Working the Skies

The Fast-Paced, Disorienting World of the Flight Attendant

Drew Whitelegg

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780814794739
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Get ready for takeoff. The life of the flight attendant, a.k.a., stewardess, was supposedly once one of glamour, exotic travel and sexual freedom, as recently depicted in such films as Catch Me If You Can and View From the Top. The nostalgia for the beautiful, carefree and ever helpful stewardess perhaps reveals a yearning for simpler times, but nonetheless does not square with the difficult, demanding and sometimes dangerous job of today's flight attendants. Based on interviews with over sixty flight attendants, both female and male labor leaders, and and drawing upon his observations while flying across the country and overseas, Drew Whitelegg reveals a much more complicated profession, one that in many ways is the quintessential job of the modern age where life moves at record speeds and all that is solid seems up in the air.

Containing lively portraits of flight attendants, both current and retired, this book is the first to show the intimate, illuminating, funny, and sometimes dangerous behind-the-scenes stories of daily life for the flight attendant. Going behind the curtain, Whitelegg ventures into first-class, coach, the cabin, and life on call for these men and women who spend week in and week out in foreign cities, sleeping in hotel rooms miles from home. Working the Skies also elucidates the contemporary work and labor issues that confront the modern worker: the demands of full-time work and parenthood; the downsizing of corporate America and the resulting labor lockouts; decreasing wages and hours worked; job insecurity; and the emotional toll of a high stress job. Given the events of 9/11, flight attendants now have an especially poignant set of stressful concerns to manage, both for their own safety as well as for those they serve, the passengers. Flight attendants, originally registered nurses charged with attending to passengers' medical needs, now find themselves wearing the hats of therapist, security guard and undercover agent. This last set of tasks pushing some, as Whitelegg shows, out of the business altogether.

1

Briefing

From Stewardess to Flight Attendant

Flying unsupported through space gave one a godlike impersonality. For those who could tear themselves loose from the earth there was a reward. Not in the physical release only, but in a mental freedom which swept the brain clean of cobwebs and gave one a perspective which made such tragedies as broken hearts shrink from mountains to molehills.

—Vida Hurst, Air Stewardess, 1934¹

One evening in January 2005, I was driving northbound to LAX on Interstate 405 with a United flight attendant, Rebecca. Rebecca had spent most of the day worrying and venting about her job and what the future held. Would her new Denver base be an improvement on her old one in Washington? Would bankrupt United survive? And even if it did, what would life be like for its flight attendants, threatened with chaotic schedules and scrapped pension schemes? As we drove, Rebecca directed my attention out of the right-hand window. As far back as the eye could see, airplanes on approach banked and circled over the Puente Hills before forming a neat vector, one after another, coming in to Los Angeles. “Oh, my god!” exclaimed Rebecca. “Look at that! I just love that sight. It’s like a dance in the sky.”

Just as the best dancing can transport us to another dimension, for flight attendants, flying has long been a means of breaking free from the limitations of terra firma. As Barbara Dorger, a recent United retiree, suggests in her memoirs, “We traveled on a wave of energy, spending much of our time in the air—not on the earth—in a timeless kind of space. A space of serving others. A space we enjoyed.”²

From their first hiring in 1930, women attempted to “space-out” their lives through taking to the air, even if few hung around for more than a year or two. Flight attendant imagery became increasingly important to airlines seeking to create brand identity and to differentiate themselves from their competitors. On the one hand, carriers exploited the spaces of their workers’ bodies and sold “femininity”; on the other, women used the job for their own ends and, with time, capitalized on their centrality in airline marketing to reclaim their bodies from the advertising gurus. As I argue here, flight attendant history is the story of how women took the job and turned it into a full-time profession. Though they often took to the skies under strict patriarchal conditions, women flight attendants carved out a niche for themselves and ultimately challenged those restrictions. In doing so, they “spaced-out” in different ways, from being thrilled just to be airborne, to being excited by exotic locations, and then to being satisfied with being able to exert control over their movements.

