ABSTRACT
This dialogue, from a fictionalized account of life in a training college in the 1940s, paints an accurate picture of students’ sexual destinations. The majority would ‘teach for a bit’ but then marry and retire from teaching;2
only a minority would not marry and remain in the teaching profession until the retirement age. Most women teachers were both unmarried and celibate. In the 1920s and 1930s local authorities imposed a marriage bar which required women teachers to resign on marriage (see Chapter 1).3
Furthermore, as I shall show below, contemporary mores obliged respectable women to restrict the expression of their sexuality to the marriage bed.
