May 4, 2011 • 23 mins
In 1930, the first stewardess was hired. Stewardesses had to be young, unmarried and within certain height and weight guidelines. To get rid of these rules, stewardesses and stewards had to take on the Civil Rights Act. Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom never told
you from house step words dot Com. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Molly. Molly. If
(00:22):
it were right now and not two thousand and eleven,
be a shock. And I wanted to be a flight
attendant on a Boeing Air Transport flight, one of the
only airlines that you could get from here to there
on back in the day. Yes, three things that would
(00:43):
prevent me from doing that. Oh are you sad, Kristen.
I'm a little sad. I could not become a sky
girl as they were called back in the day, because
I'm too old, I'm too tall, and I'm too fat.
But strikes I am so I'm so out. And were
you a nurse? I wasn't a nurse. I was trained
for CPR years ago. But Lord help you if you
(01:07):
choke on something standing next to me. Uh, you had
to be single, I mean, no problem. There are under
twenty five just aged out of that one. No taller
than five ft four, like five nine, and then you
could only weigh no more than a hundred and fifteen pounds.
And let's just say if I were five nine and
(01:27):
a hundred fifteen pounds, I would need a nurse. Yeah. Um,
and in addition to meeting all those physical qualifications, you
had to be a nurse. Because in nineteen thirty, that's
when we have the first female flight steward. Previously it
was boys doing it, young young teenage boys, boy scout times,
cabin boys, cabin boys, um, which, like our voices imply,
(01:49):
has a different meaning now. But yes, when we get
the first airline stewardess as they were called back then,
working that Boeing Air Transport flight, it was a woman
named Ellen Church who wanted to be a pie let,
and uh, that was definitely a no go back in
the day. But she mentioned, haim a nurse, why don't
I fly along with you? And the people thought, oh,
(02:10):
that's good because people are kind of scared of flying. Yeah,
they should have been back in nineteen thirty. So why
don't we have nurses on flight so that people feel
safer and really skinny nurses, really thin short nurses. Oh,
I guess five ft four one fifteen. I don't know
the b M I on that, but it sounds like
it's much healthier than than five nine one fifteen. Uh So,
(02:32):
Ellen Church is the world's first airline stewarts and check
this out. The flight is only from Oakland to Chicago, Oakland, California,
not that long, but it takes twenty hours and involves
thirteen stops along the way, So they needed someone on
there to uh, to help help that flight go smoothly.
So she becomes the first of what Bowing calls the
(02:52):
sky girls. These these very few women they hire who
meet certain fiscal requirements and who are nurses. But you
know this by the fact that they've hired these very petite,
small women being a Being a sky girl wasn't just
passing out the peanuts and pouring a coke. It was
like fueling up while the while the plane was on
the ground. It was pushing the plane into the hangar
(03:13):
at the end of the day. I mean it was.
It was a lot of work compared to what we
may think of. It's sort of the stereotypical stewardess. Yeah,
which is kind of ironic that they mandated these very
petite women to be sky girls. But eventually, as as
the commercial airline industry took off, and they had more
crews to do that that manual labor for them. Sky
(03:35):
girls or stews as they became known as, really became
the in flight hostesses. Right. There was some there were
some training manuals that would tell the stewardess is to
pretend that they were the mother of the plane and
they were hosting a party for all their friends, and
that's how they should treat and serve all their guests.
And uh, those requirements about looks and appearance never go
(03:58):
away until the nineties semnies. Women who were serving as stewardesses,
which will use that term even though it becomes outdated
in the nineteen seventies, but they were young, they were slender,
they were attractive, they were white. They were the perfect
woman who will serve you a coke, no matter how
nasty you were being to her. Um and it became,
you know, this very stylized woman who was traveling the world,
(04:20):
becoming very cosmopolitan. But it was also a really nice
way to meet a potential husband. And the airline's kind
of had that in mind. They said, once you get married,
you have to retire. Once you have a baby, you
definitely have to retire, and once you turn thirty two,
you should retire. Yes, some airlines were a little more
liberal and let the women work until they were thirty five,
(04:42):
but definitely not after that. And in just to drive
home the idea of the role of the sky girls,
a female writer for Independent Woman magazine wrote that they
needed the skill of a nightingale, the charm of the
powers adele, and the kitchen wisdom of a fanny farmer.
(05:03):
And you know, one funny thing that happened a few
years ago. A few years before that Christen Is in
the Literary Digest. They were talking about how these perfect
women are serving as the stewardesses and these really smart
guys are serving as the pilot and if these people
met and had children, question, would it yield a superior
human being? Uh? Answer, that was a legitimate question posed
(05:26):
in ninety six about intermingling between these perfect women and
these uber masculine pilots. And speaking of posing, in nineteen
fifty five, United Stewardess Barbara Cameron poses for Playboy as
Miss December. And really with that we see this huge
(05:46):
sexual sexualization of the stewardess, the sexy stewardess who hasn't
heard about, you know, the old trope of the sexy stewardess.
