20 Jobs That Once Let Bosses Control Workers’ Private Lives

Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, a huge silent film comedy star, was arrested in 1921 after actress Virginia Rappe died following a party hosted by him. He was eventually acquitted in three separate trials, but even then tabloid scandal and boycotts persisted. One of the first big movie studios, Universal Pictures, began inserting a new provision into its contracts with actors and others, which allowed them to be fired if their conduct brought them “public hatred, contempt, scorn or ridicule.” This provision became standard. Despite this, Arbuckle’s career was ruined.

The star outfielder Babe Ruth was baseball’s greatest attraction in 1922, when the Yankees’ owner, Jacob Ruppert, added a contract stipulation that he “refrain and abstain entirely from the use of intoxicating liquors” and adhere to a 1 a.m. curfew while the season was underway or pay fines for infractions. It came in the wake of a match-fixing scandal that sullied the game and pushed owners to police players’ off-field conduct more broadly. But Ruth stayed on with the Yankees for over a decade, and his drinking and late nights remained a persistent problem.

Only $2.34 of the much-touted $5 workday at Ford’s Highland Park plant was guaranteed as base pay. The rest of the bonus, $2.66, depended on passing a series of checks administered by Ford’s Sociological Department, which sent agents on unannounced home visits to check the cleanliness of the houses, bank accounts, drinking habits, and whether immigrants were keeping unauthorized boarders. Anyone who failed one of these checks would lose his or her bonus for six months. Only those who still had not “reformed” after six months were fired.

In 1930, Boeing Air Transport hired its first commercial flight attendant, Ellen Church, a registered nurse. This launched a profession built on rigid personal standards. Pan Am, TWA, and other airlines demanded that their stewardesses be young, single, without children, and not over a certain weight, measured in unannounced weigh-ins. To get married or get pregnant was to lose your job. The requirements persisted until the 1960s, when they were overturned.

In 1822, when the first young women from New England farms arrived at Francis Cabot Lowell’s textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, they did not live in regular homes. They lived in company boarding houses. Company-appointed matrons instituted a 10 p.m. curfew, mandatory church attendance on Sundays, and a prohibition on male visitors unless accompanied by a chaperone. If a worker was fired for “improper conduct,” she wasn’t just unemployed. She was banned from working in textile mills across the region.

From 1867, almost every porter employed to staff the sleeping cars of the Pullman Palace Car Company was an African American man. They were also under the watchful eye of “spotters,” undercover company inspectors, who kept tabs on how they looked, what they said, whether they drank, gambled, or owed money, on and off the train. Offenders risked suspension or termination. But in 1925, despite the scrutiny, porters banded together under the civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, creating the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which became the first major Black labor union in North America.

When John Reith became the founding director-general of the BBC, he saw his announcers not just as representatives of the empire’s airwaves but also as representatives of its morals. Between 1922 and 1938, if a member of the BBC staff was linked with a divorce, whether they were the petitioner, the respondent, or a third party, they would be sacked automatically. Reith’s broader insistence on propriety meant announcers should wear dinner jackets on the closed circuit inside the studio, where no one could see them. Scandal meant dismissal.

Beginning in 1883, Fred Harvey constructed a series of restaurants along railroad lines in the Southwestern United States, hiring young waitresses called Harvey Girls who were sent out west from the Eastern United States and Midwestern United States after giving references about their morality. Women typically signed 6- to 12-month contracts and could not marry while under contract. Once a woman married, she was discharged immediately and lost her travel allowance. Many of the women did marry, but they often did so after completing their contract or quitting the job first.

Housemaids formed the largest number of paid working women in 19th- and early 20th-century Britain and North America, and their employment came with a famous stipulation: they were not allowed “followers,” no male suitors in the employer’s house. Employers also locked doors at night, checked their belongings, and made them go to church. If they violated this rule, they were dismissed without a written character reference, and without such, they had no chance of finding another good job.

In 19th-century Britain and America, educated and unmarried women who worked as teachers for wealthy families’ children were common enough, with over 25,000 included in Britain’s 1851 census. They lived in their employers’ homes, so their contracts required absolute chastity and matching levels of religious piety; any suggestion of courtship, particularly with a member of the family, was grounds for termination. In real life, that sort of romance destroyed a governess’s career, whatever novels like Jane Eyre suggested.

