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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gender studies > Women's studies
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Femininity in Flight - A History of Flight Attendants (Hardcover, New)
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Femininity in Flight - A History of Flight Attendants (Hardcover, New)
Series: Radical Perspectives
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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"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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