Victoria Vantoch - The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon

Copyright 2013 Victoria Vantoch

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used
for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this
book may be reproduced in any form by any means
without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

A Cataloging-in-Publication record
is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-4481-6

For my mother
and
for the stewardesses
who flew during
the golden era

When world war II ended, assembly lines shut down and America's Rosie the Riveters were sent home to start their lives as wives and mothers. It was a new era for femininity, and televisions June Cleaver, who dished up casserole in her suburban dream kitchen, set the standard. But not all women wanted to be full-time homemakers and those who were unmarried or needed to work outside the home had limited options: they could be secretaries, nurses, teachers, or sales clerks, but not much else. Then something monumental happened. Millions of Americans started to travel on airplanesand the stewardess profession was born.

Now, young working women did not have to change bedpans or take dictation; they could travel the world, meet important people, and lead exciting lives. The stewardess position was well paid, prestigious, and adventurousand it quickly became the nations most coveted job for women. Scores of qualified young women applied for each opening so airlines had their pick and could hire only the crme de la crme. In order to win a stewardess position, an applicant had to be young, beautiful, unmarried, well groomed, slim, charming, intelligent, well educated, white, heterosexual, and doting. In other words, the postwar stewardess embodied mainstream Americas perfect woman. She became a role model for American girls, and an ambassador of femininity and the American way abroad.

This icon of American womanhood showed up everywhere in postwar culturestewardesses appeared in Hollywood films and national ad campaigns for everything from milk to cigarettes. In 1955 a Disney television series featured an episode titled I Want to Be a TWA Stewardess When I Grow Up. In 1958 a Life magazine cover story reported that stewardesses held one of the most coveted careers open to young American women. Airlines

At first glance, the stewardess appears to have been a reflection of conservative postwar gender rolesan impeccable airborne incarnation of the mythical homemaker of the 1950s who would happily abandon work to settle down with Mr. Right. A high-flying expert at applying lipstick, warming baby bottles, and mixing a martini, the stewardess was popularly imagined as the quintessential wife to be. Dubbed the typical American girl, this masterful charmerknown for pampering her mostly male passengers while maintaining perfect poise (and straight stocking seams) thirty thousand feet above sea levelbecame an esteemed national heroine for her womanly perfection.

But while the stewardess appears to have been an airborne Donna Reed, a closer look reveals that she was also popularly represented as a sophisticated, independent, ambitious career woman employed on the cutting edge of technology. This iconic woman in the workforce was in a unique position to bring acceptance and respect to working women by bridging the gap between the postwar domestic ideal and wage work for women. As both the apotheosis of feminine charm and American careerism, the stewardess deftly straddled the domestic ideal and a career that took her far from home. Ultimately, she became a crucial figure in paving the way for feminism in America.

The stewardess, as both icon and individual, challenged the traditional gender roles of the 1950s in two ways. First, this multifaceted icon appeared pretty, feminine, and career oriented. The stewardess image in the postwar media conformed to traditional gender norms in many ways, but it also contained porous spaces, which allowed subversive ideas about gender to leak through and to undermine the dominant happy-housewife ideal even during this conservative era. Thus, this icon exposes early seeds of feminism

Second, the profession fostered a budding feminist consciousness among these women long before the American womens movement brought gender inequality into the mainstream national consciousness. Before feminism was a household word, these pretty women had become aware of gender inequality and found ways to resist traditional gender norms. These girdled women conformed to draconian airline beauty codes, but at the same time they also marshaled a powerful rebellion against beauty-based gender inequality in the workplace (such as body weight limits). Using the Civil Rights Acts Title VII, they were among the first women in America to go up against major corporations for gender discrimination of various stripes, and, ultimately, to win landmark victories for working women on issues including equal pay, maternity leave, age limits, and body weight regulations. They also beat the tobacco industry by winning the nations first ban on workplace smoking. These stewardesses show how gender consciousness burgeoned in one group of women before the rise of mainstream American feminism.

The stewardess also sheds light on how Americas identity was being reconfigured as the nation assumed a new role in the postwar world order. When the United States replaced Britain as a world superpower in the postwar international landscape, American national identity changed in important ways. The stewardess came to symbolize Americas emerging identity as a middle-class, consumer nation. This beautiful career girl projected an image of America as glamorous, consumer oriented, and technologically advancedand this potent image would be central to Americas international propaganda campaign as the nation aimed to charm and impress the Cold War world. The stewardess became a much-mythologized, international symbol of glamour.

At a time when few women traveled internationally, this pretty jetsetter served a broader role as a female diplomat who sold the American way overseas. Popularly dubbed ambassadors, American stewardesses were on display all over the worldfrom greeting visitors at the 1958 Worlds Fair in Brussels to waving from Coca-Cola parade floats in the Dominican Republic to teaching Soviet women how to apply lipstick.

The stewardesss ambassadorship was particularly symbolic in the context of the global political climate of the Cold War. The stewardess rose to fame at a time when the Soviet Union and the United States were embroiled in a tense, long-term Cold War expressed through economic competitions, a nuclear arms race, wars of extension, and technological contests. The rival empires also fought an intense propaganda war, which prominently featured images of women. The question of which nations women had better lives and whose women were prettiest were recurring themes in the Soviet-American propaganda wars. Pan Ams stewardess training motto of 1960 captured the power of beauty: An attractive, well-groomed appearance is a social expression of good will and friendship to the world.