Nell McShane Wulfhart - The Great Stewardess Rebellion : How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet

This morning, sight-seeing in New Yorkand in about five hours, Ill meet my date for dinner in San Francisco. Thus read a 1961 newspaper ad for American Airlines that enticed would-be stewardesses with the glamour of life as a sky girl. It was this alluring imageof a cosmopolitan career that would take you to new places, introduce you to new people, and confer upon you an aura of beauty, confidence, and desirabilitythat snared the imagination of young women in small towns, farms, and cities all over the United States. They wanted to escape lives that were mundane and ordinaryand becoming a stewardess seemed like an unmissable chance to do just that.

The opportunity to embody the stewardess idealslim-hipped, smiling, perfectly coiffedand spend your time serving cocktails to Don Draper types while wearing an Emilio Puccidesigned uniform was irresistible to tens of thousands of young women. But underneath this glossy surface, the reality of the job was very different. Appearance standards mandated that the women working the cabin adhere to strict weight limits, that they be physically inspected to be sure they were wearing girdles, that they have clear complexions, perfect eyesight, even teeth, no scars, and be, as often as possible, white.

It wouldnt be much of an exaggeration to say that in the 1960s the airplane cabin was the most sexist workplace in America. Stewardesses were required to be unmarried, a demand the airlines stuck to, perversely, well after nearly every other industry had dropped this rule. Once they hit their thirty-second, thirty-third, or in some cases thirty-fifth birthday, theyd lose their jobs. And if they became pregnant, theyd be fired immediately. Virtually no one became a stewardess thinking theyd make it their lifes work. And it would have continued to be that way if they hadnt taken matters into their own hands.

This is the story of how that happened.

Its about how Patt, a nineteen-year-old from Missouri whose biggest ambition was to become a stewardess supervisor, would spearhead a workers rebellion, leading a subversive campaign to undermine one of the largest and most powerful groups in organized labor. Its about how Tommie, a rangy Texas stewardess with a sociology degree, would help run a feminist organization that made headlines time and time again, and how shed invest heart and soul in seizing institutional power to change her industry from the inside. And its about how the work of the stewardesses in striking down the airline industrys most sexist rules was helped along by Sonia, a single-minded Jewish refugee from Germany who would end up making legal history in more ways than one.

Their friends and colleagues aided and abetted them through court cases, face-offs with airline executives, sexual harassment, picketing, intimidation from labor bosses, and internal struggles. Through womens marches and weight checks, from hot pants to organizing campaigns, their effortsnot always unified, but with the same goals in mindresulted in a workplace revolution.

Their actions changed their own industry forever, and along with it, the lives of women workers in the United States. They were among the first to see the potential of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to fight sex discrimination. They launched a series of complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then dozens of lawsuits, in a drive to eradicate marriage, pregnancy, and age bans in the cabin. They lost more often than they won: the airline industry was highly dedicated to keeping its workforce young, thin, single, and female. But their work turned Title VII into a tool that would be wielded against discriminatory employers for decades to come, helping to cement the rules of law on disparate treatment based on sex, and establishing case law that would go on to benefit all working women.

When they had, after hard-fought battles, succeeded in turning flight attendant from a carefree interlude between college and marriage into a career that could span decades, it suddenly became exponentially more important that the conditions of that worklow pay, weight limits, degrading uniformswere in every way inferior to those of their male colleagues. So they used their seductive image to their advantage, bringing public attention to the sexist standards of their workplace, and to the way their employers had created and then exploited a stewardess-as-sex-object trope to sell plane tickets. Stewardesses enjoyed a unique cultural visibility, but that had its dark side. The glamour of the job was offered up in place of tangible benefits such as retirement plans, maternity leave, a living wage, and much more.

Turning to their union for help, they found little forthcoming from the men in charge. So they decided to seize that power for themselves, looking to homegrown leaders who would take the radical step of breaking away from an extremely powerful labor organization to form their own, women-led union.

Flight attendants might seem like unlikely figureheads of the womens movement. Its hard to view them as the militant union leaders, passionate organizers, or aggressive litigators they were. It was all too easy to underestimate them, something that was quickly discovered by the very people they were fighting: the airline executives who forced them into paper dresses and go-go boots, and the unions that treated them as decorative mascots rather than workers or colleagues.

The flight attendants achievements are, even from todays perspective, remarkable: they forced the airlines to promote them alongside men, to pay them fairly, to treat them as legitimate workers. The stewardess rebellion is a story of harnessing the energy of the womens movement to make radical change. Its a story of seizing power from the powerful. And for Patt and Tommie and many of their friends, its a story of unexpected personal transformation. But the flight attendants biggest victories were only achieved through tenacious collective actionand through behavior that was anything but ladylike.