I think Don Draper hooked up with a sexy he
did so where it's a it's a very big trope. Yeah,
well they were. They were. It wasn't just a tripe
that I mean, it was based in reality because they
were hired based on their looks. They had to be
attractive women, and they were outfitted in attractive clothes. Which
(06:08):
airline was that. I think that at some point Pucci
was was designing their their uniforms. So these are pretty
much the most good looking women doing, you know, very
thankless task. It was often considered women's work. They aren't
paid much at all. They weren't paid much, but it
paid off in the end because you got to meet
a rich husband and guy who could afford to fly. Yeah,
(06:30):
then you wouldn't have to work again. Um. But you know,
as as time goes on, we hit the fifties and
sixties and seventies, women's right and rights movement starts to
come into being, and these ladies start to think, hey,
maybe it's not so awesome that I have to stop
working at thirty two, or if I gained ten pounds. Yeah,
they actually started unionizing pretty early on, I believe in
the by the by the middle late fifties, the stewardesses
(06:53):
were pretty well unionized. But yes was second way feminism.
These other things start to really eight on them, like, hey,
maybe I want to work for more than two years,
which was the average career span of a flight attendant
at that time. And when they start having these thoughts like, hey,
it's it's not that cool that I always have to
have makeup on despite the fact that I'm flying twenty
(07:14):
out of twenty four hours. That's when the story collides
with male flight attendants who have sort of their own
stigma about them because, um, you know, while these women
were becoming so famous for being the ideal woman, it
became less common for men to work aboard flights, despite
the fact that this all got started with cabin boys. Yeah. So,
(07:36):
in nineteen sixty four we have the Civil Rights Act,
which is past and very much by accident sort of. Uh.
Sex gets slipped into the Civil Rights Act in terms
of you can't you can't discriminate based on race or
your gender, and at the time, people who did not
(07:58):
politicians who did not want the Civil Rights Act pass
slipped sex into the legislation because they thought that that
would immediately stop it from moving forward. Yeah, jokes on
you racist. It passed, so, uh, these flight attendants in
their unions started to realize, hey, we can use the
Civil Rights Act to get this marriage clause struck, to
(08:21):
get the weight gain limitation struck. But to do so,
they had to bring in the male flight attendants, and
male flight attendants had a bad reputation at the time.
There was one case in nineteen fifty four when a
male steward was gunned down in Miami by two teenagers
who alleged that the steward had come on to them,
and um, you know, it turned into robbery and went
(08:43):
back and they had to shoot him. So a lot
of the stereotypes that we have about male flight attendants
being gay comes from this one case in nineteen fifty four,
where because of the way it was drummed up in
the press, people started thinking, oh, man, all these male
stewards who want to be like these pretty ladies, they're
all they're all amosexual and we should fear them. And um,
you know, people who wrote uh newspaper stories about the
(09:06):
case often didn't question the morality of the two teenage killers,
the people who actually pull the trigger. It was all like,
oh man, this guy was awful. He was so depraved,
and as a result, anyone who does his profession must
be depraved because this is clearly a woman's work. Yes,
since he was homosexual, and one of the murderers claimed
in defense that he shot him because he didn't want
(09:29):
to be sexually attacked by this man, the jury actually
let them off, the murders off with manslaughter charges rather
than murder charges, just because they you know, it was
at the time considered such a depraved lifestyle and actually
triggered a bunch of steing operations in Miami to uproot this, uh,
this homosexual community. So all this is going on, this
(09:51):
sort of sets the stage for bias against male stewards.
Oh I guess that's kind of redundant, but against male
flight attendants. But the female flight attendants who really want
to dismantle all of these repressive standards and actually be
able to make careers out of flying from place to place,
(10:13):
realize that the only way they're going to win this
case is if they go to the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission or council set up to to um hear cases
related to Title seven of the Civil Rights Act and
have them dismantle all of these all these mandates from
(10:35):
the airlines based on the sex clause in the Civil
Rights Act. Yeah, these stewardesses don't necessarily want more male
stewards working that would take away jobs from them. They
do think that it's their their job to nurture all
these passages, and they do think it's kind of an
absurd idea that a guy would want to fill their shoes.
But they think, Okay, if we're gonna make this a
(10:58):
case about gender so that we can use at seven,
we're gonna have to bring the male stewards kind of
in with us and say, hey, these people can do
our job just as well as we can, and they
can get married because there were a handful of male
stewards still working after that that landmark case, and they
could get married, they could have children, and they could
still fly because they were men. So the stewardesses have
(11:18):
to show that the fact that they can't get married
is sex discrimination. And all of this comes down to
something referred to as a b f o Q, the
bona fide occupation qualification yes, which basically like a necessity
to hold the job. It's the loophole they find. But
(11:40):
the airline's fine. Yeah, like I mean, if you if
you want to be a doctor, you gotta go to
mid school. I mean, it's a b f o q.
