MALE PRIVILEGE AND UNIONIZING
In tandem with airlines’ embrace of the steward came moves to upgrade the profession into a secure, middle-class livelihood. Male flight attendants benefited disproportionately from the first contracts negotiated by newly organized flight attendant labor unions that led to wage increases, better health benefits, and retirement pensions. These moves were consistent with larger economic priorities promoted by New Deal Democrats and supported by the Eisenhower administration at the dawn of the cold war. Many industries emulated the status quo that took hold in America’s burgeoning armaments industries: in exchange for lucrative subsidies to contractors, the federal government established the expectation that companies would pay their workers a family wage and allow union representation to guarantee this. In turn, union leaders, especially those at the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the International Association of Machinists (IAM), used their increasing influence to help unionize workers in a wider swath of industries beyond those tied directly to the military-industrial complex. For flight attendants, the money and know-how for organizing came primarily from preexisting unions within the American Federation of Labor (AFL), especially from the pilots’ union, the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA). Starting with United’s stewardesses in August 1945, flight attendants at airlines across the country (save for those at Delta) quickly unionized, becoming members of ALPA’s newly formed Air Line Stewards and Stewardess Association (ALSSA). Only Pan Am’s flight attendants opted for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)-affiliated Transportation Workers Union (TWU).21
FIGURE 7. Eastern’s first pursers, 1946, in pilot-inspired military uniforms. Great Silver Fleet News, July-August 1946, 35. Courtesy Eastern Air Lines.
Both the ALSSA and the TWU had immediate success at the bargaining table, securing substantial raises for employees in every pay grade. But flight attendants with greater seniority and those who ascended to the purser position were the biggest winners under these contracts. Male stewards were overrepresented in both of these categories, since they were unaffected by the airlines’ marriage and age restrictions on stewardesses and could easily—even automatically at some airlines—become pursers. For those promoted to purser, unionizing bestowed a twofold benefit: they enjoyed the across-the-board increases shared by others, plus a promotion into the even higher-paying category. Pan Am’s Miami-based TWU Local 500 was so proud of its first flight attendant contract in late 1946 that it boasted to all the airline’s rank and file, even the mechanics: “During your lunch or smoke period try to visit with some of the Flight Stewards or Stewardesses. Ask them how the CIO tackled the problem of wages AND reclassifications. Fully 118 (or some 36% of Flight Service) Flight Stewards and Stewardesses, shortly after their contract was signed, were immediately reclassified into Pursers with an average $72 per month increase.”22 Male flight attendants throughout the industry were enjoying similar double raises, especially since airlines reserved the new purser position for their male personnel.
Back in the 1930s, female flight attendants cost the airlines more than men in the same position. With the job’s relatively low wages that were equal for both men and women, the primary cost difference stemmed from stewardesses’ being forced out of the job when they married, thereby leading airlines to pay an additional $1,000 to train a replacement. But the rise of contracts negotiated through collective bargaining, coupled with the adoption of the purser category, changed the airlines’ financial calculations. The new pay scales meant that airlines were paying their veteran pursers quite a bit more than junior flight attendants, often for work that was only negligibly different.23 New employee training was still expensive, and airlines still deemed the rapid turnover of stewardesses to be a financial drain; however, the cost of long-serving flight attendants had increased considerably.
Men who entered the job and gained seniority were now commanding a family wage. In addition, they also garnered extra pension payments, greater scheduling autonomy, and increased sick leave, all of which altered the gender-based financial calculus for airline executives. By the mid-1950s, Captain Rickenbacker’s concern from the 1930s that women were too costly had flipped; men now were far more expensive. Cold war economic and gender expectations were coalescing to create an imbalance in the flight attendant corps: stewards now enjoyed a middle-class income and a potentially lifelong career, while stewardesses faced sexist work rules that forced them out when they married or reached their midthirties.
DOMESTICATING MILITARY HARDWARE
On the whole, stewards after World War II benefited from the militarization of U.S. society. They earned priority in hiring because of their status as veterans, and they gained disproportionately from the larger trend toward unionization that accompanied the cold war economic cooperation between government and private industry. Yet in other crucial ways they suffered from the entwinement of aviation with the militarism of the day. Following the work of historian Elaine Tyler May, it is important to recall that cold war militarism had a strong cultural counterbalance: a desire to downplay, even ignore, the existential threats to American security by embracing traditional gender roles and an idealized home life. May argues that “cold war ideology and the domestic revival [were] two sides of the same coin: postwar Americans’ intense need to feel liberated from the past and secure in the future.”24 Indeed, middle-class Americans effectively hid the geopolitical anxieties of the 1950s behind a curtain of domestic bliss; the nation’s muscular foreign policy was balanced—at least psychologically—by a feminine domestic sphere. A similar balancing of masculine and feminine was required by airlines in the postwar moment, especially as their quest for profits increasingly required them to diversify their clientele. This need ultimately left the steward in a vulnerable position vis-à-vis the stewardess.
To appeal to women and children, airlines needed to find a way to play down the militarized connotations of the airplane itself. Airplanes have always been a product of intense cooperation between the military and private industry. Before the war, a vast majority of planes were purchased by the U.S. military, as would also be the case after World War II.25 However, commercial airliners and military aircraft advanced in tandem during the prewar years, since aviation research and development were shared via a common governmental agency. Innovations that might have been developed as part of a government contract (more powerful engines, lighter-weight fuselages, etc.) were quickly adopted in commercial aircraft. At times, airlines such as Pan Am—not the U.S. military—spearheaded the advance of aviation technology. When hostilities broke out in late 1941, Pan Am acquiesced to the military’s lease of its largest and most advanced aircraft, the oversized Pan Am Clippers, since the military possessed nothing of the sort. Likewise, Douglas Aircraft simply modified its DC-3 to create the backbone of Allied military aircraft during World War II, the C-47 transport plane.
The war, however, radically reworked this relationship between military and commercial aviation. In the lead-up to World War II, the aircraft industry changed drastically. Military aircraft output soared, from roughly 2,000 planes in 1939 to 18,466 in 1941, finally peaking at over 96,300 in 1944.26 Aircraft manufacturers also devoted their research and development almost exclusively to the military’s fleet, which became far more technologically advanced than that of the airlines. Manufacturers produced impressive technological innovations in a very short period of time. Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress bomber became the new mammoth of the