This was another reason schoolteachers like Dot were perfect: They were almost always unmarried. In America in the 1940s, three-quarters of local school boards (like telephone companies and other employers of female labor) had enacted a “marriage bar,” which required that married women not be hired and that a teacher must resign when she did marry, in accordance with the prevailing belief that a wife’s place was at home. By definition, then, many female schoolteachers were single.
