Neyaf Alharbi
Laine McDonald was part of a series of legal cases involving United Air Lines (UAL), their
former flight attendants, and the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA). The cases centered around
flight attendants who lost their job due to UAL’s no-marriage policy of the 1950s and 1960s in which the
company insisted that their female flight attendants remain unmarried. Upon hiring a woman as a
stewardess, UAL made them sign a form which stated they could only work as a flight attendant if they
remained unmarried. If a flight attendant married, they had to transfer to a ground job, were forced to
resign, or were fired. For years flight attendants had no legal basis to protest this employment clause,
but in 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed with Title VII prohibiting sex-based discrimination. The Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was founded that same year, and ALPA’s Steward and
Stewardess Division (the precursor to the AFA) began fighting UAL’s no-marriage policy, which the
company finally revoked in 1968. In 1965 the EEOC declared UAL’s no-marriage policy in violation of
Title VII and opened the legal system to flight attendants seeking reinstatement. The first case in this
series was Mary Sprogis v. UAL, 1966. This case led to a class action suit by Carole Romasanta in 1975.