So the female stewardesses are saying, being a woman is
not a bfo q for this job. Therefore, you are
discriminating against men by not hiring them on the basis
of their gender. Even though the air fine. The heads
(12:01):
of the airlines were coming back and saying, you know,
there's it is a b fo q for a woman
to be a stewardess because you can men cannot create
the psychological like nurturing atmosphere that we need to create
on our flights. So yeah, you do have to be
a woman. So they go back and forth and back
and forth. Yeah, I mean, can you imagine reading a
(12:22):
document that says this job is meant to be done
by a young single girl. Yeah, I mean what job?
Can you think of what that can be done by
young people girl? And that's what they're saying. Flight attendants
where they were saying that nurturing passengers, giving them liquids.
It was it was like mothering and therefore only women
could do it. So that's the argument, is it a
b fo Q? And that is not a crazy argument.
At the time, in the late sixties, we really haven't
(12:44):
progressed very much at all. And because of that, there
was a big question that the e f C had
to work out of whether the role that public perception
would pay to this. Most people at the time didn't
want dudes being there serving the in flight because a
lot of times it is time to flying was reserved
(13:04):
for upper class in businessmen, and they wanted pretty women
on their flights. So they don't even bring male stewards
in to testify before the e e o C. I
mean this case that was allegedly about the right for
a man to work on a plane, I mean they
barely ask the people who are working on the plane
because they say at the time they've got like four
or five complaints from men who want to be stewards,
(13:27):
whereas they have a hundred and fifty complaints from these
women who want to get married. So you know, the
airlines kind of say, hey, this isn't about men, it's
about these women. And the title seven says nothing about marriage,
it says nothing about weight game. So that's why they
had to make it about men. But ultimately the committee
decides they've got men are doing this job, the men
(13:48):
who been doing the job just as well, so therefore
you can't discriminate on gender. And eventually all the weight
game stuff gets struck down years later, And isn't an
ironic that in this same way that sex was slid
into the Equal Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act
excuse me, and it passed women venues sex again to
(14:15):
to win themselves more rights. I mean, it's just like
a trojan horse. It's really like the ultimate Smitty move
over and over again. It's a double trick, a double
turn catchline two use. It's all of them. And you
could say that, well, in the end, everybody wins because
the airlines have to strike down these rules that women
can't get married and can't gain weight and everything. But
it's still for the men tough out there, because the
(14:37):
media coverage of this landmark ruling by the e o
C is very sensational and very homophobic. Yeah, it's like,
oh my gosh, watch he's getting your coffee. They'll slip
something into it and they'll try and drug you, and
and it's flying is gonna suck from now on. They
made fun of them, calling them he stewardesses. So um,
it was it was not an easy transition. But I
(15:00):
think that, you know, one gay newswerper did pick up
on the fact that if you're a small little family
flying from like the Midwest New York, this might be
the first opportunity you have to see a gay person,
and if they're in a position of serving you and
helping you, it could actually do a lot to improve
the standing of the gay community in Middle America's eyes,
which I think is kind of interesting. Yeah, and being
(15:20):
a flight attendant has become a popular occupation um for
gay men, is a number of the articles we've read
pointed out, and I think it has something to do
with the fact that that there is there. It's sort
of an emancipatory career, which has been for women. There
was an article very recently in The New York Times
about how Arab women are flocking to the u a e.
(15:44):
To become flight attendants because it is their first opportunity
to really break out of uh their societal roles that
they would have to stay within if they were to
stay home, instead of actually forging a career for themselves,
and that was the same role that had played for
a lot of women in the States, and then also
for a lot of gay men. I would argue, but
(16:05):
you know, it's kind of interesting when you compare, um,
that article about women in the Middle East versus women
in the US, and like the niesties is we said,
you know, um, one of the quotes in the Chicago
Tribune was that being a flight attendant was as sure
a path to the altars any It was very much
you can get married. You can do this for a
fewear's day, and you can get married, Whereas the New
York Times article about the Middle East made the point
(16:27):
that almost the opposite is happening, Like, yes, these women
are gaining a little bit more independence, begging to fly
around the world and do this profession, but they might
be getting too much so that when they actually go
back to their town, the men see them as unmarriable,
that they are not good marriage material because they've been
exposed to, you know, such newness. But maybe just in
the same way that it took time for us to
(16:48):
evolve from the sky girls to these stewards, sexualized stewardesses
with you know, airline taglines that said like we'll move
our tails you and does your wife know that you're
flying with us? And naughty things like that took a
long time, what forty years for that to happen. It
wasn't until nineteen seventy nine, uh, that a female journalist
(17:12):
was finally like, Okay, we're not gonna call you stewardesses anymore.
You are gender neutral flight attendants. Yeah. Stop thinking about
these women as sex objects bringing you coffee. These are
women who women and men who are designed to protect
your safety aboard, to make sure that we get from
point A to point B as comfortably as possible. But
they're not, you know, your personal servant. They are serving
a legitimate function on this airplane. And granted as discount
(17:35):
flights have become more and more than norm and people
are trying to pinch pennies. It's gotta be much harder
up air than it used to be because people are disgruntled.