Nursing schools based on the 19th-century British nurse Florence Nightingale’s system of medical education ran hospital-based nursing programs with strict residential rules. From the 1890s until the 1950s, nurses were housed in what hospitals called “nurses’ homes” with rules including curfews, room checks, and no unsupervised dating. It was common for hospitals to require all nurses, trainees, as well as fully certified registered nurses, to resign upon marriage.

Chicago’s Marshall Field’s and New York’s Macy’s were just two large department stores that not only hired young, single women as sales clerks but also tried to control much of their lives outside of the sales floor. They were forced to live in approved boarding houses, managed by matrons, and forbidden to go to public dance halls or spend time alone with men after work. A bad reputation gained during a clerk’s free time could lead to instant dismissal.

By 1930, some 235,000 women were working as “Hello Girls,” phone operators for the Bell telephone network founded by Alexander Graham Bell. To get a job, applicants had to supply character references vouching for their flawless moral reputation. Once employed, the Bell company closely regulated their appearance, associates, and language, with many working girls living in dormitories under the control of matrons or being watched while boarding. If a woman was considered a threat to the reputation of the company, she could be fired immediately.

Public librarians, generally single women employed by city library boards when the profession was emerging in the late 1800s and early 1900s, were seen as moral guardians for their community. Employment contracts required them to not read “salacious” novels in private, dress conservatively, restrict their suitors and, if they married, resign their positions. These are hardly the standards of intellectual freedom that public libraries adhere to today.

In 1907, Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. started the Ziegfeld Follies, featuring the tagline “Glorifying the American Girl,” and turning his chorus girls into stars of the night. Off stage, however, Ziegfeld enforced a curfew at the stage door. He forbade his girls from unchaperoned social interaction, bar hopping in public cabarets, and taking presents from wealthy patrons, known as stage-door Johns. If a girl broke the rules or even just generated enough gossip, she might get fired and forfeit the money she had already earned.

Prior to the advent of automated accounting, the bank clerks in charge of large sums of cash were subject to very little external control, and so in the U.S. and Britain they had to pledge to avoid gambling and excessive alcohol consumption. The directors would examine their personal finances and forbid them from entering taverns and billiard rooms in their free time. The mere suspicion that a clerk was living beyond their salary was enough for them to be dismissed. Historians now interpret this as a way of preventing loss of money, rather than a purely moral measure.

Public school teachers, who were almost all female, were governed not by any national law but by local school boards that issued them annual employment contracts. Virtually every board stipulated that should a teacher marry while under contract, she would be fired immediately. During the Great Depression, an estimated 50% to 80% of urban U.S. school districts imposed the rule, along with prohibitions on dating, smoking, drinking, and going to dance halls. Most boards also had curfews that required teachers to be at home from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Prior to the adoption of tenure rules that now protect the rights of college professors, their employment was subject to the pleasure of the university’s board of trustees. Boards could cite a “moral turpitude” clause in a professor’s contract to fire him or her, which could cover affairs and divorces but also political associations. The American Association of University Professors released its seminal statement on academic freedom in 1940, but boards of trustees continued using the “moral turpitude” clause to dismiss faculty members accused of moral or political misconduct.

When Congress passed the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1950, which came into force in 1951, private behavior by a commissioned officer became federal criminal law, not simply a matter of personal honor. Article 133 of the code made “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman” a crime, subjecting officers to court-martial for having affairs, having unpaid debts, drinking in public, or engaging in homosexual relations. Conviction could strip the officer of his commission, result in a dishonorable discharge, and wipe out any back pay he had accumulated.

In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued an executive order that specifically cited “sexual perversion” as an acceptable reason for terminating a federal employee. Government agencies at the State Department and the Civil Service Commission tapped telephones, questioned co-workers, and reviewed mail in an attempt to ferret out lesbian and gay government employees. This campaign became known as the Lavender Scare, distinct from the contemporary Red Scare, which targeted alleged communists. By the end of the decade, more than 5,000 government employees were stripped of their security clearances and dismissed.

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