As historian David Courtwright notes, this move toward greater safety and comfort permitted the first significant diversification of airlines’ clientele. Airline marketing executives promoted their new planes as female-friendly and child-safe, hoping to cash in on their easiest growth demographic: wives and families of the wealthy businessmen who already were frequent flyers. After all, these potential customers enjoyed the same class status as their wealthy husbands and fathers, making them uniquely able to afford the airlines’ prohibitively expensive product. Thus airlines like United created a simple marketing strategy designed to appeal foremost to women: “Tell them how comfortable they’ll be, how delicious the meals are, how capable the stewardesses are, how luxurious their surroundings will be, and you can ‘sell’ women on air travel. Leave the ‘revolutions per minute’ to the men.”29
As this quote suggests, flight attendants’ jobs were increasingly tied to more feminine tasks like cooking and providing comfort to passengers. For the first time, stewards and stewardesses were expected to prepare full meals in flight, as both the DC-3 and the Clipper boasted galleys fully stocked with ovens and refrigerators. Meanwhile, the work of providing for passengers’ comfort also increased the potential for passengers and flight attendants to establish erotic ties, albeit in subtle ways. This increase in erotic potential may well have led more customers—over 75 percent of whom were men—to prefer stewardesses over stewards.30 After all, as airplanes approached the opulence of Pullman cars, flight attendants now might touch their passengers when passing them a pillow or tucking them under a blanket. Their gazes might also be palpable to passengers disrobing behind curtains in Pan Am’s or United’s sleeper cabins. Some first-time travelers’ raw nerves offered other opportunities for intimate touch. One steward noted in a 1938 Washington Post article that his gender actually benefited him in this regard, since a good number of these new fliers were women. He recounted that nervous female passengers often wanted him to hold their hands: “Now, I’d been instructed on how to make a nervous passenger feel at ease. But they never told me I ought to hold the lady’s hand.”31
At the same time, some aspects of these technological innovations actually made the flight attendant’s job stand out as more masculine. Most important in this regard, with passenger capacity now doubled and a myriad of new tasks the job became more complex and hierarchical. Two or three attendants now staffed flights, and their work roles were increasingly varied. Some executives like Eastern’s CEO Eddie Rickenbacker, the famed World War I fighting ace, found men to be the obvious choice for this more complex job. In October 1936 he made the decision to hire only men as flight attendants for the dawn of the DC-3 age, even though the company had hired only women a few years earlier.32 His reasoning was grounded in traditional sexism rather than some novel desire to promote gender transgression: “Women have shown themselves extremely heroic in emergencies. Nobody can take that away from them....But planes are getting bigger, there is more to do in them, and men are the logical answer.”33
This raw invocation of male privilege did not go unchallenged. In fact, Rickenbacker’s announcement placed his company—and the flight steward—in the heart of a public relations battle over gender and work. One Washington Post reporter referenced Rickenbacker’s World War I heroics to emphasize the magnitude of public displeasure, which, in his words, “promises to make his toughest battle with an enemy plane appear tame before this ‘steward vs. hostess’ war is over.”34 Yet the adversaries in this so-called “war” were more difficult to identify than the Post article made it seem. The reporter suggested that the discontent came from feminist circles. The headline stated that “feminists” were “aroused” by Eastern’s plan, while the article itself employed even more colorful language: “When Rickenbacker revealed his line was planning to add stewards, feminists lost no time in hopping on his weatherbeaten neck. What was the idea, they wanted to know, hiring men for work that women have proved they can do capably?” While the article certainly references a plausible feminist grievance, the reporter offers no names and fails to quote anyone espousing these views.
Eastern was quick to tamp down concerns about stewards by inviting First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s most politically connected woman, who later became outspoken on feminist issues, aboard an early flight. According to Eastern’s in-house publication, the Great Silver Fleet News, Mrs. Roosevelt “comes right out and says what she thinks.” And in this case, stewards received her seal of approval: “The flight stewards,” she noted, “are most courteous and helpful.”35
Just as likely as a feminist critique of stewards is another possibility: that men who enjoyed being served by stewardesses were deeply upset with the airline’s decision. The same article suggesting feminists’ arousal actually was placed in the Post’s Section X, an addendum to the Sports section. Littered with college football scores and advertisements for men’s clothes, the section clearly had an overwhelmingly male readership. Moreover, the article’s cheeky tone is reminiscent of fraternity-house conversations, as it starts off with the previously quoted description of stewards as “male hostesses.” Thus, even before Eastern’s stewards made their inaugural voyage, other men were already ridiculing them for their perceived effeminacy.
Rickenbacker’s decision exposed a rift within male chauvinist circles. Despite invoking sexist reasoning for his male-only policy, Rickenbacker had alienated a demographic essential for the airline’s survival: the macho pilot corps and the unchaperoned businessmen who were his core customers. In this internecine war among chauvinists, Rickenbacker mixed economic reasons and aggressive bravado to defend his actions, always sidestepping the claim that stewards were failed men. At a closed-door meeting, facing a hostile crowd of his own pilots who wanted to know why he had changed the policy, Rickenbacker baldly replied, “Because you bastards are making enough dough to buy your own pussy!”36 And in reference to the laments of his core customer base of businessmen, he noted, in slightly less colorful terms, “If passengers want to fool around with girls, let ’em do it at their expense, not mine.”37
His comments, while flippant, expose an underlying economic reality behind the commodification of stewardesses’ bodies: selling female sex appeal could become prohibitively expensive for the airlines. Stewardesses actually commanded the same wage as men during the 1930s.38 This parity was unusual for the time, but it reflects the fact that these women held superior credentials in the form of their nursing degrees. All female flight attendants thus had completed at least two years of college and also held valuable skills in the case of a health emergency on board. Meanwhile, stewards at Pan Am and Eastern needed only to possess the equivalent of a high school degree and a few years’ experience in a customer service field like ship stewarding, bell-hopping, or waiting tables. “Even filling station attendants will not be overlooked in the search for personnel,” noted one article covering Rickenbacker’s choice of stewards.39
All told, stewardesses actually cost the airlines more on average than stewards. Rickenbacker bemoaned how his company, when it had hired stewardesses before 1934, had spent one thousand dollars training each employee, only to have them quickly get married and leave.40 Of course, he could have undone this problem by allowing married stewardesses to continue working, like his all-male pilot corps and even his stewards. But such thinking was seemingly beyond him and all other airline executives in the 1930s. Instead, Eastern embraced a male-privileged orthodoxy: “When a flight-steward marries he is more valuable to the company because his stability increases, whereas the stewardess who marries gains a husband and loses her job.”41
Because Eastern had very little competition on its most lucrative routes, Rickenbacker did not need to give his straight male customers (much less his pilots) the costly amenity of attractive stewardesses. Eastern competed with companies like American and Delta within the triangle connecting Chicago, New York, and Atlanta. However, its most lucrative route—the