The first steps toward the complete feminization of the job came when Delta quickly reversed its efforts to introduce male pursers. The airline ceased hiring men by 1949, just a few years into the new policy, after reportedly hiring “a maximum of 19 men... at the height of the experiment.”33 Meanwhile, Eastern responded to its rising labor costs in two main ways, both of which adversely affected male flight attendants. First, the airline dispensed with the purser role in the mid-1950s, eliminating the automatic seniority boost and pay bonus that men had enjoyed. Then, from 1954 through 1957, the airline first scaled back, then completely ceased its hiring of stewards. Economics were a key factor in this choice; increased competition from both Delta and Florida-based National Airlines on the lucrative New York–Miami route spurred the airline to improve its service and cut its labor costs by employing more women. By then, executives could cite claims from customers and public relations representatives that stewardesses rendered more effective customer service.
Some airlines with international routes did retain pursers and even continued to hire only men for these positions into the 1960s. Northwest, Braniff, and TWA adopted this policy, choosing to absorb the higher costs of male pursers in an effort to keep a male-dominated hierarchy in their plane cabins. In fact, TWA remained so wedded to this policy that they went to court in New York State in the late 1960s to keep their pursers all male.34 This placed the airline in an unusual position: they asserted that only men had the necessary qualifications to be pursers, while simultaneously claiming, along with other U.S. carriers, that only women were capable of being regular flight attendants.
Pan Am, meanwhile, forged a mixed stance that was at once progressive and regressive. Alone among international carriers, it always offered women an equal opportunity to become pursers, granting them unique access to higher-paying, more senior positions. Coupling this with its policy allowing women to fly without any retirement age—even if they were married—the airline created an admirable model of relative gender equality in some realms. Yet the carrier also continued to fire women once they became pregnant and enforced strict weight standards that forced many of them out of the workplace. Likewise, men encountered discriminatory attempts to lower labor costs; by 1958 Pan Am had stopped hiring men altogether and ultimately became the defendant who wronged Celio Diaz.
The airlines may have victimized stewards in the most draconian way, but stewardesses encountered a complex web of newly entrenched indignities. Airlines gained a newfound appreciation for stewardesses who married young and thereby cut short their careers. One Braniff recruiting manual even encouraged stewardesses to see quick marriages as a perk: “Where do Braniff Hostesses Go When They Leave Us? You guessed it... most of them turn in their wings to get married! The romantic statistics say 98%!”35 Similarly, Eastern Air Lines, reversing Rickenbacker’s earlier disdain for stewardesses who married, now saw this fact as a tolerable annoyance. The airline resigned itself to constantly hiring new flight attendants, noting matter-of-factly: “With larger planes, expanded routes, and the fact that 36 per cent of the Stewardesses resign each year to marry, the company is always on the scout for new talent.”36 The newly created age restrictions placed on stewardesses had a similar effect: forcing women out of the job before they accrued significant seniority and replacing them with younger, lower-paid personnel. Thus the prohibition on new male hires and the age and marriage restrictions placed on women need to be considered together as complementary attempts to circumvent the costs of collective bargaining.
These policies served their purpose well. The unions were unable to overturn the marriage bans and age restrictions on stewardesses. They also could not counteract Eastern’s and Pan Am’s decisions to stop hiring stewards, which affected only job applicants, not employees. Finally, union leaders were at a loss about whether to defend purser positions, especially at those airlines like Eastern, Northwest, Braniff, and TWA, where the job category drove a wedge between male and female members. By and large, then, the unions had to satisfy themselves with pyrrhic victories. They could boast to their rank and file that they had negotiated higher wages and better pension benefits. But given that these benefits accrued mainly through seniority, the average stewardess—whose career lasted about eighteen months—never benefited from these achievements. Both male applicants for the job and stewardesses facing age, weight, and marriage restrictions were in a “holding pattern,” awaiting the 1964 Civil Rights Act to combat the various forms of sex-based discrimination they encountered.
MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEXITIES AND THE STEWARD
Under the cold war military-industrial complex, an oligarchy essentially controlled the economic choices of a vast swath of the U.S. economy.37 Significant authority went to those most centrally tied to the armaments industry, whether politicians, military brass, or industry executives. Unquestionably, though, their decisions had both economic and social ripple effects throughout society. The airlines were just one step removed from the military-industrial complex’s epicenter. Like the military, they were customers of Boeing, Lockheed, Douglas, and the other aircraft manufacturers. And they were just as dependent on aeronautical innovations—jet planes, pressurized cabins, more effective radar systems—as those defending the nation.
It makes sense, then, that developments in the cold war affected all levels of the airline industry, even influencing the seemingly apolitical choice of whether flight attendants should be men or women. Economically, the sudden glut of decommissioned aircraft hardened airlines’ resolve to both increase their passenger base and cut labor costs. Stewardesses, airline executives soon realized, enhanced both of these prospects. They didn’t have the male-privileged economic clout of stewards, who could make a long-term career of the job, often in higher-paying purser roles. Meanwhile, stewardesses also could emulate the doting mothers and living room hostesses of the 1950s American home (who, like stewardesses, were denied a fair wage for their labor). As such, stewardesses were an inexpensive domesticating touch. They reassured new customers that a trip on an airplane—otherwise a converted piece of military hardware piloted, in most cases, by war veterans—would be safe, comfortable, and even enjoyable, and they did so for a fraction of the wages of long-serving stewards.
Both stewardesses and stewards found themselves trapped by increasingly rigid cold war gender norms. Stewardesses couldn’t escape the increasing erasure of memories of the war years, when women had been paid the same salary as men and had successfully performed the same work. Meanwhile, stewards rode a wave of male privilege that rose up, then fell apart—at least for them—by the mid-1950s. Their ascendancy immediately after the war entailed a manly makeover: gone were the debonair uniforms of the 1930s, replaced by military dress that put the steward on par (visually, at least) with a pilot or soldier. Unionization in the war’s aftermath also bestowed a solid, middle-class wage upon the steward. Yet none of these benefits lasted, save for those who had secured these jobs before almost all the airlines stopped hiring men by the late 1950s. Instead, these enhanced male privileges simply led stewards to become prohibitively expensive. The airlines exploited the rigid gender norms and, as we shall see, the rampant homophobia of the decade to segregate the airplane into two distinct realms: the cockpit, a place that belonged to manly, well-paid pilots, and the cabin, a serene space where services were provided by doting women who had no claim to a family wage.
While stewards’ ultimate expulsion from the airlines industry is well accounted for by the economic machinations discussed in this chapter, there is more to the story. I turn next to the joint cultural forces of sexism and homophobia that also helped to eliminate their jobs.
CHAPTER THREE • “Homosexual Panic” and the Steward’s Demise
The 1950s were arguably America’s most homophobic decade of the twentieth century, even though many people at the time worked to promote greater tolerance for gays and lesbians. Most famously, sexologist Alfred Kinsey and his associates laid out the basis for a more inclusive society with their 1948 study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.1 Known simply as the Kinsey Report, the taboo-breaking best