Male Stewardesses: Male Flight Attendants As a Queer Miscarriage of Justice (Essay‪)‬

[1] To find work as a flight attendant in the 1960s took more than affability, patience, good looks and an openness to travel. While all these traits were certainly essential, there were also more pernicious criteria that made this field rife with discrimination. African Americans were only reluctantly hired at the time, thanks to the work of the NAACP and the New York State Commission on Human Rights in the late 1950s. Beyond race, the women who took these jobs were subjected to all sorts of unfair treatment as well. Most airlines refused to hire married women and forced stewardesses to resign if they chose to marry while working. Even those stewardesses fortunate enough to keep their jobs while married risked termination upon pregnancy. Finally, many airlines also forced their female flight attendants to retire at the age of 32 or 35. As a result, women remained as flight attendants only two-and-a-half years on average, with up to 80% of the flight attendant corps at certain airlines resigning or being dismissed in any given year. (Barry 366) All of this discrimination was calculated by the airlines to make the flight attendant synonymous with female sex appeal. This orchestrated regime of hiring and firing engineered a reality that was meant to seem organic and natural to airline customers. One airline industry representative testified in 1967 to what they hoped was now commonly accepted: "Anyone who has ever been on an airplane and anyone who has ever seen an airplane knows that this is a girl's job ... a young and pretty girl's job." (EEOC "Transcript" 202) [2] This essay considers yet another aspect of the very same discriminatory practices that made the sexy stewardess the normative model of service in the air: the homophobic campaign on the part of airlines, in tandem with the media, to keep men out of the job. Stewards had actually been on the job since the very beginning of commercial air travel in the late 1920s, with airlines such as Eastern and Pan American choosing to hire only men up until the labor shortages of World War II. Yet, the more the airlines tied their fortunes to the sex appeal of their stewardesses, the more out of place these men became. The gender segregation established in 1950s America--the same one that forced Rosie the Riveter back home to her husband and kids--increasingly deemed the steward incapable of providing the doting emotional and service-oriented (i.e., womanly) work required aboard a plane.