Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (review)

One of the pleasures of Kathleen Barry’s book, Femininity in Flight, is the many photographs that illustrate her arguments about how stewardesses worked to project a particular type of femininity, which she calls glamour. On page 183, for example, she includes a photograph of a youthful brunette stewardess for the fledgling airline, Southwest. The date is 1972 and the stewardess is clad in “hot pants” and high heeled lace-up boots, leaning playfully on the seat in front of an older male passenger, and presumably taking his order for a drink while engaging in a little pleasant banter. On my most recent flight on Southwest, our flight attendant wore khaki shorts and a polo shirt and warned the summer travelers to “not even THINK about coming up to the front of the plane to ask for something” and to wait patiently in our seats for drink service. Barry provides us with an insightful history of this transformation from hot pants to khakis, from individualized customer care to efficient assembly line beverage service, and from glamorous stewardesses to no-nonsense flight attendants. Barry places this story in the context of the history of air travel, the gendering of technology and work, the organized labor movement in the postwar period, and, most importantly, the simultaneous growth of pink-collar work, the demand for civil rights in the workplace, and second-wave feminism.

Barry uses the concept of “glamour” as one of the organizing principles for her book, charting the changing definitions of glamour from the 1930s to the 1970s. She also argues that the centrality of glamour to the occupational identity of stewardesses simultaneously granted them status unavailable to other feminized workers and made it easier for airlines to exploit them by, for example, imposing age and weight limits. Barry explores how glamour was constructed along race and class lines as well, highlighting interesting differences between the history of Pullman Porters and the new service workers on planes. In the 1930s, airlines were uncertain about how to define the job of the “cabin boy” or “air hostess,” but they did make whiteness a prerequisite for working in the new, intimate, and high-technology realm of the skies. By the end of the first decade of commercial flying, however, airlines also defined the job in feminine terms, expecting stewardesses to calm the nerves of wary travelers and to glamorize the new mode of travel.

Barry stresses that stewardesses were not content with the “wages of glamour” even as they took pride in high standards for appearance and graciousness. From the outset, stewardesses sought recognition for their training and work in the field of safety (many early stewardesses were nurses), finally winning federal certification for safety only after 9/11. They also worked to form unions, a challenge for a group of workers geographically dispersed and subject to high turnover due to marriage bans and age limits. Barry skillfully recounts the complexities of unionizing in the postwar system, exploring the difficulties of forming an independent union, gender dynamics within the Air Line Stewards and Stewardesses Association (ALSSA), and the politics of the larger labor bureaucracy. In the 1960s, stewardesses began looking for legal tools to challenge age limits, marriage bans, and weight requirements. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act provided them with just such a tool, but it required hard work on the part of stewardesses and their advocates to make this tool work for them. Barry recounts how their efforts eventually paid off, laying the groundwork for a more stable and militant workforce.

In the 1970s, when the sexual revolution and increased competitive pressure led airlines to use provocative images of stewardesses and slogans like “Fly Me” to appeal to consumers, a militant minority formed Stewardesses for Women’s Rights. These leaders and a changing rank-and-file challenged the new definition of glamour foisted on them by their employers and demanded “to be respected for doing real...