffrage legislation in Victoria until 1908.¹²

In addition, while liberal reformers supported female suffrage and divorce reform and the successful passage of the married women's property Act in 1884, they opposed married women teaching. Charles Pearson, champion of women's right to higher education, was Minister for Public Instruction when the 1889 Public Service Amendment Act was passed. Pearson's successor, the liberal protectionist, Alexander Peacock, a man who achieved what Geoffrey Serle has termed 'almost legendary fame' for his anti-sweating legislation in the Factories and Shops Act in 1896, presided over the operation of the 1889 Public Service Amendment Act for much of his six terms in office.¹³ Liberalism, as Stuart Macintyre has argued, was a masculine doctrine enshrining individualism, independence and mastery. These were not characteristics which liberal reformers would have wanted to encourage in married women generally or, more particularly, in their own wives.¹⁴ Indeed, it was one thing to protect the rights of married women in divorce and custody settlements but quite another to argue for the financial independence of married women teachers.

In New South Wales married women teachers fared differently. While the liberal agenda for the family had firmly taken hold in Victoria by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, it was, as Desley Deacon notes, another decade before the concept of the family wage would hold sway in NSW parliamentary debates.¹⁵ A remarkably similar Bill was introduced there. But unlike their Victorian colleagues, married women teachers in New South Wales would survive the passing of the 1895 Public Service Amendment Act, which introduced a marriage bar into the NSW Public Service.¹⁶ The response of these parliamentarians was not what the designers of the Bill had anticipated. A.B. Piddington, member for Tamworth and a young lawyer, championed the cause of married women teachers, defending their right to work and in 1895 his views were well received. Despite some consternation about well-known couples drawing two salaries, members of parliament were not inclined to do anything about it.¹⁷ Indeed, the central issue in the debate on the 1895 Bill was the right of married women teachers to work, and this was resolved in their favour.

The differences between the colonies can be attributed to a climate of opinion in country New South Wales that was more sympathetic to the employment of women, particularly married women. This pattern of support is reflected in the considerable number of female telephonists, postmistresses and station mistresses employed in early nineteenth-century New South Wales.¹⁸ The teaching wives of local farmers also brought in much-needed income to local farming households. Their presence in the schools was heightened by a code of moral propriety that preferred the teaching of male and female pupils in separate departments and senior girls taught by women teachers. This policy prevailed in schools in New South Wales long after it was dispensed with in Victoria, where cost cutting and a determination to remove the power base of married women hastened its demise. These factors strengthened the country lobby's support of married women teachers in New South Wales.

During the 1890s Australia suffered a severe economic depression. In 1894, the Victorian Department, as a recession measure, drove the remaining married women teachers from the service, offering compensation rather than pensions to many who failed to meet its rigorous pension requirements. Mary Jane Mattingley's legal challenge on behalf of the retrenched women who were denied pensions failed.¹⁹ When one job per family was a luxury, the idea of married women working, and the possibility of a state-funded dual-income family, could not be justified. There was little hope of justice for the married woman who needed the pension to support herself and her family. For Peacock, the issue was about 'the wives of men earning good salaries from the state' wanting more.²⁰ Even the radical reformer and suffragist, Dr William Maloney, who defended the widow's right to work, believed this: 'if teachers were drawing good salaries from the government, he did not think their wives should be employed'.²¹

Married women teachers did not give up without a fight. Several women, widowed after their compulsory retirement from the Department, mounted legal challenges in attempts to regain permanent employment. Their attempts were in vain. The Department responded by tightening its requirements — widows were deemed married women and treated as temporary labour. A pattern emerged in the Department's manipulation of married women's teaching labour. Needy married women, deemed 'outsiders', were used as temporary labour to cover contingencies, for example, in staffing far-flung schools. However, the world-wide depression in the 1930s later severed this tenuous hold.

The Clamour for Change

The historical orthodoxy of the Victorian Education Department is that married women returned to teaching during World War II, when labour shortages allowed married women access to many areas of employment hitherto confined to males.²² However, the stories of married teachers of this period, corroborated by archival data, present a more complex and contradictory story.²³ The outbreak of the war prompted the government to exclude married women as temporary teachers, notwithstanding the fact that the Public Service Amendment Act already prohibited their employment. But the increasing numbers of men enlisting led to a staffing crisis and the Minister of Public Instruction, Dr John Harris, was forced to abandon this approach. Cabinet quickly imposed conditions on the employment of married women. It would 'employ (temporarily) women whose husbands had enlisted' and 'ex-temporary teachers, widows and deserted wives, but no teacher was to be employed who had married since 1 September 1939'.²⁴

