The Great Stewardess Rebellion review: stirring study of what Roe v Wade helped vanquish

Clara Bingham
Sat 7 May 2022 02.00 EDT

In 1966, when America was still in the throes of the Mad Men era, when men were men and women were their secretaries, Martha Griffiths, one of a handful of women in Congress, wrote to the senior vice-president of United Airlines.

Charles M Mason had declared that a stewardess who lingered on the job for more than three years without finding a husband was “the wrong kind of girl”.

Mason’s comment described not just the devalued status of stewardesses in the 1960s but the reality of most working women at the time. Mason’s “wrong kind of girl” (these “girls” were usually college graduates) was a woman who might not want marriage and children to be her only occupation, or might need to work for a living.

As Nell McShane Wulfhart writes in her astonishing exposé of their long struggle for respect and equality, flight attendants were pimped out as sexual objects whose role was to serve, charm and entice male customers. TWA, United, Delta and other airlines argued that their bottom line depended on hiring young, beautiful women and firing them if they got married or pregnant, turned 32 or, God forbid, put on some pounds. Airlines were in the business of selling sex along with tickets, a very profitable Playboy Club in the skies

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/07/the-great-stewardess-rebellion-review-nell-mcshane-wulfhart-clara-bingham



Emilio Pucci designed stewardess uniforms for Braniff Airlines, late 1960's.


A photographic historical look at the sexy stewardesses of the 1960s-1980s



Pacific Southwest Airlines employee in mini-skirts and go-go boots.

The flight attendant occupation took permanent shape in the 1930s as “women’s work,” that is, work not only predominately performed by women but also defined as embodying white, middle-class ideals of femininity.

As the nascent commercial aviation industry sought to lure well-heeled travelers into the air, airline managers and stewardesses together defined the new field of in-flight passenger service around the social ideal of the “hostess.”

A stewardess’s foremost duty was to mobilize the nurturing instincts and domestic skills to serve passengers, much as middle-class, white women were expected to treat guests in their own homes.

The early airlines’ crystallizing idea of the stewardess alose demanded, however, that the hostess to be as desirable as she was nurturing. From the start, stewardess work was restricted to white, young, single, slender, and attractive women.

More:
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/sexy-stewardesses-pictures-history/