Girls Becoming Teachers: An Historical Analysis of Western Austra ...

Chapter 1

Introduction

Once you got married that was the end. You resigned from the Department and you could apply to go back on the supply list but it wasn’t necessarily that you’d get a job. Say someone was away ill from…It might only be a fortnight, well you could get that. It might be anywhere and they’d send you anywhere. Yes it was hard for the women in those days, particularly…I loved teaching. I hated giving up the idea and giving it up altogether.

—Jess Gray¹

Jess Gray did not give it up. Excluding her years as a monitor, she taught for a total of forty years, retiring in 1963. She had decided early in her career that because of the ‘marriage bar’, the Western Australia Education Department’s policy of banning full-time permanent employment to married women, she would remain single. Though her primary reason was financial—she had a widowed mother to support—what is apparent in the preceding comment is that she was passionate about teaching.