For all our nostalgia about the "Golden Age of Air Travel", it was
more mythical than we like to think. As with other forms of
transport then, until the 1970s, commercial and military aviation
were strictly gendered and racist divisions of labour, both in the
cockpit and cabin - piloting was a lifetime career for white men,
"stewardessing" a temporary one for women. Western culture was
built upon images of men as chivalrous knights, cowboys, and
soldiers - all living rugged manly lives, their greatest joy the
comradeship on cattle drives, or men-of-war or in the trenches. In
reality, by the beginning of the twentieth century, few males had
ever been cowboys or seen active military service. Nevertheless,
fueled by paperback novels and later Hollywood, the mythology
persisted. National identity was defined by masculinity- in the
United States it was the cowboy, in Australia the "digger" and in
Canada, the lumberjack, the Mountie and since the last war, the air
ace. Women in pulp fiction and movies were either the faithful
forgiving wife and mother, the schoolmarm - or the dance hall
prostitute. Pilots were defined by their training, professionalism,
and their courage in the air. To frightened passengers - and that
was everyone then, whoever sat in the flight deck was omnipotent.
One learned professor even cited Charles Darwin's theory of
evolution, proposing that those who became pilots had evolved from
birds and the remainder of humanity from fish and would never be
able to fly a plane! Women were defined by their domesticity as
mothers and homemakers. Airlines recruited them for their
femininity, to be substitute mothers, wives, and daughters to look
after male clientele. "The association of commercial flying and
maleness" wrote Albert James Mills in "Sex, Strategy and the
Stratosphere: the gendering of airline cultures." was largely
achieved through the exclusion of women."
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