The resumed Conference of the National Union of Women Teachers at Manchester yesterday dealt with a series of issues involving the rights of women teachers as against the tendency to favour men. A resolution was moved protesting against the system of regarding the marriage of a woman teacher as a disability either for appointment or permanent retention by educational authorities, and demanding the immediate enforcement in all Government appointments of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act.
Miss Byell (Birmingham), who moved it, said that the system was as unsound economically as it was morally. It robbed the people of the best teachers and, by replacing them with the inexperienced and inefficient, resulted in a serious wastage of public funds. Marriage should not be classed with inefficiency and immorality as a cause for dismissal. To leave it so was to degrade the institution of marriage, and to so penalise it as to undo all the work of social reformers in correcting the shrinkage of the population.
Supporting the resolution, which was carried, Miss Kenyon (Oldham) gave instances in her own experience in which, time after time, youths, some of whom were only emerging from their teens, were placed in authority while the headmaster was away, over women teachers, many of whom had 20 years experience. Her great objection to the system - which, she said, prevailed in many parts of the country, was that it led even the children to imbibe ideas of the inherent superiority of man, and that it added force to the tragic tradition upon which women were robbed of their rights in the educational world.
Miss Walmsley contended that the system of preferring men was based solely on prejudice. If there was one thing worse than a prejudiced woman it was a prejudiced man. The only way to disturb and upset the prejudice was for women to protest even to the point of making themselves a nuisance.
Further resolutions claimed that married women's incomes should be assessed separately from those of their husbands and be subject to the same abatement; that the school leaving age should be raised to 15, and that the continuation school system should at once be enforced on a practical basis.