It was during this period that women began to assert themselves and clamour for change. Married women teachers found support from women teachers in the VTU. Leading union women such as the left-winger Doris McRae and the more conservative Helene McGarvin were unequivocal in their support of women teachers' rights, including the right of married women to permanency in the Department.²⁵ In this response they differed markedly from their single female colleagues in South Australia, where in 1941 single women unionists objected to the employment of married women, except in 'special circumstances'.²⁶ In Victoria, in response to persistent pressure from women unionists, the removal of the marriage bar became part of union policy and the Department was forced to allow more married women temporary teachers into the service. Hettie Gilbert, the newly elected president of the VTU, and its first woman president, demanded to know why women who had married since the beginning of the war could not teach in primary schools. The Minister and the Director justified their stance by arguing that 'employing recently married women was a dangerous thing, grave problems [were] involved when you open the door to people married since September, 1939'.²⁷ The staffing crisis forced the Victorian Education Department to relax its stance, eventually allowing recently married women teachers to remain as temporaries in the Department.²⁸ By contrast, in New South Wales women teachers who married departing servicemen were granted special status as citizen wives whose husbands might not return from the war. They were allowed to remain as permanent teachers until their husbands were discharged, when they could resign or remain as temporary teachers.²⁹

Between the immediate post-war period and the 1950s, a change of social attitude resulted in changes for married teachers. In Victoria during the 1940s, the removal of the bar in the Education Department was a plank of union policy but not a priority. Teachers were focused on achieving a Teachers' Tribunal — as a bulwark between teachers and the government — and women teacher unionists were preoccupied with the struggle for equal pay. But post-war circumstances changed in favour of married women teachers. Immigration and the post-war baby boom sent school populations soaring. Parents, alert to the value of education for their children, demanded less-crowded schoolrooms and qualified teachers. In New South Wales, the government had already capitulated to pressure and in 1947 removed the marriage bar in the teaching service in New South Wales.

In 1952, following the election of the Cain Labor Government in Victoria, women unionists' hopes were raised and they hoped for an increased share of participation in union activities. However, they were met with opposition. In May 1952, the Teachers' Journal proclaimed a crisis in education in Victoria. The VTU calculated that the school population had increased by 15,000 students in one year but there had been a loss of over 170 permanent teachers and an increase of 124 in the number of temporary teachers — to a total of 1,655. This trend was set to continue.³⁰ The majority of these temporary teachers were married women, who now comprised about half the membership of the High Schools' Branch. At this point the union publication, the Teachers' Journal, provides some indication of the public participation of married women temporary teachers in union politics. Nancy (Nan) Melbourne (later Gallagher) and Viv Reilly were the first of these women to be included in accounts of union meetings. But the VTU was not about to share power with them, and reacted coolly to the High Schools Branch's request that temporary teachers be given voting rights for the Teachers' Tribunal, pointing out that this was not possible under the Teaching Service Act.³¹

The Director of Education, Alan Ramsay, deliberately played the two parties off against each other. (Ramsay had been Director since 1948 and would remain in this position until he retired in 1960.) While Ramsay attempted to placate temporary teachers with public comments such as 'God bless them, I do not know what we would do without them',³² his Department transferred or terminated temporary teachers' services at will. Teachers were given scant notice of Department decisions, and union requests to advertise temporary positions at least every two years were refused. Ramsay pointed out that:

staffing was very difficult and ... to advertise the positions held by them [temporary teachers] would result in the loss of many 'outsiders' who were available only in areas near their homes.³³

The married woman temporary teacher was often caught in such cross fire. In December 1954, the Teachers' Tribunal delivered a long-awaited salary award to Victorian teachers and ignited the cause of the married woman temporary teacher. This award exposed the tensions in the VTU and its failure to act on behalf of the married woman temporary teacher, whose claims the Tribunal had virtually ignored. The temporary teachers were furious, as Nan Gallagher pointed out£

A tremendous saving is effected by the employment of married women; they are just cheap labour. Our maximum is still below class iv primary. Married women are being employed at a low rate. The Department is obtaining the equivalent of class iii and class ii at the same rate as a girl out of training. I do not like saving the Department hundreds of pounds just because I am married.³⁴

When the VTU resubmitted its claim, it drew on a document provided by Nan Gallagher entitled, 'Equal Pay — Woman Teachers as Percentage of Total Classified Teachers, Victorian Education Department, 1934–1954'. Gallagher argued that temporary teachers were not paid according to the work they did. Their previous service was only allowed for at one increment for every two years and these increments were smaller than those received by permanent teachers. Nor were they entitled to a degree allowance. The salary anomalies of temporary teachers were illustrated by case studies, including that of Nan Gallagher herself. In 1953, Nan was Convener of Geography at Mordialloc High School. Her salary was £560 per annum. Her similarly qualified and experienced single colleague, A.J. Rendall, who was Convener of History in the same school, earned 730 per annum. Claire Finniss was a qualified teacher of Domestic Science who had permanent service from 1929–37. After her marriage in 1937 she had taught temporarily from 1938–55. Her salary was £560 per annum. Her similarly qualified and experienced colleagues who were single earned between £820 and £850 per annum. These case studies showed that temporary women teachers, with unbroken or practically unbroken records, were receiving up to £300 per annum less in salary than their single colleagues.³⁵

In April 1955, the Tribunal's response was to deny their sought-after reclassification to class iv status and salary, and to offer instead meagre salary improvements according to a graduated scale. Immediately after this announcement, the High Schools' Branch asked the VTU to convene a public meeting of all temporary teachers, which was organised by the temporary teachers and held in Kelvin Hall, Collins Place, Melbourne, at 8.00pm on Thursday 29 June 1955.