You know, people used to dress up for flights. My actually,
one of my brothers still likes to dress up for
a flight. I just I just feel better than the skies.
You never know when the Papa rats you're gonna get
(17:55):
you I guess so. Uh so. It used to be
this sort of veered thing, but now we just hop on.
We shove our bags in the overhead and wait and
cross our fingers that we don't get get skimped on peanuts.
It's not what it used to be. But in some
ways that's a good thing. Yeah, I can deal without
(18:19):
a sexy stewardess. I think it's I think it's great
that we're much more gender and chel. Now i'd like
a friendly flight attendant. Oh, of course, you don't want
one of those Jet Blue guys that made the headlines
about a year ago for taking the emergency shoot down
with the passenger. I'm done. And what about those flight
attendants who are so nice and they'll let you have
your entire can of soda or giving you extra pretzels
(18:41):
and peanuts on our way to south By Southwest, I
totally got two bags of pretzels, and it made quite
an impression on me. I would say, we're very easy
to please when it comes to flight. Christin you and
I all I want is my entire dike. Yeah, and
I don't want you to come and try and collect
it before I'm done drinking it and don't make me.
Don't make a guzzle it. Let me let me enjoy
(19:02):
my my flight. Um. Well, before we wrap this up
and ask for everyone out there's opinion on this, I
don't want to give credit to two of our sources
because we leaned on them a lot. Um Femininity and
Flight History of Flight Attendants is a book by Kathleen
and Barry, and that's where we got a lot of
our information about sort of the ideal woman part of
the podcast. And then a paper called Male Serritesses by
(19:23):
Phil Timeyer provided a lot of the information about um,
the male stereotypes and the court case action. So and
if you do have extra time on your hands, I
highly recommend going and reading about those uh, those court
cases about male flight attendants, because to me, that was
the most surprising, uh stuff to learn about flight attendant history.
We know so much about the history of female flight attendants.
(19:46):
Man men had, men had a hard road to ho
in the in the skies. But now we can all
be in disguise together together. All right, let's do some
listener mail. I've got one here from Jonathan and it's
about the male nursing pot cast. He writes, it's always
(20:06):
an interesting and sometimes touchy subject, as men are not
marginalized as a minority in everyday life as women are.
But place a man in the nursing profession and suddenly
there are issues he has to deal with which could
possibly distract from his responsibilities. I would like to caution you, however,
on using the term male nurse. The referred term is
men in nursing. Perhaps this is a matter of semantics
that some people believe that saying male nurse is actually
(20:28):
reinforcing the stereotype that a normal nurse is female. A
nurse is a nurse. There shouldn't be a need for
a qualifier, because you do still implies that you're modifying
the noun to denote something unusual atypical. Would you a
normal everyday conversation, say to with a friend, I have
an appointment at two o'clock with my female doctor. So yes,
that's a very good point, Jonathan that, uh, we had
(20:48):
to kind of put male nurse to differentiate in the podcast.
But when it comes in the day, a nurse is
a nurse, A teacher as a teacher, a doctor's a doctor.
I've got an email here from Molly. Is it make
It's not you? Unless you're in a polyamorous relationship, because
this is about polyamory, and Molly writes, my husband and
I have been in a polly slash open relationship for
(21:10):
almost a year. We both have very different sexual needs,
and while the rest of our relationship is amazing, this
one detail was corrupting everything with feelings of isolation, resentment,
and frustration. We realized that this wasn't either of our
faults and we were just very different. We had some
friends in really positive open relationships at different kinds, and ultimately,
(21:30):
after a lot of counseling and work on communication skills,
we decided to give it a go. My husband has
more of a true emotional relationship with her girlfriend and
they're pretty serious. I really like her and she does
the things with him that I don't want you, so
the time we get together is doing things we wanted
you together. I've had a few less serious relationships. I
am looking less for the emotional side more for the physical. However,
(21:53):
I need to really trust someone, so there's definitely still
an emotional aspect. We meet each other's potential partners and
we find find this helps reduce the jealousy and it's
easy to create this amazing fantasy person in your head
that your partner is running off with, but when you
meet them in real life, you see they're human with
good and bad things, just like everyone else. So far,
it has worked out really well for us. As you
(22:14):
said in the podcast, it takes crazy levels of communication,
which has sent our satisfaction in our relationship through the roof.
We really listen to each other and try to find
feasible ways to meet each other's needs. We still have sex,
but we are no longer dependent on each other to
meet that need. So again, we do it now because
we want to, not because we have to. We are nonbelievers,
(22:38):
so it really wasn't a moral question for us. We
just realized we had a problem that could destroy an
otherwise amazing partnership, and we chose to fund an unconventional
way just solve the problem. So thank you for that insight, Molly,
and you Molly, and if you guys have any oles
or women I shouldn't say girls, whatever inclusive term you whatever, yes,
(22:59):
whatever you want to say, You can email us at
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(23:20):
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(23:46):
by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready, Are
you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom never told
you from house step words dot Com. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Kristen and I'm Molly. Molly. If
(00:22):
it were right now and not two thousand and eleven,
be a shock. And I wanted to be a flight
attendant on a Boeing Air Transport flight, one of the
only airlines that you could get from here to there
on back in the day. Yes, three things that would
(00:43):
prevent me from doing that. Oh are you sad, Kristen.
