From Birdwomen to Skygirls: American Girls' Aviation Stories

5. The Stewardess Enters the Scene: 1930-1945

C H A P T E R 5 The Stewardess Enters the Scene: 1930-1945
W hen Ruthe S. Wheeler published Jane, Stewardess of the Air Lines in 1934, she had little idea she was creating a genre. Her only concern was to produce a salable career story touched with information, laced with adventure, and interwoven with a hint of romance. She intended to capitalize upon what was then considered as one of the latest, most modern occupations for women, pair it with the rapidly developing world of American commercial aviation, and present an informative, exciting story for her young readers. In this, she succeeded—and also created the genre of the “stewardess story,” the literary formula that puts its young heroines into the cabin of an airliner and records their adventures as they encounter pilots, passengers, and miscellaneous folk. The authors who followed her lead, all of them women, took Wheeler’s model and extended it from the era of trimotored biplanes to that of the high-flying jet liner. Their books constitute a cluster of works reaching from 1934 until the late 1950s, glamorizing the stewardess’s life while reflecting the sweeping changes in both American commercial aviation and American attitudes toward women in aviation, the workplace, and the home. The story of American commercial aviation leads directly to that of the airline stewardess. Commercial aviation in the United States dates from the mid-1920s, as the several elements needed for a national air transport system slowly fell into place. The govern- ment air mail service had been operating since 1918. Its needs stimulated the completion in 1925 of a transcontinental system of lighted beacons that made night flying practicable, and twenty-four hour flying of the mail became a commonplace. At the same time, the federal Air Mail Act of 1925, the “Kelly Act,” established eight regional air routes and opened them to bids from independent contractors . This shifted the carriage of air mail from a government agency to private enterprise, and from the winners came the first commercial American air carriers. The following year, the Air Commerce Act of 1926 gave the federal government the authority to establish standards for the licensing of pilots and in general reg-   Opposite: Interior (looking forward) of a United Air Lines 5-AT trimotor, 1932. National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution (SI 75-7267). Top: The “City of Columbus,” a Ford 5-AT trimotor in Transcontinental Air Transport Livery—competitor to the Boeing 80-A. National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution (SI 75-15206). Above: Eastern Air Transport stewardesses alongside a Curtiss Condor. Their uniforms bear a striking resemblance to a registered nurse’s cap and whites. National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution (88-18944). ulate aviation development, leading to the formation of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and a systematizing of government oversight of general and commercial aviation.1 The carriers stimulated by the Kelly Act quickly began a series of mergers and takeovers that absorbed numerous minor companies and created a network of truly national airlines. Most of the companies, large or small, flew passengers on occasion (sometimes at freight rates). Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT), however, organized in 1929 with the assistance of Charles Lindbergh and dubbed “The Lindbergh Line,” became the first line deliberately planned as a passenger carrier. Flying Ford 5-AT tri-motors for daytime segments and connecting with the Pennsylvania and Santa Fe Railroads for night-time travel, it reduced coast-to-coast travel time to forty-eight hours. It never proved profitable and in 1930 merged with Western Air Express to create Transcontinental and Western Air (TWA). Other mergers were taking place as well, involving a network of routes linking New York and Miami, a second network spanning the southern and middle United States, and a third in the Northwest comprising Boeing Air Transport and its associated routes. These produced the so-called“Big Four” carriers: TWA, plus Eastern Air Transport (1930), American Airways (1930), and United Air Lines (1931), respectively. Barely four years after Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight of 1927, a national air-commerce system was in place.2 The carriers realized that they must win over their passengers, persuading the public to fly when normally individuals would travel by railroad or bus. Airline advertising began to present air travel as safe, luxurious, and sophisticated. Meanwhile, descriptive articles and first-person accounts began to appear in...