Nan Gallagher recalled that it was the watershed of the campaign for the reinstatement of the married woman teacher and the union had no choice but to let the meeting go ahead. The agenda for the meeting included a report on answers received to the questionnaires forwarded to schools by the temporary teachers' sub-committee, the position of married women teachers in other states and in England, and the implementation of union policy that marriage be no bar to permanency.

At the meeting, chaired by VTU President, R.S. Norris, Nan Gallagher drew on the detailed information the committee had gathered from 652 women teachers in secondary schools and 1,004 women teachers in primary schools in metropolitan Melbourne, and all women teachers in girls' technical schools. Her figures showed that 45 per cent of women in secondary schools were temporaries, 34.5 per cent in primary schools were temporaries, and just over 50 per cent of women teachers in technical schools were temporaries. She also dealt with many of the 'myths' denigrating the married woman teacher.

D.P. Schubert, General Secretary of the VTU and a sympathetic supporter of the temporary teachers' case, read from a recent report of the International Labour Office, stating£

Although the practice to debar women from continuing a teaching career after marriage is decreasing, it is still usual in some countries, including Ireland, the Netherlands, Union of South Africa, some cantons of Switzerland and some states of Australia.³⁶

Schubert pointed out that this left Victoria among an unenlightened and very small group. The United States, France, Scandinavia and many other countries had less discriminatory practices regarding marriage and teaching, and it was high time that Victoria became as enlightened as those north of the Murray. The meeting was very successful and well reported in the media. Two resolutions proposed by Gwyn Dow were passed unanimously by the meeting:

That marriage be no bar to the permanent employment of women teachers in the Victorian Education Department and the meeting pledges its support to the Victorian Teachers Union in any action taken to have the Government amend the necessary legislation to make this possible. And that the meeting urges the VTU to continue its efforts to further improve salaries for temporary teachers.³⁷

In 1955, in the same month as the women were holding the meeting in Kelvin Hall, a new government took over from the Cain Labor government. The Labor Party had split with the formation of the Democratic Labor Party, and at the 1955 election, the Liberals came to power with Henry Bolte as Premier and William Watt Legatt as Minister for Education. The women thought that they had victory in their grasp. On 14 July 1955, a deputation consisting of the president of the VTU, R.S. Norris, the two vice-presidents, R. Smith and J. Baker, the general secretary, D.P. Schubert, and Nan Gallagher met with the Minister for Education, W.W. Leggett, and the Director, A.J. Ramsay, to press for reinstatement of married women teachers under the same conditions as those existing for all other permanent teachers.

The Minister admitted to being favourably disposed toward the matter and ready to discuss it with Cabinet, with the Director's advice. Here the women encountered major resistance. Despite the Director's prior praise for the work of married women temporary teachers, he now revealed deep-seated reservations. Although Ramsay indicated that he was 'in general agreement with all that had been said', he evoked the prejudices of the fertile married woman teacher as a public servant, and asked the VTU to give consideration to the period of absence involved when women had families and raised them. More serious was his objection to married women's superannuation rights, an issue that was to bedevil the question of married women's return to the service. In comments mirroring the objections of nineteenth-century liberals, the Director expressed concern that:

the Superannuation Fund would be able to carry married women and give them superannuation at the end. If you have two in the family teaching, both a man and a woman, you would have the Government paying a double pension to one family. I do not know whether we can possibly carry on the existing superannuation rights without some recasting of the whole scheme.³⁸

The Temporary Teachers Club Campaign

The Director's about-face, so soon after he had publicly supported their cause, stunned the women. The sub-committee of temporary teachers that had formed in 1955 around the issue of the salaries award decided it was time to show the strength of their numbers and approached the VTU for permission to establish a Temporary Teachers Club (TTC). The union, for its part, was relieved that the temporary teachers did not want to establish themselves as a separate branch and would clearly have opposed such a move.³⁹

The minutes of the inaugural meeting, held on 13 October 1955, confirmed the 'cooperative' nature of the TTC and its close connection with the VTU. In the chair was Miss Jean McLennan, a teacher at Glen Iris State School, representing the executive of the VTU. She moved that a Temporary Teachers Club be formed within the union, with a committee to represent the three divisions of the service. The 53 members present elected Viv Reilly (Women's Branch), who was a teacher at Camberwell South State School, as president, and Nan Gallagher (High Schools Branch), a teacher at Mordialloc High School, as secretary/treasurer. Gwyn Dow (High Schools Branch), a teacher at MacRobertson Girls High School, was elected vice-president to represent the High Schools' secondary division. Tess Vroland (Technical Women's Branch), from Prahran Technical School, was elected vice-president to represent the technical division.⁴⁰

These women were all committed unionists, but there were other factors that set them apart from other women of their generation. The 1950s is recognised as a period of conservatism, when the virtues of domesticity were enshrined in the culture and motherhood was singled out for particular attention.⁴¹ Many women of this generation, it is generally believed, would never have countenanced the idea of a career and a life away from home and family, nor indeed challenged their employer over their status.⁴² Perhaps the resistance to the Department that Nan Gallagher and Gwyn Dow demonstrated is best explained by the route that brought them to teaching. Neither came to teaching directly from teachers college. Gwyn Dow had begun work as a filing clerk and then completed a BA at the University of Melbourne.⁴³ Nan Gallagher had begun university life as a part-time evening student enrolled in Economics. Certainly, as Marjorie Theobald has claimed, tertiary education had a radicalising effect on women teaching in secondary schools.⁴⁴

