Short v Poole Corporation involved a legal challenge to the marriage bar that prevented married teachers from working in schools. The marriage bar had been re-introduced by many local authorities after the First World War with the encouragement of the Board of Education, the government department responsible for education policy. It led to many married women teachers being sacked, often with little notice and sometimes without being able to qualify for their pension.
The challenge in Short was brought by Ethel Florence Short, a long-serving married teacher and one of 22 married women teachers working in elementary schools in Poole, Dorset. Although she was successful at first instance, a unanimous Court of Appeal took a very deferential approach to the local authority, holding that
‘[a] mere decision to discontinue the employment of married women teachers, or of any women teachers at all, or a decision to employ women teachers only, could not … be interfered with by the courts’.
It concluded that the local authority had exercised its statutory discretion lawfully, therefore leaving it open for local authorities to bar married women from working in state schools across England and Wales. Despite the failure of the claim, the legal strategy in Shortenergised the political activity of the women’s movement at the time. It was part of a decades-long chain of events that led to the eventual ending of the marriage bar in 1944.
The full version of this landmark is written by Hariett Samuels