20 Jobs Where Getting Married Could Get You Fired

Flight attendants, young women whom airlines recruited beginning in the 1930s to serve in passengers’ cabins, were required to remain unmarried. Airlines inserted marriage termination clauses in their employment contracts. This policy persisted until the 1960s, decades after many government employers had eliminated it. Because of the high rate of turnover, salaries remained modest and pension obligations negligible. In the late 1960s, flight attendants challenged the rules by filing suit alleging violations of the prohibition on sex discrimination enacted as part of the US Civil Rights Act.

From the 1800s up until the mid-1900s, maritime organizations like Britain’s Trinity House and the United States Lighthouse Service would appoint only a single person, or a male head of household, as an official keeper. The wives of keepers often performed much of the actual work of the job, tending the lamp and maintaining the log, but always as unpaid and unacknowledged assistants with no contract of their own. A widow could be appointed in an emergency when her husband passed away, but married women never took on the role itself.

In Britain, Canada, and Australia, junior male bank clerks were not allowed to marry unless they received permission from the bank’s board of directors, which depended on whether they earned at least $1,000 per annum in Canada or £150 to £200 in Britain. A married bank clerk with a low salary, banks reasoned, might encounter financial difficulties that would lead him to steal. If a man married without permission, he was fired on the spot. But unlike the total ban on female staff, this was a rule that men could circumvent by increasing their salaries.

In October 1932, the board of Britain’s public broadcaster, the BBC, under director-general John Reith, made a decree: female radio producers, researchers, and studio staff had to resign upon marriage. The only exceptions were rare waivers granted to employees with exceptional creative talent. Otherwise, the rule applied. Only the massive labor shortage caused by World War Two prompted the BBC to end its marriage bar in 1944, 12 years after it was instituted.

Across the US, Britain, and Australia, school boards demanded that female teachers resign once married, based on the notion that salaried jobs should be for men who supported families, or unmarried women who could support themselves. More than half of American urban school districts enacted the rule during the Great Depression. Britain abolished its rule in 1944, and Ireland abandoned its teacher-specific marriage bar in 1958. In Australia, each state abolished its version individually, beginning with New South Wales in 1956 and ending ten years later.

Britain’s WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) and some early US units, such as the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), recruited women to serve in support roles for the military rather than on the battlefield, but if a woman married, she would be discharged immediately. Senior officers reasoned that marriage, and thus potential motherhood, was incompatible with discipline or overseas service. Temporary exemptions were allowed during the Second World War to permit continued mobilization, but there was no long-term solution for married servicewomen to pursue a career until changes were made to the rules post-war.

Banks in Britain and Australia, including the Bank of England, Barclays, and Lloyds, forced female clerks and tellers to quit their jobs when they got married. As a sop to the newlyweds, banks offered a one-off “marriage gratuity,” which was paid in exchange for giving up permanent, pensionable status, rather than as a wedding present. The Bank of England and Lloyds abolished the practice in 1949. Barclays kept it for another 12 years, until 1961.

The Metropolitan Police Women Patrols were created just after the First World War and were among Britain’s earliest official women’s police units. Officers in these patrols had to remain unmarried and live in police housing. Upon marriage, they were dismissed on the spot because their employers argued that a wife’s household responsibilities were incompatible with shift work. While England and Wales abolished this requirement in 1946, Scotland kept its own statutory bar going until 1968, more than 20 years later.

Until the mid-20th century, nurses and ward sisters in Britain’s public and municipal hospitals were subject to a residential system which mandated that they be unmarried, as officials deemed that marriage was incompatible with round-the-clock nursing work. The policy precipitated major staff shortages in Britain’s municipal hospitals in the 1930s, driving out veteran nurses at precisely the time that their services were required. The United Kingdom abolished its civil service and public health marriage bars in 1946, shortly before the establishment of the UK’s public healthcare system, the National Health Service.

At Cadbury’s Bournville chocolate factory in England and at W. & R. Jacob & Co., makers of Jacob’s Biscuits in Dublin, it was company policy for women working on the production line to resign as soon as they married. They were given a Bible, a mantel clock, or a small amount of money as a parting gift when they left their jobs. Jacob’s held firm to its rule from 1927 until 1973, when Ireland’s accession to the European Economic Community compelled the company to drop its discriminatory policy.