I'm a little sad. I could not become a sky
girl as they were called back in the day, because
I'm too old, I'm too tall, and I'm too fat.
But strikes I am so I'm so out. And were
you a nurse? I wasn't a nurse. I was trained
for CPR years ago. But Lord help you if you
(01:07):
choke on something standing next to me. Uh, you had
to be single, I mean, no problem. There are under
twenty five just aged out of that one. No taller
than five ft four, like five nine, and then you
could only weigh no more than a hundred and fifteen pounds.
And let's just say if I were five nine and
(01:27):
a hundred fifteen pounds, I would need a nurse. Yeah. Um,
and in addition to meeting all those physical qualifications, you
had to be a nurse. Because in nineteen thirty, that's
when we have the first female flight steward. Previously it
was boys doing it, young young teenage boys, boy scout times,
cabin boys, cabin boys, um, which, like our voices imply,
(01:49):
has a different meaning now. But yes, when we get
the first airline stewardess as they were called back then,
working that Boeing Air Transport flight, it was a woman
named Ellen Church who wanted to be a pie let,
and uh, that was definitely a no go back in
the day. But she mentioned, haim a nurse, why don't
I fly along with you? And the people thought, oh,
(02:10):
that's good because people are kind of scared of flying. Yeah,
they should have been back in nineteen thirty. So why
don't we have nurses on flight so that people feel
safer and really skinny nurses, really thin short nurses. Oh,
I guess five ft four one fifteen. I don't know
the b M I on that, but it sounds like
it's much healthier than than five nine one fifteen. Uh So,
(02:32):
Ellen Church is the world's first airline stewarts and check
this out. The flight is only from Oakland to Chicago, Oakland, California,
not that long, but it takes twenty hours and involves
thirteen stops along the way, So they needed someone on
there to uh, to help help that flight go smoothly.
So she becomes the first of what Bowing calls the
(02:52):
sky girls. These these very few women they hire who
meet certain fiscal requirements and who are nurses. But you
know this by the fact that they've hired these very petite,
small women being a Being a sky girl wasn't just
passing out the peanuts and pouring a coke. It was
like fueling up while the while the plane was on
the ground. It was pushing the plane into the hangar
(03:13):
at the end of the day. I mean it was.
It was a lot of work compared to what we
may think of. It's sort of the stereotypical stewardess. Yeah,
which is kind of ironic that they mandated these very
petite women to be sky girls. But eventually, as as
the commercial airline industry took off, and they had more
crews to do that that manual labor for them. Sky
(03:35):
girls or stews as they became known as, really became
the in flight hostesses. Right. There was some there were
some training manuals that would tell the stewardess is to
pretend that they were the mother of the plane and
they were hosting a party for all their friends, and
that's how they should treat and serve all their guests.
And uh, those requirements about looks and appearance never go
(03:58):
away until the nineties semnies. Women who were serving as stewardesses,
which will use that term even though it becomes outdated
in the nineteen seventies, but they were young, they were slender,
they were attractive, they were white. They were the perfect
woman who will serve you a coke, no matter how
nasty you were being to her. Um and it became,
you know, this very stylized woman who was traveling the world,
(04:20):
becoming very cosmopolitan. But it was also a really nice
way to meet a potential husband. And the airline's kind
of had that in mind. They said, once you get married,
you have to retire. Once you have a baby, you
definitely have to retire, and once you turn thirty two,
you should retire. Yes, some airlines were a little more
liberal and let the women work until they were thirty five,
(04:42):
but definitely not after that. And in just to drive
home the idea of the role of the sky girls,
a female writer for Independent Woman magazine wrote that they
needed the skill of a nightingale, the charm of the
powers adele, and the kitchen wisdom of a fanny farmer.
(05:03):
And you know, one funny thing that happened a few
years ago. A few years before that Christen Is in
the Literary Digest. They were talking about how these perfect
women are serving as the stewardesses and these really smart
guys are serving as the pilot and if these people
met and had children, question, would it yield a superior
human being? Uh? Answer, that was a legitimate question posed
(05:26):
in ninety six about intermingling between these perfect women and
these uber masculine pilots. And speaking of posing, in nineteen
fifty five, United Stewardess Barbara Cameron poses for Playboy as
Miss December. And really with that we see this huge
(05:46):
sexual sexualization of the stewardess, the sexy stewardess who hasn't
heard about, you know, the old trope of the sexy stewardess.
