RE-MANNING THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT CORPS
In the immediate postwar moment, airlines, like most other employers in the country, felt obliged to reward veterans by accommodating them in the workforce. The flight attendant corps was not immune from this trend, especially at Pan Am and Eastern. Both airlines claimed during the war that their companies’ first female flight attendants had been hired to relieve men for war duty, so there was strong pressure to rehire the men once they were decommissioned. This sense of obligation pertained first and foremost to former employees, and Eastern was gearing up for a potential logistical nightmare in late 1945. As chief executive Eddie Rickenbacker noted, “There will be approximately 1,200 men returned from the Armed Services. The majority will want to come back and we want to be in position to absorb them in a manner that will be beneficial to them and the company.”7 The company further committed itself to new hires, even offering work to one thousand wounded veterans, who might otherwise face tremendous difficulty finding a job.8
The overall effect of these veteran-friendly employment policies, while certainly noble in intent, was to place many women at a disadvantage in the application process. Priority given to male veterans meant that well-qualified women were overlooked. Rickenbacker codified female applicants’ secondary status in a 1947 conversation with managers: “Don’t hire women unless you have to, but if you do hire women, hire women with brains. There are plenty of middle-aged women who have obligations and responsibilities, who want to do a good job, and there you will find the answer to some of your problems.”9 His words contradict themselves, as he accepts that the abilities of certain women will benefit the company in crucial ways but nonetheless tells his managers to place their applications at the bottom of the stack. Executives like Rickenbacker were willing to forego workplace efficiency in order to prioritize men over women.
The flight attendant corps was one of the positions at Eastern and other airlines that saw such favoritism for white men. Aviation historian Robert Serling claims that Rickenbacker briefly imposed an “edict banning the hiring of any more women as replacements for departing stewardesses,” which in turn led to higher percentages of men in the flight attendant corps by 1950.10 But thanks to the rapid increase in seating capacity after the war, all airlines, including Eastern, continued to hire stewardesses. Starting in January 1946, men reappeared at Eastern’s flight attendant training school, with many partaking in a retraining program established for former stewards who had served in the military. Photos of the first reintegrated class show that women outnumbered men by a 3-to-1 margin in a class of fifty, but this ratio evened out over the next few years as decommissioning progressed.11 Pan Am by the end of 1946 had a flight attendant corps that was roughly half male and half female and was training more men than women, at least in its Atlantic Division, which serviced its newly opened routes between New York and Europe.12 Even as late as February 1951, Pan Am’s graduating class in the Latin American Division included seven women and five men.
However, 1951 also exposed the considerable downside of men’s privileged status as soldiers and veterans. Even as Pan Am’s corporate newsletter celebrated the new class of flight attendants that February, it also noted that this mixed-gender makeup could soon end. The reason was that men’s availability for work was thrown into doubt by the military’s unanticipated engagement in Korea. It noted that “the five newest stewards...probably will be the last men hired for this job until the international situation clears.”13 Indeed, another man who applied at the Seattle base just a few months later discovered that Pan Am was not hiring men at all. Despite a strong personal interview and extensive experience as a steward on charter airlines, applicant Jay Koren was told, “We don’t anticipate the Ivory Tower giving us the go-ahead to hire [men] until the fall.”14 The Ivory Tower—Pan Am’s New York headquarters high up in the Chrysler Building—did, however, rescind the no-males directive later in 1951. Once conflict on the front lines in Korea had stalemated by early 1951, the labor market at home stabilized as well. Now confident that the military would not require all able-bodied men, Pan Am hired Koren and several other stewards.
The pre-1951 moment represented perhaps the most expanded hiring of male flight attendants before the 1970s. Not only were Pan Am and Eastern hiring again, but several other airlines started doing so for the first time. On the one hand, this was a response to the national priority to hire more veterans, but, like Eddie Rickenbacker’s decision to hire stewards with the advent of the DC-3 in 1936, it also reflected a desire to establish a more patriarchal order in the plane’s cabin. The first generation of post–World War II airplanes doubled passenger capacity once again, and the work of flight attendants was getting more complex and hierarchical. The DC-4, DC-6, Boeing Stratocruiser, and Lockheed Constellation all seated more than fifty passengers; therefore, there were now as many as four flight attendants serving passengers on any given flight. The response of several airlines was to create a new rank in the flight attendant corps, the purser, who delegated responsibilities to the other attendants. Pursers also handled communications with the cockpit and relieved pilots of some paperwork duties, which were also becoming more demanding. On international flights, they processed customs forms and interacted with border officials.15 They also earned significantly more money: a 40 percent premium over the regular flight attendant salary at Pan Am.16
This high-paying supervisory position was just the veneer of male privilege that some airlines needed to hire men. Seizing on the Truman administration’s efforts to increase competition on international air routes, a series of U.S. airlines were finally able to challenge Pan Am with flights to South America, Asia, and Europe. TWA, Northwest, and Braniff all appointed men to serve as pursers, and reserved this position for men only, once their international flights began. Delta Air Lines also introduced male pursers in 1946, despite being only a domestic carrier. Thus, between 1946 and 1949, a whole new male-only set of jobs was created, even at airlines that had never hired stewards.17
Eastern also created a purser position after the war and reserved it exclusively for men. In addition to getting basic training in safety and hospitality, men learned about personnel management and paperwork, while women increasingly were trained in hygiene and beauty. Despite the airline’s attempts in the 1930s to market its stewards as handsome and desirable, the glamour aspect of the job was now female only. Male trainees were exempt from exercises like this one described in its corporate magazine: “Each Saturday during the training course the stewardess trainees attend Dorothy Gray’s salon on Fifth Avenue where they are coached by experts on intelligent make-up, hair-do, speech and posture—a ‘charm’ course that would cost the private client $25.”18 Placing men automatically in the position of purser meant that they were better paid and held authority over the rest of the flight attendant crew, even over women with considerably more seniority. This hierarchical imbalance was also expressed in the plane’s cabin, where the men remained in the galleys for much of the flight. According to new company policy, “A Purser will prepare the food and a Stewardess will serve.”19
The steward’s new status as manly and militarized was perfected by a drastic uniform change from the 1930s (figure 7). Gone was the white double-breasted, form-fitting coat that had made the steward a fashionable presence. Also gone were the ginger-bread red piping and the bow tie, both of which had markedly divorced the earlier