Transcript

Season 1: Episode 6

Sexism Takes Flight

Hosts: Gillian Frank & Lauren Gutterman

Guests and Additional Audio: Dr. Phil Tiemeyer, Patricia Ireland, Kathleen Heenan, Cindy Hounsell, Stewardess Advertisements,Newscaster, NOW Members 1 &2, Sherry, Male Film Narrator, Male Customer, Female Airline Employee

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Stewardess:                 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is your senior hostess, Miss McFadden, speaking to you, and Miss Dresser will be demonstrating your lifebelt briefing in a few minutes.

Gillian Frank:             Former flight attendant Paula Kane vividly remembered one of her many unwanted sexual encounters with an airline passenger.

Lauren Gutterman:     “I was busy taking another passenger’s order when he came up to me, grabbed me by the front of my hair and pulled me toward him. ‘Pretty face,’ he said sexily, as if this was supposed to flatter me or turn me on. It didn’t. I was disgusted, perspiring and boiling over, but I said nothing. I just held my breath and stared at him till my eyes filled up with tears of rage. Finally, he cast me aside.”

Gillian Frank:             As a flight attendant in the early 1970s, Kane described a workplace in which male customers assumed that access to stewardesses’ bodies was part of the in-flight experience.

Lauren Gutterman:     “I remember sitting in my jump seat on a plane, facing the passengers and leaning into the aisle to see a whole row of men staring at my legs, or escaping into the galley, the one place on the plane which is your own turf, where you don’t have to be on stage as a performer, and the men coming up, leaning casually against the door, trying to pick me up. Then there was the casual patting of my behind as I walked down the aisles, the assumption in a hotel elevator that because I had a uniform on, I was somehow public property. The expectation was that I’d have to be nice because the fellow passenger in the elevator was a customer or a potential customer.”

Gillian Frank:             One reason male customers felt entitled to harass female flight attendants like Paula Kane was because airline companies had promised them that stewardesses were sexually available.

Advertisement:            How do we love you? Let us count the ways: 8:30, 11:00, 1:30, 4:00 on Southwest Airlines. There’s somebody else up there who loves you and loves you.

Gillian Frank:             In the 1960s and 1970s, airlines sexualized stewardesses to win male customers and to increase revenues. Through advertising campaigns and labor practices, airlines invited passengers to see stewardesses as eye candy, ready to service their every need.

Lauren Gutterman:     Decades before the MeToo movement, flight attendants navigated a workplace in which their employers required them to stay thin, remain unmarried, and squeeze into revealing clothing every day. These highly skilled and educated women did their jobs all the while knowing that as soon as they turned 32, they’d be considered too old and too unattractive to continue at airlines that provided a good income and a chance to see the world. Despite all of its drawbacks, it was a job many of these women enjoyed and had worked hard to attain.

In the early 1970s, while navigating a minefield of in-flight sexual harassment and assault, flight attendants organized one of the first campaigns against workplace sexual harassment, assault, and sexual discrimination. They recognized that their sexual objectification was connected to the limitations airline carriers imposed on their careers. When they challenged a culture and an industry that viewed them as little more than sex objects in the sky, these flight attendant activists argued that injustices against stewardesses were merely a reflection of what is happening to women in all industries and professions.

Stewardesses’ struggles for sexual and economic justice anticipated many of today’s battles for sexual dignity and autonomy in the workplace. I’m Lauren Gutterman.

Gillian Frank:             And I’m Gillian Frank. This is Sexing History, a podcast about how the history of sexuality shapes our present. The sexualization of flight attendants occurred alongside the rapid rise of commercial air travel after World War Two. In the 1940s, only about 10 percent of Americans had flown on an airplane. By 1977, that number had risen to over 65 percent, and because professionals in the United States were almost exclusively male, airlines sought to win these men as customers.

Phil Tiemeyer:            My name is Phil Tiemeyer. I’m an associate professor of history at Kansas State University. My first book was on the history of male flight attendants. It’s called Plane Queer. The late ‘60s, aviation in the United States is still heavily regulated. It was really the federal government dictating how many airlines could fly between, say, New York and Chicago, who they would be and what prices they would be charging.