I think Don Draper hooked up with a sexy he
did so where it's a it's a very big trope. Yeah,
well they were. They were. It wasn't just a tripe
that I mean, it was based in reality because they
were hired based on their looks. They had to be
attractive women, and they were outfitted in attractive clothes. Which
(06:08):
airline was that. I think that at some point Pucci
was was designing their their uniforms. So these are pretty
much the most good looking women doing, you know, very
thankless task. It was often considered women's work. They aren't
paid much at all. They weren't paid much, but it
paid off in the end because you got to meet
a rich husband and guy who could afford to fly. Yeah,
(06:30):
then you wouldn't have to work again. Um. But you know,
as as time goes on, we hit the fifties and
sixties and seventies, women's right and rights movement starts to
come into being, and these ladies start to think, hey,
maybe it's not so awesome that I have to stop
working at thirty two, or if I gained ten pounds. Yeah,
they actually started unionizing pretty early on, I believe in
the by the by the middle late fifties, the stewardesses
(06:53):
were pretty well unionized. But yes was second way feminism.
These other things start to really eight on them, like, hey,
maybe I want to work for more than two years,
which was the average career span of a flight attendant
at that time. And when they start having these thoughts like, hey,
it's it's not that cool that I always have to
have makeup on despite the fact that I'm flying twenty
(07:14):
out of twenty four hours. That's when the story collides
with male flight attendants who have sort of their own
stigma about them because, um, you know, while these women
were becoming so famous for being the ideal woman, it
became less common for men to work aboard flights, despite
the fact that this all got started with cabin boys. Yeah. So,
(07:36):
in nineteen sixty four we have the Civil Rights Act,
which is past and very much by accident sort of. Uh.
Sex gets slipped into the Civil Rights Act in terms
of you can't you can't discriminate based on race or
your gender, and at the time, people who did not
(07:58):
politicians who did not want the Civil Rights Act pass
slipped sex into the legislation because they thought that that
would immediately stop it from moving forward. Yeah, jokes on
you racist. It passed, so, uh, these flight attendants in
their unions started to realize, hey, we can use the
Civil Rights Act to get this marriage clause struck, to
(08:21):
get the weight gain limitation struck. But to do so,
they had to bring in the male flight attendants, and
male flight attendants had a bad reputation at the time.
There was one case in nineteen fifty four when a
male steward was gunned down in Miami by two teenagers
who alleged that the steward had come on to them,
and um, you know, it turned into robbery and went
(08:43):
back and they had to shoot him. So a lot
of the stereotypes that we have about male flight attendants
being gay comes from this one case in nineteen fifty four,
where because of the way it was drummed up in
the press, people started thinking, oh, man, all these male
stewards who want to be like these pretty ladies, they're
all they're all amosexual and we should fear them. And um,
you know, people who wrote uh newspaper stories about the
(09:06):
case often didn't question the morality of the two teenage killers,
the people who actually pull the trigger. It was all like,
oh man, this guy was awful. He was so depraved,
and as a result, anyone who does his profession must
be depraved because this is clearly a woman's work. Yes,
since he was homosexual, and one of the murderers claimed
in defense that he shot him because he didn't want
(09:29):
to be sexually attacked by this man, the jury actually
let them off, the murders off with manslaughter charges rather
than murder charges, just because they you know, it was
at the time considered such a depraved lifestyle and actually
triggered a bunch of steing operations in Miami to uproot this, uh,
this homosexual community. So all this is going on, this
(09:51):
sort of sets the stage for bias against male stewards.
Oh I guess that's kind of redundant, but against male
flight attendants. But the female flight attendants who really want
to dismantle all of these repressive standards and actually be
able to make careers out of flying from place to place,
(10:13):
realize that the only way they're going to win this
case is if they go to the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission or council set up to to um hear cases
related to Title seven of the Civil Rights Act and
have them dismantle all of these all these mandates from
(10:35):
the airlines based on the sex clause in the Civil
Rights Act. Yeah, these stewardesses don't necessarily want more male
stewards working that would take away jobs from them. They
do think that it's their their job to nurture all
these passages, and they do think it's kind of an
absurd idea that a guy would want to fill their shoes.
But they think, Okay, if we're gonna make this a
(10:58):
case about gender so that we can use at seven,
we're gonna have to bring the male stewards kind of
in with us and say, hey, these people can do
our job just as well as we can, and they
can get married because there were a handful of male
stewards still working after that that landmark case, and they
could get married, they could have children, and they could
still fly because they were men. So the stewardesses have
(11:18):
to show that the fact that they can't get married
is sex discrimination. And all of this comes down to
something referred to as a b f o Q, the
bona fide occupation qualification yes, which basically like a necessity
to hold the job. It's the loophole they find. But
(11:40):
the airline's fine. Yeah, like I mean, if you if
you want to be a doctor, you gotta go to
mid school. I mean, it's a b f o q.
So the female stewardesses are saying, being a woman is
not a bfo q for this job. Therefore, you are
discriminating against men by not hiring them on the basis
of their gender. Even though the air fine. The heads
(12:01):
of the airlines were coming back and saying, you know,
there's it is a b fo q for a woman
to be a stewardess because you can men cannot create
the psychological like nurturing atmosphere that we need to create
on our flights. So yeah, you do have to be
a woman. So they go back and forth and back
and forth. Yeah, I mean, can you imagine reading a
(12:22):
document that says this job is meant to be done
by a young single girl. Yeah, I mean what job?
