20 Jobs That Locked Workers In After Dark Through History

When Pan Am, United, and Eastern Airlines started hiring stewardesses to work their flights in the 1930s, the airlines also provided them with accommodations for overnight layovers, keeping them in so-called crew hotels with a 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. curfew. A chief stewardess enforced the curfew by walking around the hotel, checking rooms and auditing sign-in logs. Male pilots working the same crew were exempt from this regulation, and violation of curfew meant potential grounding or firing. This policy stayed in place until flight attendant unions challenged the practice in the 1960s.

Pullman porters were Black men who worked as attendants on the company’s luxury sleeping cars from the 1880s into the 1950s. Jim Crow laws prohibited Black people from staying at the hotels white travelers used. To solve this problem, Pullman constructed rest houses for the porters. Porters had to arrive at the rest house before 10:00 PM every night, and inspectors recorded each arrival. If a porter was late, he could lose his best routes. The porters organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and won union recognition.

From the 1880s until the 1950s, the girls studying to be nurses through hospital-based diploma courses lived in dormitories owned by the hospitals. A matron would lock the dorm doors at 10:00 p.m. after making sure all the girls were accounted for. Girls who came home after the matron had locked the doors were known to climb fire escapes and climb in through windows. If they were seen, they’d be suspended from nursing school, or they’d lose privileges. After years of schooling, they didn’t even have their own keys.

In the 1820s, textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, began recruiting young, single women from farms around New England, providing them with lodging in boardinghouses supervised by “matrons.” The company’s goal was to provide a safe environment for its workers to encourage families to allow their daughters to take these jobs. When the factory whistle blew for 10:00 p.m., the boardinghouse door was bolted shut, and the matron would note any girls who returned after hours or had violated other rules. Repeat offenders were not only fired, but they were blacklisted from all mills in Lowell.

In the 1880s, De Beers and other mining companies began recruiting Black migrant laborers to mine diamonds and gold in Kimberley and the Rand. To prevent theft and desertion, these companies locked thousands of workers behind walls and gates in compounds each night when a curfew was enforced. Pass laws even made it a crime for Black workers to be on city streets after dark without an employer’s permission. These compounds set the stage for the labor control system of apartheid.

Throughout the American South until 1865, state slave codes and enslavers forbade enslaved field workers from leaving their quarters from nightfall until dawn, unless they carried a written pass from an enslaver or overseer. Armed slave patrols enforced this rule. Anyone found outside of their quarters after dark without a pass was subject to capture and whipping. This was not a workplace regulation. It was a violent, legally backed practice that carried over into Black Codes and Jim Crow laws in the post-emancipation period.

In World War II, the U.S. Army and Navy employed over 10,000 civilian women, known as the Code Girls, to crack German and Japanese military codes. They worked at locations such as Arlington Hall in Virginia, where they resided in barracks like Arlington Farms. A 10:00 p.m. curfew was enforced. If a woman was late returning from a night out, she lost her leave privileges. Each evening, a matron checked the sign-in log, while military staff conducted a bed check. It’s said that the Code Girls’ efforts helped shorten the war.

Beginning in 1883, the Harvey Company operated restaurants on the Santa Fe Railway. Waitresses called “Harvey Girls” lived in dormitories supervised by matrons who locked the doors at 10:00 p.m., keeping a record of all who entered. One possible exception to the curfew was if a train was running late and the dining car needed to be opened. Any violation not excused by a housemother resulted in immediate termination. Over the life of the chain, more than 100,000 women served as Harvey Girls.

Japan has a long history of “jokō” (young women) being brought in from rural areas to work in silk and cotton mills beginning in the Meiji era. To keep them from running away from the terrible conditions or from their contracts, they were placed in dormitories that were essentially prisons, with the main gate padlocked every night during curfew, and guards employed by the company walked the grounds, catching and punishing anyone who attempted to leave. Historians do not consider these to be worker housing, but rather “high-security facilities.”

Throughout most of the rural United States beginning in the 1880s, local school boards predominantly hired young, single females to be their teachers and expected them to act as model citizens. The boards often included specific codes of behavior in the annual teaching contracts, approved the house where the woman would board, and established curfews that differed from town to town. Violation of these local rules was grounds for immediate contract termination. The popular “1923 teacher contract” photograph you may have seen online is a relatively recent fabrication. There is no evidence it actually existed.