This creates a really difficult situation for the airlines. They are basically selling the same product as all their other competitors, and they start to look for ways to differentiate their product. By the mid to late ‘60s, they decide to do it based on their stewardess cores and accentuating that the idea that maybe their stewardesses are more attractive or at least that their uniforms display more skin, and so they’re trying to suggest that, you know, if you fly us, you’ll get a little something extra.

Lauren Gutterman:     The process of conforming to the airlines’ definition of glamorous white femininity began even before a woman was hired.

Patricia Ireland:         This is Patricia Ireland. I started out my first job out of college as seven years with Pan Am as a stewardess, and we were stewardesses in those days. I became a lawyer and served as the longest serving president of the National Organization for Women, from 1991 to 2001, and I am currently practicing law representing unions and their members in Miami, which is where I was based with Pan Am.

One of the airlines that when they interviewed me, uh, the first thing you did when you walked in the room was get on a scale. I went to interview for another airline and I had on a skirt. It was kind of flared at the bottom, and the interviewer asked me to pull my skirt—you know, pull it back tight against my legs so he could see the lower part of my body, um, in case I was disguising thunder thighs under my flared skirt.

Lauren Gutterman:     Many aspiring stewardesses turned to expensive training schools. In some cases, these were the same schools that trained women to become fashion models. Stewardess schools showed women how to exercise, walk in high heels, style their hair, and apply makeup. They were often called charm farms.

Gillian Frank:             In 1949, TWA Airlines helped produce a short film, Airline Glamour Girls, which explained to women across the United States how they could become stewardesses.

Newscaster:                The airline sends her a list of schools where she can be trained. In the afternoon there are two hours of exercises called Comportment Classes, an attempt to improve the students before photos. These girls are 21 to 28, stand 5’2” to 5’7”, and if they enroll with a few excess pounds, they graduate light enough to fly. Makeup courses enhance the girls’ natural loveliness, and apparently the airlines and the bachelors enjoy similar tastes. Half of the 8,000 US hostesses leave aviation for marriage each year.

Gillian Frank:             The airline industry enforced the widely held idea that for middle class women a job was a short-term stint between college and marriage. They sold stewardessing as a means to meet wealthy, white, marriageable businessmen. Many stewardesses shared this idea. When American Airlines began giving stewardesses gold wing pins after five years of flying, they became known as “failure pins” because they signaled a woman’s failure to marry and leave stewardessing behind her.

Lauren Gutterman:     To ensure that being a flight attendant remained a short-term job, not a long-term career, airlines in the 1950s instituted mandatory retirement for stewardesses between age 32 and 35. If these women continued to work for the airlines, they were forced into lower paying ground jobs. Age requirements drove down wages and prevented career-oriented stewardesses from accruing seniority or benefits. These regulations also aimed to prevent stewardesses from organizing for better pay and work policies.

If age limitations capped flight attendants’ career mobility, weight regulations constricted their bodies. Airlines routinely subjected female flight attendants to weigh-ins to make sure that they remained skinny. At some airlines, supervisors could ask a stewardess to jump on the scale if they didn’t like the way she looked. These weight regulations had nothing to do with stewardesses’ in-flight tasks. In the words of Transwestern Airlines, weight regulations were necessary because a good public image through attractive hostesses is one of the few ways an airline can compete.

Gillian Frank:             The airline industry’s public relations campaign had intimate consequences for stewardesses.

Kathleen Heenan:       My name is Kathleen Heenan. I was a flight attendant for TWA from 1965 to 1977, and I was based in New York, and I flew overseas most of the time. There was—it was all, you know, based on your height and what then your weight range could be. And it was pretty strict. I - I never had - had problems with that area, but a lot of [laughs] women did. That was a big problem, the, um, being on weight check.

And you could even be on weight check, and then you’d have to come in ev- —before every flight and - and - and be weighed. And there would be times when - when flight attendants would be suspended without pay because they—they’re—they weren’t—you know, that - that they weren’t losing weight. They’d been warned, but then, you know, they’d be suspended.