In Britain, the General Post Office, which was the government’s postal and telegraph service, established one of the first official civil service marriage bars in 1876. All women who worked as sorting clerks, counter clerks, or telegraphists were required to quit when they married. For surrendering all rights to tenure and pensions, women were awarded a marriage gratuity equal to 1 month’s pay for each year of service, up to a maximum of 12 months’ pay. But this was not a benevolent gesture, it was actually a buyout of their pension liabilities. The bar remained in place until 1946.

A marriage bar requiring resignation upon marriage also applied to Britain’s General Post Office and to America’s AT&T, which employed thousands of female switchboard operators in their telephone networks. During both world wars, labor shortages forced officials to suspend the rule and rehire married women, but they could be fired at will, with no seniority or pension. In 1946, the Post Office ended the marriage bar for good.

Librarianship was among the first academic disciplines that became accessible to women, beginning in the late 1800s. However, in British, Australian, Irish, and US public library systems, women employed as librarians or catalogers in permanent civil service positions were expected to resign when they married. This practice was codified in the Commonwealth Public Service Act of 1922, which affected both federal and state library systems in Australia. In periods of staff shortages, married librarians occasionally continued to work, typically under temporary contracts with diminished pay and no pension benefits.

In the early days of women’s entry into research and teaching positions at universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge’s women’s colleges and some in Australia, where women secured these posts in the 1890s, fellowships came with an additional requirement: women had to remain unmarried. A married woman would forfeit the fellowship, access to the laboratories and libraries, and even the title. Some found themselves continuing to work, but only as unpaid guest lecturers or unofficial assistants to their husbands. This continued into the 1950s.

The British government’s meteorological office hired women with math and physics degrees as forecasters and observers through the early 1900s and World War Two. Although these women had received a professional education, they were also “established” civil servants and thus subject to the same national law that forbade married women from holding civil service jobs. Women who did continue to work as forecasters became temporary assistants, without research tenure or pension rights, until the restriction was rescinded in October 1946.

As municipal governments began offering a wider array of social services at the beginning of the twentieth century, cities employed educated women as child welfare officers, hospital almoners, and social workers. For councils including the London County Council, these positions were considered breadwinner jobs meant for unmarried women or male breadwinners, and women had to resign when they married, a practice that lasted from the 1910s to the 1950s. The high rate of turnover this caused continually undermined the child welfare services that women were employed to provide.

In the early 1900s, Ireland opened its civil service exams to women, who passed them and became tax inspectors and customs officers. These women joined the permanent, pensionable civil service. However, under Irish law, a woman civil servant was obliged to resign immediately upon marriage, and those who remained were converted into temporary clerks with their pay and seniority set back to zero. Britain abolished this in 1946, while Ireland did not do so until 1973.

When Britain’s Great Western Railway and London & North Eastern Railway, and the major railroads of the US, began to employ thousands of women in roles like clerks, ticket agents, and audit clerks, forced resignation upon marriage let them avoid wage increases. This let them replace workers whose experience and seniority entitled them to higher pay with young, cheap replacements. From the 1890s to the 1950s, railway firms used forced resignations as a tool to suppress growth in their payroll.

With the advent of large office spaces in the early 1900s, businesses in North America and Western Europe employed vast armies of female typists, stenographers, and secretarial pool clerks. Resigning upon marriage was often written into the employment contract itself as company policy, rather than being at the whim of a particular manager. This allowed companies to perpetually hire new and less expensive employees in place of experienced ones, while never having to pay any pensions. This was the case from the 1910s through the 1950s.

It was not until 1946 that Britain’s Foreign Office admitted women as full-fledged diplomatic officers. They were allowed to do so only after they signed a document promising to resign immediately upon marriage. Officials argued that travel was central to the job, and a wife’s loyalty might become conflicted, particularly if she were married to a foreign national. The US State Department maintained a similar ban until 1971. The British Foreign Office did not get rid of its rule until 1973, some 27 years after initially allowing women into its ranks.

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