10 Jobs Women Couldn’t Easily Get in the 1960s

For a young woman graduating from high school or college in the early 1960s, the job market looked very different than it does today. Newspapers ran help-wanted ads in separate columns labeled “Help Wanted, Male” and “Help Wanted, Female.” The women’s column was filled with jobs as secretaries, nurses, teachers, waitresses, and telephone operators. Many higher-paying and more powerful jobs were listed only for men.

Women who wanted to break into male-dominated fields faced closed doors, open hostility, and laws that kept them out. Some employers refused to hire married women, and many fired women when they became pregnant. Even when women did the same work as men, they were often paid far less.

Change began in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1970s, thanks to new laws and the courage of women who refused to accept “no.” Here are ten jobs women couldn’t easily get in the 1960s, and the women who helped open the doors.

1. Airline Pilot

In the 1960s, women could work as airline stewardesses, but the cockpit was off-limits. Stewardesses themselves faced strict rules about weight, age, and marital status, and many airlines required them to quit when they married or turned 32 or 35.

No major U.S. airline employed a female pilot until 1973, when Emily Howell Warner was hired by Frontier Airlines. She later became the first woman to be a captain for a U.S. scheduled airline.

Today, women still make up a small share of airline pilots, but their numbers are growing. Warner’s uniform is in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

2. Police Patrol Officer

Women worked in police departments in the 1960s, but they were usually assigned to jobs like clerical work, handling juvenile cases, or working with female prisoners. Patrolling the streets was considered a man’s job.

In 1968, Betty Blankenship and Elizabeth Robinson of the Indianapolis Police Department became the first women in the United States assigned to patrol in a squad car. Their work helped pave the way for women across the country to serve on patrol. Today, women serve as police officers, detectives, and police chiefs across the country, though they remain a minority in most departments.

3. FBI Special Agent

Under J. Edgar Hoover, who led the FBI for nearly 50 years, women were not allowed to become special agents. They could work as secretaries and clerks, but not as investigators.

After Hoover’s death in May 1972, the bureau began accepting women. That July, Susan Roley and Joanne Pierce became the first women to graduate from the FBI Academy as special agents.

Today, women serve throughout the FBI, including in senior leadership roles. The FBI has documented this history as part of its own story.

4. Firefighter

Firefighting was almost entirely a male profession in the 1960s. Physical tests, workplace culture, and outright bans kept women out of most fire departments.

In the 1970s, women began breaking into the field. Sandra Forcier is often recognized as the first paid female firefighter in the United States, hired in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1973. In 1982, after a lawsuit, the New York City Fire Department hired its first women firefighters. Today, women make up a small but growing share of firefighters, many of them volunteers.

5. Bartender

In the 1960s, many states had laws that prohibited or restricted women from working as bartenders. Supporters of these laws claimed they protected women from the dangers of saloons. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld a Michigan law that barred most women from bartending.

Those laws began to fall in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1971, the California Supreme Court struck down that state’s ban on women bartenders, ruling that it violated equal protection.

Today, women work as bartenders across the country, and many own bars and restaurants. The old laws now seem almost unbelievable.

6. Stockbroker With a Seat on the Exchange

Wall Street was a man’s world in the 1960s. Women could work as secretaries and clerks, but very few became brokers. None held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange until 1967.

That year, Muriel Siebert became the first woman to buy a seat on the NYSE. She was turned down by many banks before she found one willing to lend her the money. For nearly a decade, she was the only woman among more than 1,300 men on the exchange. Siebert went on to found her own brokerage firm and became a champion for women in finance.

7. Network News Anchor

In the 1960s, television news was dominated by men like Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley. Women in TV news were often limited to “women’s interest” stories about fashion, cooking, and family.

In 1976, Barbara Walters became the first woman to co-anchor a network evening news program, joining Harry Reasoner at ABC. Her million-dollar contract made headlines, and she faced plenty of criticism.

Walters went on to become one of the most famous journalists in the world. Today, women anchor news programs on every major network.

8. Military Academy Cadet

In the 1960s, women could serve in the military, but in limited roles and in separate branches like the Women’s Army Corps. The nation’s service academies, including West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy, admitted only men.

In 1975, Congress passed a law allowing women to attend the service academies, and the first women entered in 1976. The first female graduates received their commissions in 1980. Today, women serve in nearly every military role, including combat positions that were opened to them in 2015 and 2016.

9. Astronaut

NASA’s early astronaut corps was all male. In the early 1960s, a group of women pilots, later called the “Mercury 13,” passed some of the same medical tests as male astronauts. But NASA required astronauts to be military test pilots, a job women could not hold, and the women were never allowed to fly.

In 1978, NASA selected its first women astronauts. In 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space, flying aboard the space shuttle Challenger.

Today, women are a regular part of NASA’s astronaut corps. Several have commanded missions and lived on the International Space Station.

10. Supreme Court Justice

For most of American history, the highest court in the land was an all-male institution. Even talented women lawyers struggled to find jobs at major law firms in the 1950s and 1960s. Sandra Day O’Connor, who graduated near the top of her Stanford Law School class in 1952, was offered only a job as a legal secretary by private law firms.

In 1981, O’Connor became the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg followed in 1993.

Today, several women serve on the Supreme Court. Their presence would have seemed unimaginable to many Americans in the 1960s.

The Laws That Changed Everything

Several laws helped open doors for women. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 made it illegal to pay women less than men for the same work. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned employment discrimination based on sex. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created to enforce these laws.

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that newspapers could not run sex-segregated help-wanted ads. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 made it illegal to fire women for becoming pregnant. Each change built on the last.

The Women Who Paved the Way

Many women who came of age in the 1960s remember the barriers firsthand. They fought for opportunities that younger women now take for granted. Their courage changed the American workplace forever. Many of them also faced social pressures women over 40 outgrow only later in life.

Did you or your mother face any of these barriers, or do you remember the “Help Wanted, Female” ads? Many readers say they still remember being told certain jobs were “not for girls.”