Gillian Frank:             Stewardesses recounted taking diuretics, sleeping pills, and laxatives, and living on starvation diets on days before their weigh-ins. Company doctors would sometimes supply diet pills or recommend that stewardesses go on crash diets. And pregnancy was no excuse for weight gain. Because pregnancy conflicted with the image of sexually available stewardesses, airlines grounded pregnant stewardesses without pay or forced them to resign.

Stewardesses also had to sign agreements stating that they would resign if they got married. This policy compelled some women to hide their marriages. Other stewardesses chose to remain unmarried in order to remain employed. Airlines even subjected stewardesses to underwear inspections, which allowed male and female supervisors to inspect whether or not stewardesses were wearing bras and restrictive girdles that shaped their figures. Here’s Patricia Ireland:

Patricia Ireland:         You know, we had to wear girdles. Uh, to get to the briefing office at Pan Am and at Miami International Airport, you would walk by the grooming supervisor’s office, and I cannot tell you the number of times she would call me and go in. “Miss Ireland, you do not have your girdle on, do you?” [Laughs] And I was like, “No, I don’t,” ‘cause I couldn’t figure out of a worse thing to do. If you want varicose veins, put something elastic and tight around your thighs and your waist while you fly.

Gillian Frank:             The airlines’ regulations of stewardesses’ bodies reminded these women that they were most valued for their looks, their sex appeal, and their sexual availability.

Lauren Gutterman:     The airlines’ ideas about sexually attractive women were also deeply racialized. In 1971, only about 6 percent of the nation’s nearly 35,000 flight attendants were racial minorities, and this small number marked a significant increase from previous decades. In 1966, a civil rights commissioner in New York found that for too long there has been an underlying white aesthetic in the evaluation of physical attractiveness by American industry. The bias, the commissioner explained, had the overall effect of excluding a large proportion of well qualified applicants from nonwhite backgrounds from working in the airlines.

Just as airlines dictated what kinds of hairstyles, skin color, and figures their flight attendants could have, they shoehorned stewardesses into uniforms that emphasized their femininity and sex appeal rather than their skills or authority. In the mid 1960s airlines began replacing prim and proper uniforms with increasingly revealing clothing.

Braniff International Airlines ushered in this transformation in 1965 when it announced an “end to the plain plane.” Braniff painted its jets in vibrant colors, but even more significantly created a high fashion air strip to be performed by its hostesses. Stewardesses wore traditional skirt suits to welcome passengers. For dinner service they changed into a shift dress, and for after dinner drinks, they changed into knee length harem pants.

Advertiser:                  When a Braniff International hostess meets you on the airplane, she’ll be dressed like this. When she brings you your dinner, she’ll be dressed this way. After dinner on those long flights, she’ll slip into something a little more comfortable. The air strip is brought to you by Braniff International, who believes that even an airline hostess should look like a girl.

Gillian Frank:             Braniff’s tactics worked. In 1966 the company reported a 50 percent increase in business. Following Braniff’s campaign, airline carriers began competing to design the sexiest uniform.

Lauren Gutterman:     But Southwest Airlines took the competition even further by having its flight attendants wear tangerine colored hot pants, knee-high, white vinyl boots, and short sleeves. The racy advertisements and revealing uniforms, the men who ran airline companies demanded that female flight attendants serve up their bodies along with the drinks and meals that they wheeled down the aisles, and they directly invited male customers to see the bodies of these flight attendants as one of the perks they had purchased with their ticket.

Advertisement:            Getting you there on time is our way of, uh, being faithful.

Gillian Frank:             By the late 1960s, airlines were spending millions of dollars a year on advertising to secure an increased market share. Flying, they told American businessmen, could be a sexual adventure and the airlines competed with each other by suggesting that their flight attendants would go the furthest to please male passengers. In 1971 National Airlines introduced the most famous, and controversial, airline slogan of the era: Fly Me.

Female Advertiser:     I’m Maggie. Fly me to New York. You’ll love my two 747s to Kennedy. Fly me.

Male Advertiser:         Fly Maggie. Fly National.

