Last formal marriage bar lifted by the Foreign Office.
But women were still routinely sacked for being pregnant, well into the 1970s.
Most marriage bars had been lifted in the 40s, in the years immediately after WWII. Baroness Hale (the first woman President of the UK Supreme Court), speaking in October 2025 on the podcast The Rest is Politics, Leading remarked that her mother had had to give up work as a teacher when she got married in 1936, but was able to return to her profession when the marriage bar to teaching was lifted in 1944.
By 1971, 49% of British married women were employed outside the home.