Financial pressures and long travelling hours forced Nan to accept a place at Melbourne Teachers College (MTC) where she completed her Trained Primary Teachers Certificate (TPTC). Nan Gallagher's radical contacts at university had made her something of a rebel. Nan finished her degree post-war, at her own expense, while teaching at Camberwell High School. Here she was fortunate to work with Dr A.V. James, the author of the few available geography texts. His influence would lead her to produce a series of geography texts a decade or so later. Each of these women is a 'university educated woman whose love of scholarship was linked to her emancipation'.⁴⁵

Often not burdened by marriage and children, these women were able to put in the necessary time and energy that made the TTC a force to be reckoned with. Viv Reilly was 'driven by a belief in women's rights and that included the right of all women to have a job and an independent salary'. Viv was childless, as was Gwyn Dow. Viv pointed out that this was a significant feature of the leadership of the TTC.⁴⁶ Similarly, Nan Gallagher's marriage to Bob Melbourne had broken down and she was childless. (She later married Hec Gallagher and left the service temporarily to have three children.) Another senior member, Claire Finniss, who did have children, was the breadwinner for her family. With an invalid husband, she had no option but to support the temporary teachers' cause. She was not alone. Many women were in similar circumstances.

In their work on aspects of Australian culture in the 1950s, John Murphy and Judith Smart have drawn attention to the 'dynamic and disparate elements in this otherwise flattened period', which have questioned our stereotyped understandings.⁴⁷ It is within the contested meanings of 1950s culture that we can understand the opposition of women in the TTC to the Victorian Education Department. The ambiguity in some post-war women teachers' lives can be explained in terms of the need to support themselves and their families, as well as the desire for a professional teaching career. Married women capitalised on these circumstances and used their bargaining power to advantage — in the face of considerable opposition.

Part of the success of the TTC's campaign was attributed to the strategies that they chose to pursue. In the choice of what the TTC termed a 'co-operative campaign, with all branches of the union', the TTC avoided the risk of being ignored, as they may have been, had they adopted a separatist policy that risked not being taken seriously as a women's group within the VTU.⁴⁸ Viv Reilly's notes, written some years later, indicate that monthly meetings of the Club were held 'to educate members, plan action and put pressure on appropriate people'. In adopting these strategies, the TTC had chosen an approach closely resembling the successful campaign run by the NSW Teachers Federation for equal pay some three years later. In her analysis of this campaign, Margaret Gardner argues that the women needed to combat entrenched social attitudes to women. They had to deal with a certain amount of apathy (and antagonism) within the union and develop a very broad basis of support, since legislative change was not going to be achieved through negotiation.⁴⁹ The TTC worked hard on all these elements. The women emphasised the inclusive nature of their relationship with the various branches and the wider union, and were always conscious of maintaining political pressure on their guest speakers, while keeping the government in their sights. Nor did women from the High Schools' Branch dominate the TTC. Of the 53 original members, 28 were from the Women's Branch and 23 from the High Schools' Branch. There were two senior members from the Technical Women's Branch, which numbered around 20 members in 1955.⁵⁰

At the initial meeting of the TTC in October 1955, Nan Gallagher reported on the issues that were crucial to married women teachers' reinstatement, namely, superannuation, classification and accouchement (maternity) leave. Nan Gallagher was responsible for the press releases and numerous articles, letters and reports appearing in the major press at the time. The powerful concepts of maternity and infant-centred motherhood had to be confronted if married women were to be redefined as 'professional'. The TTC set out to confront and refute these ideas. In an article in the Herald Sun entitled 'Good teachers make good mothers', Nan Gallagher attacked the prejudices surrounding mothers who taught, and argued for a more favourable understanding. She suggested that there were two categories of teaching mothers. There were those who returned to teaching after they had raised their families, and there were those who returned to teaching when their children started school. The latter category of married woman did not cause any deprivation because their working hours paralleled those of their children. Her arguments were well received by a community now anxious to employ married women teachers.⁵¹ The Department now promoted the idea that mothers who were teachers were 'naturally' better than spinsters, because they were experienced with children. It was clearing the way for the reinstatement of married women teachers.⁵²

Nan Gallagher and daugher, Katie.
Nan and Katie were the subject of a Melbourne newspaper article on their return from a period spent in a village in Kerala, south west India. Nan's political activism was matched by her passion for teaching geography, spending her holidays researching life in far-flung villages and recording her observations in a series of publications used in teaching.

Photo courtesy of Nan Gallagher. Source: Sun, 5 March 1980, used with permission.

In June 1955, a few days after the meeting in Kelvin Hall, Nan Gallagher spoke on 3AW radio, taking the opportunity to flesh out her arguments with 'real life' cases of the desperate plight of women bringing up families on their own or with invalid husbands. For the first time on radio, the public heard of the systematic exploitation of the married woman temporary teacher by the Victorian Education Department and responded very sympathetically. It was Nan Gallagher's forthright comments that opened up the women's experiences to public scrutiny and exposed the Department's treatment of widowed women teachers.