Gillian Frank:             The campaign cost National more than $9 million a year, but advertising the bodies of female employees paid off. Fly Me raised the carrier’s profile and the campaign won a number of advertising awards. By 1973, National’s Fly Me campaign had inspired a sexploitation film, also called Fly Me.

Film Narrator:           Flying out of the skies and onto your lap, here come the stewardesses of Fly Me.

Sherry:                        Hi, I’m Sherry. Buy a ticket and I come free.

Film Narrator             Four American stewardesses hijacked into wild adventure, battling the flying fists of kung fu killers. Action, oriental style.

Sherry:                        Hee ya.

Film Narrator:           Love, the American way. [Kissing sounds] Take a flight on the wild side with the stewardesses of Fly Me.

Sherry:                        Fly Me rated R.

Gillian Frank:             In the late 1960s and early 1970s, popular films and novels portrayed female flight attendants and swinging stewardesses who sought sexual adventures in the skies. There were bestselling books like the 1967 Coffee, Tea, or Me. There were also sexploitation films like Naughty Stewardesses and Bedroom Stewardesses. Even the 1975 porn film, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, teased the airlines for their obsession with sex in-flight.

Female Airline Attendant:       Oh, I can confirm on that return on that date.

Male Customer:          That’s wonderful.

Female Airline Attendant:       Uh, the destination is New York and that’s first class?

Male Customer:          Correct.

Female Airline Attendant:       Which part of first class? Sex or non-sex?

Male Customer:          Sex.

Female Airline Attendant:       First class sex. Nonsmoking or first class sex smoking?

Male Customer:          Uh, first class sex, nonsmoking.

Female Airline Attendant:       First class sex nonsmoking adult film, or first class sex nonsmoking family film?

Male Customer:          Uh, first class sex nonsmoking adult film.

Female Airline Attendant:       First class sex nonsmoking adult film. Vegetarian, kosher, or regular meals?

Male Customer:          Regular meals.

Female Airline Attendant:       Are you a fucker or mostly interested in a little head?

Male Customer:          Just a little head.

Female Airline Attendant:       Very good. That’s three seats, Cascade flight 111, destination New York, first class, sex, nonsmoking, adult film, no special meals, interested in a little head and a lot of pleasure. Happy landing.

Male Customer:          Thank you.

Gillian Frank:             Marketing campaigns and pop culture representations of swinging stewardesses dovetailed with the airline industry’s clothing, age, and marriage policies. Not only did these representations and regulations sexualize stewardesses, they also invited customers to treat these airline employees as sex objects.

Lauren Gutterman:     When the airline industry shaped flight attendants’ bodies and eroticized their appearance, it also sexualized their interactions with passengers and a wider public. Passengers badgered female flight attendants for their phone numbers and for dates. According to former flight attendant Paula Kane, male passengers’ pinching and patting increased significantly in the wake of the Fly Me campaign.

Flight attendant Jan Fulsom told the Los Angeles Times that, in her three-and-a-half years working for Eastern Airlines, she had been pinched, fondled, leered at, asked out on dates, and propositioned more times than she could remember. Her most traumatic experience of sexual harassment occurred when a drunken male passenger shouted at her, grabbed her, and ripped her skirt off. When Fulsom complained to the flight captain, he responded with laughter.

The captain’s lack of concern about the sexual harassment flight attendants faced was par for the course. One stewardess remembered: “The airlines expect us to put up with abusive language and drunks who like to pinch. Stewardesses are discouraged from complaining about nasty passengers in order to protect the airline’s image.”

Gillian Frank:             Other flight attendants pointed out that the ever shorter skirts they were asked to wear made it difficult to complete their physically active work and keep their dignity. They worried that sexist ads undermined their authority. Stewardesses reported that, in the wake of the sexist ad campaigns, passengers increasingly ignored safety direction or acted rudely when flight attendants asked them to follow airline rules. Flight attendants also faced harassment from the men they worked with. Patricia Ireland:

Patricia Ireland:         What I didn’t like was, uh, a pilot, uh, running his hand down my back, uh, figuring out I did not have a bra on ‘cause there was no bra strap there, and go, “Oh, I see you’re a modern girl.” Um, or being asked by one of the male pursers: “Are you a pilot’s girl or a purser’s girl?” Um, I was neither, but those were the kinds of things among the crew.