Breaking Free: Women and Early Flight

Human beings have long been obsessed with flight. Nearly all civilizations have imbued it with mythical and mystical powers, the prerogative of the gods or, conversely, those with evil intent. Yet within these fantasies, flying female figures have often been disconcerting: even ancient societies reflected a gender bias suggesting women in the air could only bring trouble. In Greek mythology, for instance, notwithstanding the diminutive figure of Nike (the goddess of victory), a whole collection of nasty airborne females, such as the Furies, Harpies, and even Medusa, were primed to exact retribution on the unfortunate and hapless.³ More recently, Christianity, from the fifth century on, provided the former nonflying—and essentially harmless—pagan “witch” with aerial powers to accentuate her diabolism, as she hurtled around on her phallic broomstick. Alternatively, priests warned of witches taking on the shape of owls or ravens, while “old crow” is a term reserved for a miserly woman, presumably no longer able to fly. For a generation of American children, fear’s personification arrived in the words of a flying woman, when the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz cackled, “I’ll get you, my pretty. And your little dog, too!” For a group of nineteenth-century Portuguese farmers, Satan incarnate turned up in the form of a descending woman balloonist who, having taken off from Lisbon, apparently got lost and had to make an unexpected landing. According to a report in the 1850 Scientific American, “some villagers fled, others fell to their knees in prayer; others gathered weapons and offered defiance to the devil.”⁴

One of the originators of communications theory, Marshall McLuhan, has described how new technologies produce new forms of human emotion and feeling.⁵ The airplane is certainly a case in point, opening up new vistas of freedom and escape. But women who dreamed of dancing in the sky faced a long history of prejudice. If not actually viewed as devils, they were somehow unnatural, a proposition held by many men, for instance, toward pioneering women pilots at the start of the twentieth century. Early barnstorming air shows marketed women aviators as freaks and drew large crowds in response. Following several female fatalities before World War I, the New York Times opined: “It would be well to exclude women from a field of activity in which their presence is unnecessary from any point of view.”⁶ It was fine for men to crash, but women crashing was “outside the realm of the natural,” writes historian Eileen Lebow.⁷

It was not until Amelia Earhart captured public attention in the late 1920s that society began to be more accepting of women aviators. For Earhart, however, flying was a tool—one she clearly loved—enabling women to challenge gendered and biological assumptions about what they could and could not do.⁸ As fellow flier Margery Brown argued, though perhaps in un-Earhart language, “Women are seeking freedom. Freedom in the skies. They have soared above temperamental tendencies of their sex which have kept them earthbound. Flying is a symbol of freedom from limitation.”⁹ Yet for all the efforts of women aviators, they found it hard to break into the traditional male domain of the airline cockpit (a loaded term if ever there was one). In 1934 the first documented female airline pilot, Helen Richey, lasted only a year at Central Airlines due to opposition from the all-male Airline Pilots Association (ALPA). Subsequently, no woman pilot would be employed by U.S. airlines until the 1970s.¹⁰

Under the 1925 Kelly Act, U.S. carriers’ main responsibility was to transport mail. Passengers were a bonus, and cabin service amounted to thermos coffee and sandwiches passed by the pilot to the intrepid handful who may have been on board. Following the “Lindbergh boom” of the late twenties—when flying suddenly captured the nation after the aviator’s first solo transatlantic crossing—several airlines began to copy European carriers in employing male attendants on board. Pan Am, for instance, began using male stewards in 1928 and delayed introducing women until 1944.¹¹

Ellen Church and the Invention of the Profession

Despite prejudice and restrictions, some women were determined to fly, and the story of how airlines eventually came to employ them illustrates how they used any means possible to fulfill this ambition. In 1930, Ellen Church, a graduate nurse and flying enthusiast, was a regular visitor at Boeing Air Transport’s (later United Airlines) office in San Francisco, where she pestered the district traffic manager, Steve Stimpson, about getting a job in aviation. Stimpson at the time wanted to foster a greater sense of care and comfort on board flights through the use of stewards.¹² Airlines in those days were less in competition with each other than they were with the railroads. Flight times were not much quicker than rail travel; moreover, airlines were up against a well-established service culture in the form of long-distance Pullman workers. In comparison to rickety, bone-shaking airplanes, rail could offer security, safety, and service in ample measures. Indeed, airlines attempted to “soften” the aircraft cabin by designing it to resemble the more familiar railcar.¹³

Ellen Church suggested to Stimpson that Boeing employ women nurses on board instead of male stewards. In turn, Stimpson approached his supervisors, and, though it initially was reluctant, Boeing eventually introduced the “Original Eight” “stewardesses”—all single nurses in their twenties—on its Chicago–San Francisco route, with a stopover in Cheyenne, Wyoming.¹⁴

The stewardess profession was thus invented by a woman. Like many of her contemporaries, fired up by nascent first-wave feminism and aviator heroines such as Earhart, Church wanted to fly. She would have preferred to have been a copilot but realized this was impossible at a commercial airline. She thus invented a position that would enable her to take to the air. Church was thus “savvy,” according to flight attendant and historian Georgia Nielsen, “in making inroads for women within the pioneering airline industry, which manipulated masculine symbols that were so blatantly a part of aviation.”¹⁵ “Spacing-out” in this phase was directly linked to women’s greater mobility in general. Middle-class women, in particular, were on the move, with the automobile especially acting as a conduit for a new spatial freedom. Flight attendants at this stage were not worried about destination. They were happy enough just to go, and where they went was unimportant.