Widows had earlier been offered permanency in the Department during World War II, but the circumstances surrounding their reinstatement were never made public. In 1951, during a deputation to the Minister of Education, P.P. Inchbold, the VTU discovered this Department change in policy regarding the treatment of widows. Inchbold told the deputation that he could see no reason to change the temporary status of married women and that widows were eligible for permanent employment.⁵³ Nan Gallagher's notes from this period show the intransigent approach of the Department in the case of Mrs Ivy Corey.⁵⁴

Mrs Ivy Corey had been teaching at MacRobertson Girls High School as a temporary teacher since 1944. She had previously trained and worked as a teacher in South Australia. She was 43 when she began temporary teaching and when her husband died in 1946 she was just outside the age limit for permanency for widows, which was 45 years. On this basis, Ivy Corey was barred from permanency. In 1950 when the age limit was raised to include widows from 45 to 55 years of age, Ivy Corey was again barred. This time the provisions for permanency included ten years' classified service before marriage. Ivy Corey had eight years' teaching before marriage, 12 years during marriage and five years as a widow.⁵⁵ In 1955, the proviso was altered to read 'any approved service'. But this change came too late for Ivy Corey who was again debarred from permanency as, at 56 years of age, she had passed the age limit of permanency at 55 by a few weeks.

Nan Gallagher put Ivy Corey's case to the TTC, pointing out that Mrs Corey had approached the VTU in July and again in September, when the matter was taken to the Director. She had received a letter from D.S. Schubert saying that the Director was unwilling to grant her permanency, in case it set a precedent. The TTC had taken up a suggestion from MacRobertson Girls School that a petition on her behalf be circulated through the schools and addressed to the union and the Department for urgent action. The union was displeased with this outcome and Norris, the VTU president, called in Viv Reilly and Nan Gallagher to explain their actions. But the TTC's tactics proved successful. In February 1956, Ivy Corey received a letter from the Director, waiving the age limit in her special case and outlining how she could apply for permanency.

Keeping the spotlight on the reinstatement of married women teachers, the women drew up a list of invited speakers for their meetings, which reads as a 'who's who' in the Department and the teaching service. The first address was from W. Trudinger, a former president of the VTU, then the classifier of the primary division. His response demonstrated the ambiguity of the union on the place of married women teachers in their ranks. Closely questioned on issues of classification and the need for recognition of the experience and qualifications of married women teachers when they applied for permanent positions, Trudinger claimed that many married women temporary teachers would obtain class iii positions on their first application, and that there were now up to 300 class iii primary vacancies. But in the following year, he voted in favour of a decision that primary class iii women's positions should be advertised for men or women, supporting a male unionist's claim that the women were on 'clover'.⁵⁶

The TTC sought information on the superannuation rights of their sisters in New South Wales and Tasmania and discovered that the fervour surrounding the issue of the re-admission of married women into the teaching service in Victoria was completely absent in Tasmania and New South Wales. Both states had accommodated the married women teachers to the extent that neither had any information on the number employed in their respective departments. In Tasmania, a regulation allowed women to continue teaching after marriage as long as they conformed to the requirements prescribed in the regulations. Married women teachers in Tasmania had exactly the same responsibilities as their single counterparts and were treated in the same way, except that they could be appointed near their homes when they had home responsibilities. Clearly the Tasmanian Education Department needed married women's teaching labour and was prepared to accommodate them. Similarly, E.W. Mattick replied that in New South Wales, since the repeal of the Married Women Teachers and Lecturers Act in 1947, the salaries and conditions of employment for married women teachers, including superannuation entitlements, were exactly the same as those for single women.⁵⁷ The minutes record that the meeting which discussed this information adjourned early so that 'members wishing to interview members of parliament regarding the failure to introduce legislation could proceed to the House of Parliament'.⁵⁸

The issue of superannuation was clearly the chief obstacle to married women's reinstatement in the Department. H.E. Loader, the teachers' representative on the Superannuation Board, addressed the TTC in February 1956. Loader pointed out that the most likely objection to the permanency of married women would come from a government unwilling to pay significant contributions to pensions for both husband and wife. Nan Gallagher remembers asking what difference this made to the situation, as there were cases of fathers and single daughters residing in the same household who were receiving individual pensions.⁵⁹

The union continued to lobby on behalf of the women for a reasonable superannuation scheme, trying to meet the Department's requirements with medical tests and varying age and service requirements. The VTU hoped that requiring contributors to pay both the government and their own contributions while on leave might meet some of the government's objections. But the union's good intentions proved difficult to implement. The Director favoured a Provident Fund. On retiring, women would receive a lump sum consisting of their own contribution plus government contributions.

In August 1956, Minister Bloomfield finally accepted an invitation from the TTC to speak at their meeting. The meeting was once again crowded, but it was not a success. Bloomfield did not endear himself by declaring that he was not prepared to make any statement on the subject of the status of married women teachers. Rather, he offered a lengthy address on the workings of the Department and his position as Minister, and spoke of the huge salary bill of the Department and the increasing problem of juvenile delinquency, which the women were quick to see as an implied criticism of working mothers.⁶⁰ The women were deeply depressed by the gloomy picture presented by the Minister, sensing the need to plan another public meeting to push the issue further. But they need not have worried, for in October 1956 the Teaching Service (Married Women) Bill was passed.