When we went to recurrent training—every six months we had to re- —uh, get recurrent training on safety, uh, and evacuating the airplane ‘cause that’s a very serious part of the job. And we would walk through the hangar where they - they, uh, worked on the aircraft, and from the point that you entered the hangar till you walked all the way to the other end to go to the stairs up to the training class, those guys would hoot and holler and catcall and make kissy sounds, and go, “Oh, mommy. Oh, baby.”

Um, it was—and - and depending on my mood, I would either just wave back and smile, you know, and yell something like, “Right back at you,” or I would give ‘em the finger. Um, but - but mostly I tried to keep that all outside of my—of who I felt I was, that that was something they were doing to, you know, to this image of a Pan Am flight attendant. They were not doing it to me. It didn’t touch me. Now that’s not really true, but that’s how I tried to handle it.

Gillian Frank:             Here’s Kathleen Heenan:

Kathleen Heenan:       Pilots could be sexually aggressive when we were out—you know we’re out in the evening or having a drink or something, definitely. There was a lot of that that went on: touching, you know, touching, grabbing, jokes that were really, uh, way over the line. There was a lot of just saying things that made you look like you were kind of like very available and sexually, um, active, uh, with - with these guys, you know.

It’s upsetting I think possibly pri- —you know, because I feel like I wished I’d been more aggressive or assertive a- and I wished I’d been more careful about, you know, ever getting yourself into a situation like that. You know, you can be talking and joking and then it turns into something that’s—you know, goes way beyond what you expected.

Lauren Gutterman:     What do you do when your employer, your coworkers, and a wider culture insist that your ultimate value is in your appearance and sex appeal? Some flight attendants engaged in quiet acts of resistance. Paula Kane wore a uniform two sizes too big in order to properly cover her body. She also deliberately misplaced her name tag in order to remain as anonymous as possible to passengers.

At the very moment airlines marketed flight attendants as commodities, the women’s liberation movement was transforming how women viewed themselves, their workplaces, and their portrayals in the media in this rising feminist movement. In 1966 Colleen Boland, the president of a major flight attendants’ union, became a founding member of the National Organization for Women, also known as NOW, a group founded to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society.

Gillian Frank:             Here are two members of NOW discussing the harms of sexist advertising in 1973.

NOW Member 1:        Uh, this is the National Airlines ad that New York NOW brought to national shame and fame. It says, “I’m Cheryl. Millions of people flew me last year.” And the sexual implication is quite explicit here.

NOW Member 2:        Do - do you also object to sex in advertising?

NOW Member 1:        Well, not sex per se, but, uh, we object to sexism, and this is inequality between the sexes. Um, we object to the double standard that’s being sold to us in advertising. We think that’s very detrimental, don’t you think?

Lauren Gutterman:     By the mid-1960s women had a new legal tool at their disposal. The passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion, allowed flight attendants to challenge workplace discrimination. Using Title VII, stewardesses worked with NOW to challenge marriage restrictions and mandatory retirement by age 35.

In 1972, in response to the Fly Me campaign, NOW organized a picket of the ad agency that came up with the slogan. They carried signs that told the company to go fly itself. At the protest they sang: “I don’t have propellers and I don’t have wings. I don’t have none of those mechanical things. I’m only a woman, and as you can see, I can sure be walked on, but you can’t fly me.”

Gillian Frank:             National’s Fly Me campaign motivated flight attendants to form their own feminist group: Stewardesses for Women’s Rights. Upset by the image of stewardesses as empty headed, whorish sexpots, Stewardesses for Women’s Rights sought to change the annoying and degrading treatment by airlines and the flying public. Foremost among their demands was that airlines stop advertising sex in the sky.

 Cindy Hounsell:         My name is Cindy Hounsell. I was a flight attendant for Pan American World Airways, and as a result of the horrible communications about flight attendants and the sexist advertising at - at the end of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, I joined an organization, Stewardesses for Women’s Rights. I think what drove me to Stewardesses for Women’s Rights was the, uh, marketing of that. The minute you said you were a stewardess or a flight attendant, it was like there was this presumption that you were readily sexually available, and it - it was just so annoying to me that smart people would - would say these things.

