Femininity in flight : a history of flight attendants / Kathleen M. Barry.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barry, Kathleen M. (Kathleen Morgan)

Series:

Radical perspectives

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Flight attendants--United States--History.

Flight attendants--Labor unions--United States.

Feminism--United States.

Feminism.

Flight attendants--Labor unions.

Flight attendants.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

xv, 304 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2007.

Summary:

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." Combining attention to the political economy and technology of the airline industry with perceptive readings of popular culture, newspapers, industry publications, and first-person accounts, Barry makes a significant contribution to the history of women's work and working women's activism.

Contents:

1 "Psychological Punch": Nurse-Stewardesses in the 1930s 11

2 "Glamor Girls of the Air": The Postwar Stewardess Mystique 36

3 "Labor's Loveliest": Postwar Union Struggles 60

4 "Nothing But an Airborne Waitress": The Jet Age 96

5 "Do I Look Like an Old Bag?": Glamour and Women's Rights in the Mid-1960s 122

6 "You're White, You're Free, and You're 21-What Is It?": Title VII 144

7 "Fly Me? Go Fly Yourself!": Stewardess Liberation in the 1970s 174

Epilogue: After Title VII and Deregulation 211.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [271]-292) and index.

ISBN:

9780822339342

082233934X

9780822339465

0822339463

OCLC:

71790120