Airborne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways by Christine R. Yano (review)

In her book Airborne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways, Christine R. Yano intertwines the stories and experiences of Pan Am’s Japanese-American stewardesses with the iconic airline’s rise to fame and fortune from the 1950s–1970s. The result is a persuasive account of the gendered and racialized labor that enabled Pan Am to rebrand itself as a racially-inclusive, cosmopolitan airline that defined Jet Age travel and symbolized the United States’ emerging global power following World War II.

Yano structures her account along three theoretical strands. The first, and perhaps most important, frames Pan Am within the context of frontier ideology in an era of emergent U.S. power and globalism following World War II. The result, Yano suggests, is that Pan Am “used frontier language and ideas to promote itself as a public servant, a path breaker for America, and the leader of a new era called ‘The Jet Age’” (8). The second situates Pan Am’s corporate culture within Japanese American history and the complex ways Japanese American women served as a model minority of femininity—and Jet Age service—amidst the backdrop of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. Her third and final framework combines Pan Am’s corporate ideology as a cosmopolitan symbol of “modernity” with Nisei stewardesses’ experiences navigating this new frontier in the skies.

Yano situates her work within other studies of empire that explore the gendered, raced, and sexualized bodies that enable them to grow and expand. In the case of Pan Am, Yano suggests that the Nisei stewardess “sits at the nexus of frontier and cosmopolitanism. She inhabits the frontier of Pan Am’s empire exactly because of her assimilation, performing corporate Jet Age multiculturalism” (15).

Yano’s primary methodology relies on oral histories from Nisei stewardesses, and thus, the most compelling arguments in this book are those in which the women speak for themselves. Chapter 3, for example, examines the racialized dimensions of why Nisei women were seen as “ideal hostesses” for the sky, as well as how these racial stereotypes shaped their recruiting, hiring, and training. This is where Yano’s reliance on Pan Am’s corporate archives, trade publications, and the popular press serve as important counterpoints to the personal experiences the women recount in their interviews, many of whom speak highly and proudly of their time with the airline. Chapter 4 offers similar insights as it looks at Pan Am’s conflation of “Asianization” with its trademark hospitality and the ways women navigated their often unexpected upward class mobility and global education they gained while flying with Pan Am. Chapter 5 looks at the unique ways Pan Am deployed the physical bodies of the women through grooming, training, and maintaining control of their health and beauty regimens.

The book concludes by examining how Nisei stewardesses managed to assimilate, excel, and sometimes even challenge the double standards and expectations that were placed upon them as Pan Am employees. As members of the Japanese American community in a time when the politics of race and gender were redefining social expectations for ethnic minorities and women in the United States, Yano gives credit to Nisei stewardesses for “carving out their own sense of self” within Pan Am’s corporate framework.

Yano’s methodology enables her to successfully juxtapose Pan Am’s corporate frontier ideology with the individual experiences of its Nisei stewardesses. As a result, Airborne Dreams presents a compelling example of why oral histories are critical to countering the master narratives corporations create for themselves, their employees, and their customers.

The downside to this approach, however, is that Yano spends less time engaging in a broader analysis of Pan Am and its connection to the United States growing commercial empire. Several places in the book could be strengthened by engaging with historians who grapple with similar questions (e.g., Roland Marchand, Victoria DeGrazia, Emily Rosenberg). This aside, Airborne Dreams is a fascinating study of how...