Howard on Barry, _Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (June 2007)

Kathleen M. Barry, _Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight 
Attendants_. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. xv + 304 pp. 
$23 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8223-3946-5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Vicki Howard, Department of History, Hartwick College.


On the front cover of _Femininity in Flight_ two youthful flight 
attendants, dressed in tailored uniforms, wave and smile against a 
blue cloud backdrop as if to beckon the reader to step inside their 
airplane and Kathleen M. Barry's beautiful book. At first glance, the 
cover photograph provides us with an example of the glamorous early 
postwar "stewardess." Readers of this first-rate labor and cultural 
history of the American flight attendant profession will likely never 
look at images like these in the same way. Upon closer examination of 
the cover image, one half sees a sense of irony behind the smile and 
the waving arm, belying a long labor struggle and a budding feminist 
consciousness. _Femininity in Flight_ tells the story of the 
radicalization of these women, from Ellen Church, a nurse and trained 
pilot who became the world's first airline stewardess in 1930 to the 
women who founded Stewardesses for Women's Rights in 1972 and 
published feminist memoirs, such as _Sex Objects in the Sky_.

Barry, an independent scholar living in London, has written a 
monograph that will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and 
students, as well as general readers who will enjoy her accessible 
prose and well-organized chapters. _Femininity in Flight_ fits into a 
growing scholarship that has benefited from the history profession's 
increasing interdisciplinarity and attention to gender. Drawing on 
unprocessed collections at the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, 
and on interviews conducted with former and current flight 
attendants, the book fits into the field of women's labor history 
developed by Susan Porter Benson, Eileen Boris, Dorothy Sue Cobble, 
Alice Kessler-Harris, and Ruth Milkman, among others. In a fairly 
traditional way, several chapters explore pink-collar grassroots 
movements and the complex inter and intra-union struggles and gender 
politics of flight attendants as they sought to organize under 
existing pilot unions and eventually create their own independent 
associations. This union history is put into context, with analysis 
of economic regulation, such as the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 
that centralized aviation policy, and with extensive discussion of 
changing civil rights law, brought about by the Title VII of the 
Civil Rights Act of 1964 that made it illegal to discriminate in 
employment.

_Femininity in Flight_, however, is also a cultural history of flight 
attendants that draws on advertising, film, and fiction to talk about 
the "wages of glamour" (pp. 14-15) and to analyze changing 
representations of attendants from the 1930s through the 1970s. The 
dual identity of Barry's book as a labor and cultural history is not 
just a reflection of her broad intellectual interests -- it is 
central to the thesis of the study. She argues that the labor history 
of these women cannot be separated from the cultural -- that 
"glamorization was a double-edged sword that motivated and shaped 
flight attendants' activism, and in turn their contributions to 
working women's struggles for more respectful treatment" (p. 3). The 
glamorous image of the profession compensated for the low pay, 
arduous work, and often harassing and even unhealthy or dangerous 
conditions. But, as Barry shows, glamour also became a burden for 
female flight attendants that they continually tried to shed or at 
least turn to their advantage as they pressed for equality and safety 
on the job and for greater respect for their profession as a whole.

The early story of flight attendant work followed larger patterns in 
labor history, starting with feminization, the process by which many 
occupations became "women's work." As Barry demonstrates, the 
occupation became permanently feminized in the 1930s, an era during 
which the gendered identity of the job and its relation to other 
service work was still uncertain. Young, attractive, white "sky 
girls" became the favored labor pool, pushing out white male stewards 
except on long distance international flights. When airlines 
feminized the occupation in the 1930s, they also turned their backs 
on other potential labor pools, such as black men, who had 
traditionally held service jobs in other areas of transportation, 
such as the railroads. Barry argues that airlines employed passenger 
attendants who acted as both host and servant, in the tradition of 
the railroad porter, but that they also set themselves apart from the 
railroads and other services by "offering the 'fellowship' of 
whiteness and banishing tipping" (p. 16). At the beginning of the 
commercial aviation age, moreover, female cabin crew had to attend to 
passengers' fear of flying and required courage themselves. Early 
airlines who could afford the frill of a hostess made the decision to 
hire only women with a nursing diploma. Many of the restrictions on 
marital status, age, height, weight, and grooming that would haunt 
the field were established during this period as well.

By the postwar era, the period that occupies most of the book, the 
stewardesses lost the nurturing and courageous image developed in the 
1930s as beauty and charm became the profession's main requirements. 
In a chapter that explores "the postwar stewardess mystique," Barry 
argues that much of their labor on the plane was invisible to 
passengers, and indeed, that glamour itself was work as stewardesses 
sculpted their bodies and made up their faces to fit the airlines' 
requirements. In these early postwar chapters, readers will enjoy 
accounts of a lost era of luxury flying. Rather than losing your 
luggage as is common today, American airlines promised "door-to-door" 
baggage pickup and delivery. In the context of regulation, airlines 
sought to capture market share through service, rather than new 
routes or price cuts. Competition gave rise to such things as Pan 
Am's "President's Special," which offered seven-course meals and 
gifts of cigars, perfume and orchids.

One of the strongest portions of the book is the extensive discussion 
of Title VII and the role it played in transforming the profession. 
Without federal support, unions had failed to lift the marriage ban 
and other discriminatory requirements. Rules varied at different 
airlines, with some hiring only women, some disallowing glasses for 
women but not for men, some requiring retirement at age 32 or 35 for 
women but not for men, and so on. Favoring a transient, pliable 
female-only workforce that lacked the ability to gain seniority and 
power, and believing that the youthful and sexually available image 
of the single stewardess was central to their success, the industry 
dug in its heels after 1964. Stewardesses pushed for action quickly, 
but met failure in the courts as the airlines repeatedly and 
successfully claimed a "bona fide occupation qualification," a 
loophole that employers could use to justify differential treatment 
of job applicants and employees on the basis of sex, religion, or 
national origin (though not race). By 1968, the Equal Opportunity 
Commission (EEOC) definitively denied the use of this loophole for 
flight attendants, but it was not until 1971 that the courts settled 
the question finally and disallowed sex as a "bona fide occupation 
qualification" for flight attendants.

Title VII brought about vast changes in the industry, just as the 
Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 began a process that would transform 
commercial flying. Barry briefly overviews these changes, describing 
the setbacks for unions in the 1980s, the rise of a new and larger 
flight attendant union in the 1990s, and the economic decline in the 
industry caused by the September 11th terrorist attacks. But Barry's 
interesting story really ends in the late 1970s, when the activism of 
these women began to bear real fruit, and stewardesses became flight 
attendants.


Vicki Howard is an Assistant Professor of History at Hartwick College 
in Oneonta, New York, and the author of _Brides Inc. American 
Weddings and the Business of Tradition_ (University of Pennsylvania 
Press, 2006).

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