At the same time, however, the sadomasochistic cartoons chronicling the abuse of the fictional steward Barney Bullarney point to an aggressive homophobia brewing in 1930s society. These images, while just cartoons, expose a visceral desire among some to maintain a more macho code of manhood. This trend would only intensify after World War II and would lead the flight attendant corps to become increasingly a female-only domain. Indeed, as planes became even more comfortable after the war and the culture grew more aggressively homophobic, the ratio of stewards in the flight attendant corps began its precipitous decline from one-third to well below one-tenth.
Not surprisingly, by the mid-1950s both historians and journalists had begun to misremember flight attendants’ history. Amaury Sanchez and his peers from the 1920s were virtually forgotten, and United’s stewardesses hired in 1930 were now hailed as America’s very first flight attendants. Also overlooked were the Pan Am and Eastern stewards hired before the war, some of whom continued to live—and even work—for several more decades. Equally neglected was these men’s deeper historical significance for gender and sexuality history: that a gender-bending, potentially homosexual cadre of “gay” stewards had thrived for an entire decade.
CHAPTER TWO • The Cold War Gender Order
The airplane’s success as a piece of military hardware during World War II had a profound impact on postwar civil aviation, stimulating immense growth for the industry. Wartime output included vast supplies of the airlines’ favored DC-3 aircraft, modestly modified for military purposes, which became a major workhorse for deploying troops and replenishing supplies across Europe and the Pacific. When the war ended, the military decommissioned many of these planes, selling them at discount prices to a variety of airlines and charter services, some of them founded before the war and others entirely new start-ups. This glut of newly available seats helps to explain the jump in air passengers after the war. U.S. airlines in 1941 had carried roughly five million passengers. Despite the decline of commercial air travel during the war itself, fifteen million people flew in 1946, and almost fifty-five million did so by 1958. Thus, by the close of the 1950s, air travel had expanded more than ten times over levels at the end of the 1930s.1 A new era of mass air transportation had begun, with airlines now competing with trains and ships for a larger chunk of the traveling public.
As an expanded airline culture consolidated in tandem with the economic and geopolitical order of the cold war, the flight attendant culture changed radically as well. But it did so in response to two countervailing impulses regarding gender in the aftermath of World War II. One impulse was to reward men, especially those who fought in the armed forces, with well-paying, unionized jobs that would remain lifelong careers.2 Consistent with these norms, various airlines—not just Pan Am and Eastern—welcomed men into the flight attendant corps after the war. And as victories at the bargaining table were won by newly organized flight attendant labor unions, the profession actually became slightly more male and better paid, at least in the immediate postwar years. Indeed, many of the stewards hired in these years stayed in their jobs for decades (in some cases into the 1980s), as their jobs offered stable wages, solid health coverage, lucrative travel benefits, and supposedly secure retirement pensions.
But a stronger and ultimately more lasting employment trend pulled the demographics of the profession in a very different direction, toward becoming an almost exclusively female domain by the close of the 1950s. While seemingly contradictory, this dynamic was also a consequence of white men’s growing privileges in middle-class and unionized jobs after the war, and it was coupled with the war-induced longing for a return to more traditional gender roles for men and women. As historian Elaine Tyler May points out, marriage and child rearing ticked upwards for almost two decades after the war, and white middle-class women were increasingly expected to seek fulfillment in tending to family needs at home rather than seeking out careers.3 That said, May also notes that women’s employment did not decline in the postwar years. Instead, the types of work women undertook changed, mainly for the worse. Gone were the stable and high-paying factory jobs of the war years, the ones valorized by the fictitious but compelling image of the strong and independent Rosie the Riveter. Instead, women entered workplaces that ostensibly complemented their primary roles as wives and mothers. Such work was poorly paid and overwhelmingly part time or temporary. Full-time working women typically held such jobs only in the years between high school and marriage.
In workplaces geared toward these younger women—with airline stewardessing a prime example—employees were expected to provide precisely the type of emotional work required of good wives and mothers. Serving meals and drinks, looking after sick passengers, soothing the nerves of worn-out businessmen, and changing dirty diapers—all done with boundless charm and alluring feminine beauty—made the stewardess’s role an ideal proving ground for marriage and motherhood. The stewardess had become a counterversion of Rosie the Riveter for the 1950s, an image of white feminine strength and working prowess that mainly reinforced a woman’s conformity to the traditional roles of wife and mother and did not challenge the male privileges of higher wages and stable long-term careers.
The image of the cold war–era stewardess is so emblazoned on the historical memory—one need only peruse films and television shows about these years—that it is easy to overlook how her status was briefly challenged by the paradigm of a male-privileged flight attendant corps.4 In this chapter, I retrieve this overlooked reality, examining how and why the stewardess, thanks to a combination of economic and cultural factors, ultimately became predominant in this profession. In doing so, I help nuance the customary understanding of the gender-based labor market retrenchment after World War II that focuses on the banishment of female laborers back to the home. Considering the plight of stewards helps isolate distinct groups of employees who languished under the cold war gender order: not only working women, who remained underpaid and shut out of notionally male careers, but also white men who attempted to maintain a foothold in service-oriented workplaces. Men who aspired to be stewards, like women seeking work in male-dominated professions, faced increasing likelihood of rejection as the 1950s progressed and, as we shall see, also risked greater derision as gender failures and suspected homosexuals.
Certainly, female flight attendants were also victimized by this corporate-imposed gender segregation. The successes of unionizing and collective bargaining, which bore fruit immediately after the war, were increasingly neutralized over time, thanks in part to stewardesses’ lack of clout tied to their gender. The airlines never revived the prewar practice of hiring skilled nurses as flight attendants, replacing them instead with women who possessed no health or safety qualifications and whose most valued assets were their youth, good looks, and charm. Additionally, they found ways to ensure that stewardesses would not accrue significant seniority, which would have allowed them to command the higher wages and more lucrative benefits that longer-serving stewards enjoyed. Most gallingly, many airlines added new mandatory retirement ages on top of the marriage bans that already existed back in the 1930s. American Airlines started this trend in 1953, followed by Northwest in 1956 and TWA in 1957; each of these airlines now forced stewardesses to retire at the still-sprightly age of thirty-two or thirty-five.5 Stewardesses were part of a familiar trope in American corporate practice: as in many low-skill professions, employers sought to feminize their workforces so as to enjoy greater leeway in keeping these jobs short term and low paying.
Stewards, meanwhile, also faced discrimination as the years progressed. By 1958 both Pan Am and Eastern had completely reversed their prewar policies of hiring only men and instead refused to accept them for such jobs. Thereafter, only a small New York–based airline, Trans Caribbean, which flew primarily between New York and San Juan, hired men as stewards, while TWA and Northwest hired a limited number of male pursers for their international routes throughout the 1960s. Another exception was United’s small cadre of Hawaiian men, who, starting in 1950, served as both flight attendants and cultural ambassadors on flights from the mainland United States to Honolulu. By and large, however, male flight attendants by the 1960s had virtually disappeared from domestic flights. They also were heftily outnumbered and put in supervisory positions requiring less interaction with passengers on U.S. carriers’ international flights.
All the while, stewards and male applicants for the job faced an even more virulent form of homophobia than had existed in the