The Teaching Service (Married Women) Act, 1956

Married women teachers' reinstatement in the Department came at a cost. In 1956, both sides of parliament focused on the proposed superannuation scheme for married women. The Liberal Minister, Bloomfield, was blunt. He was opposed to a situation where a husband and wife both qualified for superannuation, thus bringing in two pensions to the one household. Labor members of parliament, concerned with protecting the 'interests of male persons in long term employment', were prepared to accept an inferior superannuation scheme for married women. The scheme that was devised was a limited-contribution fund. Married women teachers would contribute five per cent of their salary to the fund, the Government would contribute on a pound for pound basis, and the Superannuation Board would invest this amount. Women who subsequently resigned were to be repaid their contributions at three per cent interest.

The Bill finally removed the marriage bar of the Victorian Education Department:

any married woman (whether or not she is in temporary employment on the teaching service) who at any time has been in employment — in the teaching service of the Education Department of Victoria; or in some teaching service approved for the purposes of this section by the Tribunal may apply in writing to the Tribunal to be appointed or reappointed to permanent employment in the teaching service in the lowest class of the appropriate division with such seniority as the Committee of Classifiers determines, and the Tribunal, if it receives a satisfactory medical report by a school medical officer, may if it thinks fit appoint her subject to the Principal Act.⁶¹

The medical examination required by the Act provided an unexpected hurdle for many members of the TTC. Some women were asked questions of a personal rather than a medical nature, presumably to do with their plans for combining families with careers. A number, including Viv Reilly, failed the medical examination. There was an immediate outcry and protests from the TTC to the VTU, whose president took up the matter with the Director. Consequently, Viv Reilly, among others, was re-examined and passed as fit for entry into the Provident Fund. The irony was that married women teachers needed a successful medical examination to be passed as eligible for permanency but the Provident Fund for married women had no provisions for sickness benefits.⁶² Indeed, if a married woman was injured on the job, she was eligible only for workers' compensation while other teachers, single women and all male teachers would be superannuated out of the service.

The Provident Fund was a grave disappointment to married women. For women employed prior to the passage of the Act, the maximum period of service recognised for Provident Fund purposes was five years. Their level of contribution was also exceedingly low. In 1959, the VTU and the Public Service Association had the maximum entitlement for their members lifted from 36 to 39 units.⁶³ Married women teachers' contributions started at around four units. Hence, as the women in the TTC well knew, it was possible for a woman to retire with practically no pension. They cited the case of Mrs X who had 47 years of service at the time of the passing of the Act and would retire with a pension of about £3 per week, less than the old age pension.⁶⁴ Women such as Claire Finniss, who were the sole breadwinners for their families, were devastated, feeling that the union had let them down.⁶⁵ In 1955, Finniss wrote to the editor of the Age:

I would like to express my agreement with M.P.'s statement (27/9) that every teacher should, after a lifetime of service to education, be able to retire 'in reasonable comfort'. However, M.P. is misguided in believing that all departmental teachers can do this. She overlooks that large group of departmental teachers — the married women — who are paid less than unmarried teachers and in addition can receive no superannuation at all. In three years time I shall have served the education department as a temporary teacher for thirty years. I have domestic responsibilities that make it urgent for me to retire on an income above the old age pension. My case is one of many. I am acquainted with widows who support large families on a salary that is below that paid to single women who live with their families. When they retire these widows will be entitled to nothing more than the old age pension ... I am suggesting that a protest be made on behalf of married women who form so large a part of the service and are treated so inequitably.⁶⁶

Nor could older women in the service afford to marry as they would lose their superannuation rights. There is one case of a woman resigning from the Department after many years of service, accepting her superannuation, and then marrying.⁶⁷ The Act also created anomalies. For instance, women who married and opted to leave the service were entitled to money in lieu of furlough, but if women accepted permanency and then resigned on account of pregnancy, they were not entitled to anything. Overall, only 200 women joined the Provident Fund.⁶⁸

By June 1957, 344 married women had been appointed to the permanent staff in the primary division, 98 married women had been appointed in the secondary division, and ten married women had been appointed in the technical division. The TTC still had work to do. Viv Reilly recognised that many married women preferred to remain temporary teachers, while those who chose permanency needed a greatly improved pension scheme. She renamed the Club, the Temporary and Permanent Teachers Club, and continued the campaign for justice for women teachers. In 1958, the Teachers' Journal contained an article by the Minister for Education claiming that 'marriage was a factor which put all women in a special class'. 'Marriage', he claimed, 'is likely to cause invalidity'. On this basis he defended the withholding of full superannuation rights from married women teachers. The women promptly contacted a list of specialists seeking their opinions. The battle continued until married women teachers gained improved superannuation rights in 1975.⁶⁹

Over the ensuing decades, Viv Reilly, Nan Gallagher and Gwyn Dow have watched with silent amusement as others have laid claim to 'removing the marriage bar in the Victorian Education Department'.⁷⁰ At the time, the women were focused on their goals, unconcerned about what future generations might make of their campaign. It was also in the interests of the VTU that the TTC's campaign was subsumed within it. The same factors that made the TTC's campaign so successful, their loyalty to each other, and the union and their reluctance to claim individual fame, have disinclined Reilly and her fellow campaigners to break their silence.

