Women who flew the world
The role of the stewardess in the early aviation industry played its part in women gaining more social equality, writes Julia Cooke
Working as a Pan-am stewardess gave a woman the ability to see different places and also to experience who she could be against those varied backdrops.
This invitation to try out an unfettered version of oneself somewhere else had appealed to enormous numbers of women from the start of the commercial airline industry. “Sadie in New York,” read a 1936 profile in the Chicago Sunday Tribune of a stewardess who had beaten out hundreds of other women for a spot on a United shuttle, “is a very different person from Sadie in Chicago.”
In Chicago, Sadie Ericson lived “a life of considerable dash,” biking, swimming, roller-skating, and shopping. But twice a week, her job took her to New York, and New York Sadie was a different sort of woman. As soon as she arrived there, she bought two books, one fiction and one nonfiction, and a supply of magazines; she stocked her hotel room with a pound of chocolates and half a dozen apples and had her meals sent up as she read stretched across the hotel-room bed in her dressing gown.
A decade earlier, when air travel was raw and new, cabin attendants, in the established model of train stewards, had been men. But in 1930, a nurse and trained pilot approached an airline executive to convince him that nurses would make better cabin crew. The pitch worked. A nurse could more naturally reassure a fearful passenger, the executive wrote in a memo, or minister to airsick men. “The passengers relax,” reported an Atlantic Monthly writer. “If a mere girl isn’t worried, why should they be?”
In the mid-1930s, a stewardess had dragged two passengers from the burning wreckage of a Pennsylvania crash that killed 12. Though she was injured herself, she ran four miles for help. Front-page articles celebrated her as a heroine. Profiles of other women and their crews, friendships, and habits appeared across newspapers and magazines. “Air Hostess Finds Life Adventurous,” read one front-page headline in the New York Times. Indeed, Sadie Ericson was a model of the duality expected of stewardesses: she had social skills and self-determination, glamour and grit. The petite blonde looked “like a captivating French doll” and was “almost magically endowed by looks, temperament, and education to be outstanding” in a profession that required “poise and fearless capacity for action” and “grim courage.”
The next two decades consolidated the view of the job as women’s work. During the Second World War, women took cabin positions across airlines as men served in the military. Passengers began to favour air travel over ocean or rail in the postwar 1950s, due in part to advances such as a jet plane that sliced a trip across the Atlantic down to six or ten hours.
Prices were stabilised by the government at $400 or $500 to cross the Atlantic, so flying was too expensive to be a regular undertaking for anyone but the rich. Each airline tried to convince customers that it had the highest level of luxury and service, and the women who served a predominantly male clientele became a particular selling point.
Perks varied from airline to airline. On the President Special to Paris, Pan
A stewardess had dragged two passengers from the burning wreckage
Am gave women passengers orchids and perfume and men cigars after a seven-course meal. On Continental, passengers walked to the plane across a velvety gold carpet. Stewardess uniforms conveyed a unified brand with stylish panache. Pan Am’s stewardesses sported sky-blue skirt suits by “Beverly Hills couturier” Don Loper, and National Airlines crews wore Jacqueline Kennedy’s favoured designer, Oleg Cassini.
By the early 1960s, air travel, once new and uncertain, had become an American institution complete with industrial titans, frequent fliers, government oversight, and clamouring press. An upper crust of frequent customers were christened the “jet set” by gossip columnist Igor Cassini; they were a polyglot group dominated by “post-debutantes, scions of bigwigs in business and government or sons of just plain millionaires, Greek shipowners’ sons, people with titles (many of these spuriously used).” Repeat fliers, mostly businessmen and members of the jet set, constituted 64 per cent of flight traffic.
In the 1960s, the appeal of the international was evident throughout high and low culture: James Bond, the television show I Spy; Epcot and the International House of Pancakes; the popularity of the films La Dolce Vita and Endless Summer. At the Monterey International Pop Festival in Northern California, the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas played alongside Hugh Masekela from South Africa, Donovan from Scotland, and headliner Ravi Shankar from India. After the 1950s postwar stability, anything international held a waft of glamour, a counterpoint to the hum and drone of suburbs and nine-to-fives. When French-speaking Jackie Kennedy hosted a small dinner party at the White House, she was advised to “have pretty women, attractive men, guests who are en passant, the flavor of another language. This is the jet age, so have something new and changing.”
In the United States, the cabin of an international airplane was a sought-after workplace for young, unmarried, mostly white women. Airlines in the early 1960s hired only three to five per cent of applicants. Base pay was commensurate with other acceptably feminine roles: nurse, teacher, librarian, secretary. Perks included insurance, free air travel, paid vacation, and stipends on layovers. Layovers in themselves were extraordinary. A decade earlier, solitary international travel was rarely undertaken by a woman who could not leverage high social status to excuse her lack of a chaperone. And most women had married long before their mid-twenties: in the 1950s, only a third of American women were still single at 24.
The women applying for stewardess positions in the 1960s had in the 1950s been forbidden to wear trousers in high school and sometimes even in college. Now, during layovers, a stewardess could pull off the skirt of her uniform, put on slacks, and, chaperone-free, sashay around the museums of the 16th arrondissement; she could wear jeans and wander through Mexican markets. Flight routes, experience, and expertise varied by airline. But having a job on any plane was a reason for a woman to roam. What was revolutionary was the lack of should in this job, the plenitude of could.
Come Fly the World: The Women of Pan Am at War and Peace by Julia Cooke is published by Icon books, priced £16.99 hardback