The Butler Act was the nickname for the 1944 Education Act that finally enabled women to have a husband (or now a wife) simultaneously to a job teaching in a UK school. Don't confuse that with the 1925 Butler Act in Tennessee, US, that made it illegal in public schools to deny that the Book of Genesis was an account of the origin of mankind (men and women) and also made it illegal to teach Evolution Theory.

I've introduced a discount for teachers this month, the Teachers' Summer Holiday Advantage, which is how I came to be browsing various information about teaching, and although I understood that women were expected to stay at home and run the kitchen sink once married I had never realised there was so much pressure in law.

Preventing women from working once married was known as "The Marriage Bar", which was defeated in 1936 after much campaigning. It took the 1944 act to actually end the open practice in some parts of the UK that were loath to let go of the established practice.

Eighty years later I can imagine that some women still feel pressured to conform to this long-banished philosophy. It puts the archetypal 'Spinster' teacher in another light — not a woman whose life is simply fulfilled as a teacher of children but rather someone who has had to choose just one of two mutually exclusive lives.