During World War II, women in the Women’s Army Corps and the Navy’s WAVES were stationed in barracks with a strict 10:00 p.m. curfew on weeknights (extended to 11:30 p.m. on weekends). The military police (MPs) checked IDs at the gate, locked the door to the barracks, and conducted bed checks. A curfew violation could result in court-martial, jail time, or a dishonorable discharge. Meanwhile, their male counterparts had no such restrictions.

Between 1600 and the 1770s, those making their way to Britain’s American colonies bound themselves as indentured servants to pay for the passage, while young men were bound as apprentices to master craftsmen to learn a trade, a practice that continued well into the 1800s. Colonial assemblies set curfews of roughly 9:00 p.m. on the movement of servants, while masters kept the apprentices locked in at home according to their own house rules. Constables and night watchmen arrested anyone who was found outside without a pass, and punishment might be a whipping or additional years of service.

Bell System affiliates employed girls (sometimes known as “Hello Girls”) to staff switchboards in small towns across the U.S. and Canada between the 1900s and 1920s. In order to keep comfortable the communities that were wary about women working at night, telecom firms would build dormitories above the exchanges. The girls were supervised by a live-in matron with a 9:30 p.m. curfew. She would lock the doors, turn off the lights, and report any girls who returned after curfew to the district manager. Late arrival meant termination.

From 1838 until the abolition of indenture itself in 1920, Britain transported South Asian migrants on five-year contracts to sugar colonies such as Fiji, Trinidad, and British Guiana following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Plantation managers kept them in estate accommodation called “coolie lines,” and after a certain time at night, they could not leave the grounds without a written permit, with colonial police officers guarding the roads around the estate. Over a million laborers lived under the system before it was abolished.

In the 1870s, British and American department stores used what they called the “living-in system,” which involved deducting rent for company dormitories directly from workers’ salaries. Each night, managers locked the doors and shortly after turned off the lights. If a worker was late, he or she might find himself or herself locked out on the streets all night long, possibly fined or even dismissed without a reference. Eventually, public outcry and union campaigns led to parliamentary inquiries, which ultimately led to the demise of the entire system before World War I.

The largest category of female employees in Victorian and Edwardian Britain and North America was the live-in housemaid. Governesses, who were educated ladies employed to tutor the children of a wealthy family, were somewhere in between, not quite servants and not quite family. But both were subject to an evening curfew. At a set time, the master of the house or the butler locked all the external doors. After nightfall, governesses were not allowed off the property without supervision. And just like the servants, if they broke the curfew, they were dismissed on the spot. They didn’t even get a letter of recommendation.

From the 1850s to the 1920s, logging camps in the U.S. and Canada had a strict lights-out policy enforced by camp bosses. At 9:00 p.m., there was no talking, no cards, and no leaving the bunkhouse. Part of the policy was to ensure men were well-rested for grueling and dangerous jobs at dawn. Part of the reason was to curtail any union organizing efforts by labor groups like the Industrial Workers of the World. If you came back from the tavern too late or too drunk, you were out of work.

In building the Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914, Black West Indian workers (on what was called the “Silver Roll”) were paid at a lower rate than their white American counterparts (on the “Gold Roll”). They lived in segregated, overcrowded camp barracks. Canal Zone police imposed a 9:30 p.m. curfew on the Silver Roll camps, while the Gold Roll workers weren’t subjected to such restrictions. If a Black worker was out after hours, he risked arrest, fines, and even being sent to a penal chain gang.

The British Ministry of Munitions during World War I hired more than 700,000 women, called munitionettes, to manufacture artillery shells at its government-run factories like HM Factory Gretna, and it constructed hostels in village communities for the workers who had moved from elsewhere for employment. Welfare matrons ran these hostel facilities. They locked the front door after 10:00 p.m., did not let guests who were not residents enter, and recorded who came in. A curfew infraction would be referred directly to the factory supervisors, and the offender might receive a fine or even risk his or her wartime position.

In the 19th century, the lives of merchant seamen and whalemen were controlled almost entirely by the ship’s captain. In port cities around the world, captains and boardinghouse employees known as crimps imposed an evening curfew to prevent sailors from absconding on advance wages or from missing the next day’s sailing. A watch officer checked every man who came back aboard at night. Anyone seen outside after hours was liable to be marked as a potential deserter, apprehended by the local constabulary, or locked below deck in irons.

This content was created with the help of AI.