Can you think of what that can be done by
young people girl? And that's what they're saying. Flight attendants
where they were saying that nurturing passengers, giving them liquids.
It was it was like mothering and therefore only women
could do it. So that's the argument, is it a
b fo Q? And that is not a crazy argument.
At the time, in the late sixties, we really haven't
(12:44):
progressed very much at all. And because of that, there
was a big question that the e f C had
to work out of whether the role that public perception
would pay to this. Most people at the time didn't
want dudes being there serving the in flight because a
lot of times it is time to flying was reserved
(13:04):
for upper class in businessmen, and they wanted pretty women
on their flights. So they don't even bring male stewards
in to testify before the e e o C. I
mean this case that was allegedly about the right for
a man to work on a plane, I mean they
barely ask the people who are working on the plane
because they say at the time they've got like four
or five complaints from men who want to be stewards,
(13:27):
whereas they have a hundred and fifty complaints from these
women who want to get married. So you know, the
airlines kind of say, hey, this isn't about men, it's
about these women. And the title seven says nothing about marriage,
it says nothing about weight game. So that's why they
had to make it about men. But ultimately the committee
decides they've got men are doing this job, the men
(13:48):
who been doing the job just as well, so therefore
you can't discriminate on gender. And eventually all the weight
game stuff gets struck down years later, And isn't an
ironic that in this same way that sex was slid
into the Equal Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act
excuse me, and it passed women venues sex again to
(14:15):
to win themselves more rights. I mean, it's just like
a trojan horse. It's really like the ultimate Smitty move
over and over again. It's a double trick, a double
turn catchline two use. It's all of them. And you
could say that, well, in the end, everybody wins because
the airlines have to strike down these rules that women
can't get married and can't gain weight and everything. But
it's still for the men tough out there, because the
(14:37):
media coverage of this landmark ruling by the e o
C is very sensational and very homophobic. Yeah, it's like,
oh my gosh, watch he's getting your coffee. They'll slip
something into it and they'll try and drug you, and
and it's flying is gonna suck from now on. They
made fun of them, calling them he stewardesses. So um,
it was it was not an easy transition. But I
(15:00):
think that, you know, one gay newswerper did pick up
on the fact that if you're a small little family
flying from like the Midwest New York, this might be
the first opportunity you have to see a gay person,
and if they're in a position of serving you and
helping you, it could actually do a lot to improve
the standing of the gay community in Middle America's eyes,
which I think is kind of interesting. Yeah, and being
(15:20):
a flight attendant has become a popular occupation um for
gay men, is a number of the articles we've read
pointed out, and I think it has something to do
with the fact that that there is there. It's sort
of an emancipatory career, which has been for women. There
was an article very recently in The New York Times
about how Arab women are flocking to the u a e.
(15:44):
To become flight attendants because it is their first opportunity
to really break out of uh their societal roles that
they would have to stay within if they were to
stay home, instead of actually forging a career for themselves,
and that was the same role that had played for
a lot of women in the States, and then also
for a lot of gay men. I would argue, but
(16:05):
you know, it's kind of interesting when you compare, um,
that article about women in the Middle East versus women
in the US, and like the niesties is we said,
you know, um, one of the quotes in the Chicago
Tribune was that being a flight attendant was as sure
a path to the altars any It was very much
you can get married. You can do this for a
fewear's day, and you can get married, Whereas the New
York Times article about the Middle East made the point
(16:27):
that almost the opposite is happening, Like, yes, these women
are gaining a little bit more independence, begging to fly
around the world and do this profession, but they might
be getting too much so that when they actually go
back to their town, the men see them as unmarriable,
that they are not good marriage material because they've been
exposed to, you know, such newness. But maybe just in
the same way that it took time for us to
(16:48):
evolve from the sky girls to these stewards, sexualized stewardesses
with you know, airline taglines that said like we'll move
our tails you and does your wife know that you're
flying with us? And naughty things like that took a
long time, what forty years for that to happen. It
wasn't until nineteen seventy nine, uh, that a female journalist
(17:12):
was finally like, Okay, we're not gonna call you stewardesses anymore.
You are gender neutral flight attendants. Yeah. Stop thinking about
these women as sex objects bringing you coffee. These are
women who women and men who are designed to protect
your safety aboard, to make sure that we get from
point A to point B as comfortably as possible. But
they're not, you know, your personal servant. They are serving
a legitimate function on this airplane. And granted as discount
(17:35):
flights have become more and more than norm and people
are trying to pinch pennies. It's gotta be much harder
up air than it used to be because people are disgruntled.
You know, people used to dress up for flights. My actually,
one of my brothers still likes to dress up for
a flight. I just I just feel better than the skies.
You never know when the Papa rats you're gonna get
(17:55):
you I guess so. Uh so. It used to be
this sort of veered thing, but now we just hop on.