However, though Church took the initiative, it was Stimpson who recognized stewardesses’ full marketing power. He telegrammed the following to top management at Boeing:

It strikes me that there would be a great psychological punch to having young women stewardesses.… I have in mind a couple of graduate nurses that would make exceptional stewardesses.… Imagine the psychology of having young women as regular members of the crew. Imagine the national publicity we would get from it, and the tremendous effect it would have on the traveling public. Also imagine the value they would be to us not only in the neater and nicer method of serving food but looking out for the passenger’s welfare.¹⁶

An element of gimmickry therefore informed the decision to employ flight attendants, but this was overshadowed by two pillars of Stimpson’s “psychological punch.” First, if young “girls” were not afraid of flying, then businessmen should not be either, at a time when the traveling public still distrusted aviation safety. Second, if men were still afraid up there in the clouds, who better than a nurse to look after them? This appeal appeased not only male passengers but also, importantly, their fearful, landlocked wives. Nurses on board simultaneously distracted male passengers from worrying about danger and reassured them they would be in good hands should apparent danger somehow become more real.¹⁷

Church and her colleagues thus entered into something of a Faustian pact: they got to fly, but in the process airlines claimed proprietorship over their bodies and began to market their femininity. Thus began a trade-off that would be continually renegotiated over the next seventy-odd years, forming the basis of what Arlie Hochschild calls “emotional labor,” whereby flight attendants’ feelings and emotional responses become part of the onboard service.¹⁸

Reserving the cockpit for men and the cabin for women ensured commercial aviation’s gendering at an early stage: male pilots and mechanics looked after the technological hardware of the industry, while women flight attendants looked after the software, the cabin, and the passengers. Though airlines continued to employ some male stewards, the profession became heavily feminized—both in numbers and in imagery—by the mid-1930s. As historian Suzy Kolm suggests, the stewardess provided airlines with a marketing weapon they could unleash against the railroads, one that came with a racial subtext: white, sophisticated, educated women versus black, male Pullman workers, a subtext reinforced when carriers banned tipping in the airplane cabin.¹⁹

However, for those women who wanted to fly, being a stewardess was better than nothing. Indeed, if anything, early stewardesses actively encouraged marketing of their femininity. It was stewardesses who most vociferously stressed the job’s hostess requirements and who argued that only women could really perform these tasks properly. But though stewardesses reinforced gender stereotypes with such messages, in the process they provided strategic protection for their jobs. By emphasizing the “feminine” requirements to be a stewardess, women would not encounter opposition from men worried about losing their jobs to the other sex.²⁰

The Profession’s Early Days

In the early days, being a stewardess was more arduous than glamorous, as women worked in a cold, unpressurized cabin, flying at several thousand feet, where every bump would have measured high on the Richter scale. A good deal of stewardesses’ time was spent assisting passengers in various stages of vomiting.²¹ At United, part of their job description was to make sure seats were bolted down properly and to prevent passengers from opening the fuselage door while seeking the bathroom. For all the airlines’ attempts to suggest otherwise, flying was still a haphazard experience, and stewardesses carried rail timetables with them in case a plane was grounded. If passengers did need to continue their journey by rail, stewardesses were expected to accompany them to the nearest station.²²

Most airlines followed United and began to hire nurses as stewardesses. Nurses appealed partly because passengers often genuinely needed medical attention but also because they came from a regimented background that easily fit into airlines’ quasi-military culture. Nurses had long experience in deferring to male experts in the form of doctors and therefore, so the theory went, would have no trouble in doing so with male pilots.²³ Only middle-class white women were hired. Generally between twenty-one and twenty-six years in age, weighing between 110 and 125 pounds, air hostesses (as they were then known) had to combine charm and personality with their nursing skills. For instance, Delta’s first recruitment advertisements, in 1940, asked for “Eight Hostesses: Can you qualify? … Prefer...