Gillian Frank:             Two Eastern Airlines stewardesses, Sandra Jarrell and Jan Fulsom, started Stewardesses for Women’s Rights in 1972. Jan Fulsom became an activist after a male customer sexually assaulted her on a flight from Atlanta to San Antonio. Sandra Jarrell suffered for two-and-a-half years under Eastern Airlines’ weight requirements.

After Jan Fulsom and Sandra Jarrell shared their stories with each other, they realized that the airlines industry’s male dominated unions didn’t pay much attention to the gender discrimination female flight attendants experienced. In founding their group, Stewardesses for Women’s Rights, they brought an explicitly feminist agenda to airline labor activism.

Lauren Gutterman:     Sexual politics were at the center of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights’ agenda, which aimed to raise the consciousness of stewardesses to their slut-in-service-to-America status. Only 15 people attended the group’s first meeting, but that number grew. They dragged friends to meetings and even held consciousness raising sessions in airport employee parking lots. Stewardesses for Women’s Rights also placed an ad in Ms. Magazine.

These actions sensitized flight attendants to shared workplace problems. It gave them the power to name those problems and ask new sets of questions, and it helped individual flight attendants recognize that they were not alone in their anger.

Gillian Frank:             A number of prominent feminists, including Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, supported Stewardesses for Women’s Rights as their campaign took off. Stewardesses for Women’s Rights organized around a mix of political and cultural goals. The group understood that the representation of stewardesses as sex objects was not isolated to their profession. It was a reflection of how American culture stereotyped women within and outside of the workplace.

Stewardesses for Women’s Rights sought to give its members a set of critical and practical tools to challenge sexism and chauvinism. First, the group suggested that flight attendants should challenge the objectification of women through everyday acts of consciousness raising. It encouraged flight attendants to talk about women and men and gender roles to their friends on airlines and outside of the airline industry.

It encouraged its members to use the media to challenge exploitative advertising and to call out those who perpetuated negative stereotypes about flight attendants. Stewardesses for Women’s Rights sought to create alternative media scripts that emphasized that flight attendants were on planes to ensure safety and to handle emergencies.

Lauren Gutterman:     To underline their role as safety professionals, Stewardesses for Women’s Rights released a commercial to challenge sexist advertising and remind Americans that flight attendants’ most important job was enforcing federal safety regulations. In the ad, an actress portraying a flight attendant explained: “I am a highly trained professional with a serious job to do. Should an emergency arise, I urgently need the respect, confidence, and cooperation of all my passengers. Fantasies are fine in their place. Let’s be honest. The sexpot stewardess image is unsafe at any altitude. Think about it.”

Most importantly, Stewardesses for Women’s Rights insisted that women needed to assume positions of institutional power and shape policy. The group told flight attendants that they needed to show up and “use your union as the tool it is meant to be. Voice your complaints, opinions, and suggestions.” In the face of sexism and sexual harassment, passivity and apathy were not options.

Finally, Stewardesses for Women’s Rights inspired its members to engage in persistent legal action against the airline industry. Stewardesses for Women’s Rights found a lawyer who took flight attendants’ complaints about weight, grooming regulations, and promotion opportunities to the EEOC. They quickly filed 14 complaints and the group’s efforts spurred other flight attendants to complain to the EEOC, resulting in a cascade of law suits.

Beginning in the 1960s and through the 1970s, lawsuit after lawsuit challenged the restrictions airlines placed on stewardesses’ age, marital status, weight, uniform, and hairstyle. Flight attendant activism pushed airlines to adopt serious uniforms that reflected women’s professional status. African American flight attendants also used the courts and the EEOC to challenge the airlines’ white beauty standards.

Deborah Renwick, a stewardess with United Airlines, received a three-week suspension and then was terminated for having an Afro hairstyle. With the support of the NAACP, she filed a suit that stated the sole reason for compelling her to abide by the vague and arbitrary standards of appearance is to prevent the plaintiff from looking like a black woman, to express her blackness, to compel her to look like a white woman, and to preclude her from negating the illegitimate standards by which black women have previously judged themselves as women. Renwick successfully sued United for wrongful termination and won the right for flight attendants to wear Afros.