Conclusion

The campaign to remove the marriage bar from the Victorian Education Department in 1956 is an important episode in women's activism that deserves acknowledgement. When Viv Reilly, Gwyn Dow and Claire Finniss listened to the debate on the reinstatement of married women teachers, they were confronted by a litany of prejudices against them as women and by a determination on the part of all members of parliament to restrict their superannuation entitlements. These views paralleled those of the nineteenth- century liberals who crafted the original legislation. Telling these women's stories makes it clear that the achievement of equal pay and the vital removal of the marriage bar was by no means a gift but a long and arduous struggle.

By removing married women from the teaching service, the 1889 Victorian Public Service Amendment Act not only curbed women's independence but removed an ideologised anomaly — a two-salaried family funded by the state. Across seven decades, Victoria's male administrators and members of parliament were in agreement that the married woman should be a procreative, dependent wife, not a professionally paid teacher or a breadwinner. Nor should the state tolerate the possibility of a family with two state-funded pensions. Yet against these insistent voices, the TTC reclaimed their professional lives, resisting narrow definitions of what it meant to be a married woman teacher, exploring its possibilities and ultimately changing its meanings.

Donna Dwyer is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication, Culture and Languages at Victoria University. She has completed a PhD in the history of women teachers in the Victorian Education Department with a specific focus on the impact of the marriage bar on women teachers and the teaching profession.
<Donna.Dwyer@vu.edu.au>

Endnotes

^* This paper has been peer-reviewed by two anonymous referees for Labour History.

^1. Temporary Teachers Club (hereafter TTC), Victorian Teachers Union (hereafter VTU) Correspondence, 8 November 1956, MS Box 1769/3, Manuscript Room, La Trobe Library, State Library of Victoria (hereafter SLV).

^2. B. Bessant and A. Spaull, Teachers in Conflict, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1972; A. Spaull (ed.), Australian Teachers: From Colonial Schoolmasters to Militant Professionals, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1977.

^3. M. Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1999.

^4. M. Theobald, Knowing Women: Origins of Women's Education in Nineteenth-Century Australia, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996; A. Prentice and M. Theobald (eds), Women Who Taught: Perspectives on the History of Women and Teaching, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991; K. Whitehead, The New Women Teachers Come Along: Transforming Teaching in the Nineteenth century, ANZHES, Sydney, 2003; K. Rousmaniere, City Teachers: Teaching and Reform in Historical Perspective, Teachers College Press, New York, 1997; K. Weiler, Country Schoolwomen: Teaching in Rural California, 1850–1950, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998.

^5. Public Service Amendment Act, 1889 (53 Vic. No. 1024).

^6. S. Macintyre, Winners and Losers: the Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian History, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1985, ch. 3.

^7. D. Deacon, Managing Gender: the State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers, 1830–1930, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989.

^8. Victorian Parliamentary Papers 1884, Royal Commission on Education (Rogers Templeton Commission).

^9. M. Theobald, 'Women's Teaching Labour: The Family and the State in Nineteenth-Century Victoria', in M. Theobald and R.J.W. Selleck (eds), Family, School and State in Australian History, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1990; see also Theobald, Knowing Women.

^10. Rogers Templeton Commission, Report and Minutes of Evidence, vol. 3, p. 26.

^11. Victorian Government Gazette, no. 1, January 1885, the first classified roll.

^12. A. Oldfield, Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or Struggle?, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 131–35.

^13. Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 11, pp. 173–75; L.J Blake (ed.), Vision and Realisation: A Centenary History of State Education in Victoria, Education Department of Victoria, Melbourne, 1973, vol. 1, p. 1481.

^14. In 1883, Charles Pearson, Minister of Public Instruction 1886–90, was a co-sponsor to simplify divorce proceedings for women and make custody procedures less disadvantageous. But Liberals replaced patriarchy with domesticity and maintained inequality in marriage and public life. See S. Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1991.

^15. Deacon, Managing Gender, ch. 5.

^16. Public Service Amendment Act 1895, no. 25, Section 36.

^17. New South Wales Parliamentary Debates (hereafter NSWPD), 1895, pp. 1821–27.

^18. Deacon, Managing Gender, ch. 5.

^19. For detail on this case, see Theobald, Knowing Women, p. 170.

^20. Victorian Parliamentary Debates (hereafter VPD), 1901, vol. 99, p. 2915.

^21. VPD 1889, vol. 60, pp. 429–30; VPD 1894–5, vol. 76, p. 2053.

^22. J. Rea, Women in the Victorian Teaching Service: The Struggle for Her Own Rights, Federated Teachers Union, Melbourne, 1991.

^23. For an account of the government's treatment of Mrs Edna Nurse at MacRobertson Girls High School, see Victorian Public Record Series (hereafter VPRS), 1046, High Schools' Correspondence, unit 38, 16 September 1940, Public Record Office of Victoria (hereafter PROV).

