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A History of Flight Attendants
Duke University Press
February 2007
On Sale: February 1, 2007
296 pages
ISBN: 0822339463
EAN: 9780822339465
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
“In her new chic outfit, she looks like anything but a
stewardess working. But work she does. Hard, too. And you
hardly know it.” So read the text of a 1969 newspaper
advertisement for Delta Airlines featuring a picture of a
brightly smiling blond stewardess striding confidently down
the aisle of an airplane cabin to deliver a meal. From the moment the first stewardesses took flight in 1930,
flight attendants became glamorous icons of femininity. For
decades, airlines hired only young, attractive, unmarried
white women. They marketed passenger service aloft as an
essentially feminine exercise in exuding charm, looking
fabulous, and providing comfort. The actual work that flight
attendants did—ensuring passenger safety, assuaging fears,
serving food and drinks, all while conforming to airlines’
strict rules about appearance—was supposed to appear
effortless; the better that stewardesses performed by
airline standards, the more hidden were their skills and
labor. Yet today flight attendants are acknowledged safety
experts; they have their own unions. Gone are the
no-marriage rules, the mandates to retire by thirty-two. In
Femininity in Flight, Kathleen M. Barry tells the history of
flight attendants, tracing the evolution of their glamorized
image as ideal women and their activism as trade unionists
and feminists. Barry argues that largely because their glamour obscured
their labor, flight attendants unionized in the late 1940s
and 1950s to demand recognition and respect as workers and
self-styled professionals. In the 1960s and 1970s, flight
attendants were one of the first groups to take advantage of
new laws prohibiting sex discrimination. Their challenges to
airlines’ restrictive employment policies and exploitive
marketing practices (involving skimpy uniforms and
provocative slogans such as “fly me”) made them high-profile
critics of the cultural mystification and economic devaluing
of “women’s work.” Barry combines attention to the political
economy and technology of the airline industry with
perceptive readings of popular culture, newspapers, industry
publications, and first-person accounts. In so doing, she
provides a potent mix of social and cultural history and a
major contribution to the history of women’s work and
working women’s activism.
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