Gillian Frank:             These legal actions had a dramatic impact. As the EEOC and the courts struck down marriage, pregnancy, and age requirements, the average job tenure of a flight attendant increased from 15 months in 1965 to over 6 years a decade later. While not all lawsuits and complaints were successful, and while some cases dragged on for years, flight attendants remade the face of the airline industry and created new employment opportunities for women. They were no longer known as sexy stewardesses. They would now only be known as flight attendants.

Flight attendants transformed the airline industry and improved their working conditions through a sustained struggle in the courts, unions, and in the press. Working alongside feminist groups and their unions, they educated the public about the realities of their labor and they empowered each other to speak out against their demeaning treatment.

Flight attendant activism had repercussions long after the 1970s and its impact was felt beyond their profession. These flight attendants went on to take leadership roles within their unions and to become more politically active in other aspects of their lives. One member of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights described it as “my awakening to the feminist movement, to the labor movement. It woke me up to my political goals and ideas.”

Today most American airlines no longer cash in on the image of the sexy stewardess to sell tickets, and images of swinging stewardesses, which occasionally pop up in popular culture and pornography, no longer sustain the same altitude. While the cultural legacy of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights lives on, its economic gains were tenuous. Here’s Phil Tiemeyer:

Phil Tiemeyer:            There’s just a pernicious way that this did not work out economically as well as flight attendants had hoped, in that the minute these women have jumped out of the box of being a—of women’s work and they’re starting to get paid more akin to family wage, then the rules change, right? Deregulation happens. Union busting happens in the ‘80s, um, in - in a way that, uh, forces ultimately the - the wages in this industry down across the board, not just for women but for the men who are in this - in this career now as well. And that - that foothold that was almost attained, uh, of getting this to be a sustainable, um, pathway into the middle class, um, is sort of chipped away at.

Lauren Gutterman:     Today the Time’s Up movement is striving to address systemic inequality and injustice in the workplace while seeking to improve laws, employment agreements, and corporate policies. Activists aim, in other words, to enable more women and men to access the legal system to hold wrongdoers accountable. As women and men continue to reckon with sexual objectification, harassment, and assault in the workplace and in their intimate lives, the question asked by flight attendants four decades ago resonates: How can we channel our anger into productive actions? Here’s Patricia Ireland:

Patricia Ireland:         You have to speak up and, yes, there can be a price, but the price, in my experience after all these years, is almost always exaggerated in advance and worth it once you take the risk. So you have to speak up. You have to be brave. You need allies and supporters, a - a base of people who will help you in the hard times, because people will attack.

Lauren Gutterman:     Stewardesses for Women’s Rights insisted that anger was an expression of belief in one’s power to implement change, the first step toward a new self-image as a powerful human being. This anger at sexual injustice became jet fuel for rewriting the script for women and men and for their attempt to make sexism take flight.

Sexing History is produced by Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui, Devin McGeehan Muchmore, Gillian Frank, and me. If you’re enjoying our show and want to help us grow, please review us on iTunes. We’d love to hear from you. And if you like an episode, please share it on Facebook and Twitter.

Gillian Frank:             Sexing History is made possible with generous funding from Alan Zwickler of the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation, created in honor of the journalist, filmmaker, poet, and gay activist Phil Zwickler. The Foundation seeks to promote human rights, education, health, and the arts, specifically with respect to the gay and lesbian community and generally with regard to those individuals and groups who need assistance to survive and be heard. Visit them at PZFoundation.org.

Lauren Gutterman:     Many thanks to Phil Tiemeyer for spending time with us and sharing his expertise about the history of the airline industry. You can visit our website for a link to purchase Phil’s excellent book, Plane Queer. We also want to thank Patricia Ireland, Cindy Hounsell, and Kathleen Heenan for sharing their stories with us.

Gillian Frank:             I’m Gillian Frank.

Lauren Gutterman:     I’m Lauren Gutterman. This is Sexing History.

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