^24. See VPRS Special Case File 1324, PROV for précis of the position of married women teachers and the government response to them. See also the Teachers' Journal, 20 September 1941, p. 272.

^25. Minutes of the VTU Council, N86/38 10–13, 25 June 1940, held at the Noel Butlin Archives Centre, Australian National University (NBAC), Canberra.

^26. K. Whitehead, '"Many Industrial Struggles are Due to the Presence of Female Labour": The Women Teachers Guild in South Australia, 1937–42', Historical Studies in Education, vol. 8, no. 1, 1996, pp. 25–41.

^27. Teachers' Journal, 20 September 1941.

^28. See VPRS Special Case File 1324, Temporary Teachers, 14 October 1939, PROV; 40/9307 for the small (39 at this point) but increasing number of married women seeking teaching positions. See also Blake (ed.), Vision and Realisation.

^29. See Married Women Teachers' (Dismissal) Act, file 4 December 1945; has a briefing document to the Public Service Commissioner and a list of the women involved.

^30. Teachers' Journal, 20 May 1952, pp. 95–6.

^31. Ibid., 20 May 1952, p. 84.

^32. Ibid., 20 February 1953, p. 162.

^33. Ibid., August 1953, p. 162.

^34. Ibid., February 1955, p. 20. Married women, irrespective of their classification prior to marriage, were employed as temporary teachers in class v, the lowest classification in the Department.

^35. Teachers' Journal, February 1955, pp. 50–3.

^36. Teachers' Journal, July 1955, p. 147.

^37. Ibid., July 1955, pp. 143–48.

^38. Ibid., August 1944, pp. 183–85.

^39. Although D.S. Schubert supported the women's case, many other male unionists did not share this view. This is clear in union minutes and opposition expressed in the Teachers' Journal, where married women permanent teachers were depicted as rivals for promotion or, alternatively, as inferior workers. Both the married women teachers and the Union were keen to distinguish the TTC from the other powerful and disgruntled lobby group, the Victorian Secondary Masters Professional Association. This group of teachers had broken away from the union in 1948 and set up what would eventually become a powerful rival organisation, the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association.

^40. TTC MS Box 1769/1, Minute Book, Inaugural meeting, 13 October 1955, SLV.

^41. A. Mackinnon, Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1997, p. ix.

^42. J. Murphy and J. Smart, 'The Forgotten Fifties: Aspects of Australian Society and Culture in the 1950s', Australian Historical Studies, no. 109, October 1997, pp. 1–5.

^43. Gwyn Dow would later become Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne and Reader in 1970. Her publications include: George Higinbotham: Church and State, Pitman, Melbourne, 1964; G. Dow and J. Factor (eds), Australian Childhood: An Anthology, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1991.

^44. M. Theobald, 'And Gladly Teach? The Making of a Woman's Profession', Fink Memorial Lecture 2000, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, 2000.

^45. Interview with Nan Gallagher, 2002.

^46. Interview with Viv Reilly, 1999.

^47. Murphy and Smart, 'The Forgotten Fifties', pp. 1–5.

^48. Theobald, 'And Gladly Teach?'.

^49. M. Gardiner, '"The Fateful Meridian": Trade Union Strategies and Women Workers', in M. Bray and V. Taylor (eds), Managing Labour?: Essays in the Political Economy of Australian Industrial Relations, Sydney, McGraw-Hill, 1986.

^50. Minutes of the Executive meeting of VTU Council, N86/38, 20 September 1955, NBAC.

^51. 'Teachers Can be Good Mothers', Herald, 1 July 1955.

^52. See the arguments of the Minister of Education, John Bloomfield, in VPD 1955–6, vol. 249, p. 4969.

^53. VPRS 10537/P00, unit 70, 9 December 1951, PROV.

^54. Interview with Nan Gallagher, 1999.

^55. TTC, MS Box 1769/1, 8 December 1955, SLV; Teachers Union Correspondence, MS Box 1769/3, SLV. Reference to the relevant change in provisions can be found in the Teachers' Gazette, June 1955, although no reference is made to the term 'widow'.

^56. Teachers' Journal, October 1956, p. 257.

^57. TTC, MS Box 1769/3, 1 November 1954, SLV.

^58. TTC, MS Box 1769/1, 10 November 1955, SLV.

^59. Interview with Nan Gallagher, 2000.

^60. TTC MS Box 1769/1, 9 August 1956, SLV.

^61. Teachers' Journal, October 1956, p. 259.

^62. TTC, MS Box 1769/1, February 1957, SLV.

^63. Vision and Realisation, vol. 1 p. 1177.

^64. TTC, MS Box 1769/1, 11 June 1959, SLV.

^65. Interview with Nan Gallagher, 1999.

^66. C. Finniss, 'Lack of Superannuation', Age, 30 April 1955.

^67. TTC, MS Box 1769/1, 11 June 1959, SLV.

^68. TTC, MS Box 3, written on panty-hose insert, p. 3, SLV.

^69. Married women teachers would not receive the same superannuation entitlements as their male colleagues until 1982. See Women in the Public Service of Victoria: a discussion paper, Public Service Board, Melbourne, August 1983.

^70. For example, see Rosemary Francis, Of Secondary Concern? Women in the Victorian Teachers' Association 1953–1995, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2000.

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