We shove our bags in the overhead and wait and
cross our fingers that we don't get get skimped on peanuts.
It's not what it used to be. But in some
ways that's a good thing. Yeah, I can deal without
(18:19):
a sexy stewardess. I think it's I think it's great
that we're much more gender and chel. Now i'd like
a friendly flight attendant. Oh, of course, you don't want
one of those Jet Blue guys that made the headlines
about a year ago for taking the emergency shoot down
with the passenger. I'm done. And what about those flight
attendants who are so nice and they'll let you have
your entire can of soda or giving you extra pretzels
(18:41):
and peanuts on our way to south By Southwest, I
totally got two bags of pretzels, and it made quite
an impression on me. I would say, we're very easy
to please when it comes to flight. Christin you and
I all I want is my entire dike. Yeah, and
I don't want you to come and try and collect
it before I'm done drinking it and don't make me.
Don't make a guzzle it. Let me let me enjoy
(19:02):
my my flight. Um. Well, before we wrap this up
and ask for everyone out there's opinion on this, I
don't want to give credit to two of our sources
because we leaned on them a lot. Um Femininity and
Flight History of Flight Attendants is a book by Kathleen
and Barry, and that's where we got a lot of
our information about sort of the ideal woman part of
the podcast. And then a paper called Male Serritesses by
(19:23):
Phil Timeyer provided a lot of the information about um,
the male stereotypes and the court case action. So and
if you do have extra time on your hands, I
highly recommend going and reading about those uh, those court
cases about male flight attendants, because to me, that was
the most surprising, uh stuff to learn about flight attendant history.
We know so much about the history of female flight attendants.
(19:46):
Man men had, men had a hard road to ho
in the in the skies. But now we can all
be in disguise together together. All right, let's do some
listener mail. I've got one here from Jonathan and it's
about the male nursing pot cast. He writes, it's always
(20:06):
an interesting and sometimes touchy subject, as men are not
marginalized as a minority in everyday life as women are.
But place a man in the nursing profession and suddenly
there are issues he has to deal with which could
possibly distract from his responsibilities. I would like to caution you, however,
on using the term male nurse. The referred term is
men in nursing. Perhaps this is a matter of semantics
that some people believe that saying male nurse is actually
(20:28):
reinforcing the stereotype that a normal nurse is female. A
nurse is a nurse. There shouldn't be a need for
a qualifier, because you do still implies that you're modifying
the noun to denote something unusual atypical. Would you a
normal everyday conversation, say to with a friend, I have
an appointment at two o'clock with my female doctor. So yes,
that's a very good point, Jonathan that, uh, we had
(20:48):
to kind of put male nurse to differentiate in the podcast.
But when it comes in the day, a nurse is
a nurse, A teacher as a teacher, a doctor's a doctor.
I've got an email here from Molly. Is it make
It's not you? Unless you're in a polyamorous relationship, because
this is about polyamory, and Molly writes, my husband and
I have been in a polly slash open relationship for
(21:10):
almost a year. We both have very different sexual needs,
and while the rest of our relationship is amazing, this
one detail was corrupting everything with feelings of isolation, resentment,
and frustration. We realized that this wasn't either of our
faults and we were just very different. We had some
friends in really positive open relationships at different kinds, and ultimately,
(21:30):
after a lot of counseling and work on communication skills,
we decided to give it a go. My husband has
more of a true emotional relationship with her girlfriend and
they're pretty serious. I really like her and she does
the things with him that I don't want you, so
the time we get together is doing things we wanted
you together. I've had a few less serious relationships. I
am looking less for the emotional side more for the physical. However,
(21:53):
I need to really trust someone, so there's definitely still
an emotional aspect. We meet each other's potential partners and
we find find this helps reduce the jealousy and it's
easy to create this amazing fantasy person in your head
that your partner is running off with, but when you
meet them in real life, you see they're human with
good and bad things, just like everyone else. So far,
it has worked out really well for us. As you
(22:14):
said in the podcast, it takes crazy levels of communication,
which has sent our satisfaction in our relationship through the roof.
We really listen to each other and try to find
feasible ways to meet each other's needs. We still have sex,
but we are no longer dependent on each other to
meet that need. So again, we do it now because
we want to, not because we have to. We are nonbelievers,
(22:38):
so it really wasn't a moral question for us. We
just realized we had a problem that could destroy an
otherwise amazing partnership, and we chose to fund an unconventional
way just solve the problem. So thank you for that insight, Molly,
and you Molly, and if you guys have any oles
or women I shouldn't say girls, whatever inclusive term you whatever, yes,
(22:59):
whatever you want to say, You can email us at
mom stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can
head over to our Facebook page and like us and
leave a comment and comment on other comments that have
been commented on, and you can follow us on Twitter
at Mom Stuff Podcast. And finally, you can read what
we're doing during the week on our blog It's stuff
(23:20):
Mom Never Told You from how stuff Works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com To learn more about the podcast,
clock on the podcast icon in the upper right corner
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(23:46):
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