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. Schoolteachers were smart, educated, accustomed to hard work, unused to high pay, simultaneously youthful and mature, and often unencumbered by children or husbands. In short: They were the perfect workers.
