American Experience: "Fly with Me" (Sarah Colt Productions, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, aired February 20, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, February 20) I watched two consecutive episodes on PBS’s long-running documentary series American Experience. One was called “Fly with Me” and was about the checkered history of airline stewardesses; they’re now called “flight attendants” but in the 1930’s, 1940’s and especially the 1950’s and early 1960’s the airlines essentially sold them as glamorous sex objects and animate Barbie dolls. The concept of women flight attendants actually began in February 1930 with a woman named Ellen Church, a registered nurse and also an amateur airplane pilot who’d learned to fly because she wanted to be part of the technology of the future. She went to the San Francisco offices of United Airlines at a crucial moment in the history of commercial aviation. Before that, as historian Mia Bay explained in the documentary, in the 1920’s airlines had hired Black Pullman porters to be flight attendants. “But there's a longstanding association between technological know-how and white supremacy,” Bay explained. “And they do not think that Black people have the kind of authority to kind of help people through the challenges of flying.” According to Ann Hood, another historian on the program who’d previously worked as a flight attendant herself, Church’s big push to the United executives was that if planes had nurses on board, people would be less afraid to fly because there’d be trained medical personnel to take care of airsickness and provide first aid in case the plane crashed. This was in an age before pressurized cabins, which means planes had to fly below 10,000 feet and that “means you feel every bump,” Hood explained. “It was always turbulent.” Another historian, Victoria Vancoch, added, “There were no circulation systems. So you could smell hot oil, and the disinfectant used to clean up after airsick passengers. To go from coast to coast it took 28 hours at minimum. Often planes would get grounded in the middle of nowhere, passengers would have to wait for several days until the weather cleared. It was really a big adventure, instead of a reliable way to travel.” A third interviewee, Phil Tiemeyer, said, “The airlines started to realize the passengers were more attracted to having a woman do the job for the charm that she brought, the attractiveness that she brought to an otherwise exceptionally unpleasant experience.”

Like the airline industry itself, the opportunities for women flight attendants zoomed upward after World War II and again with the introduction of jet aircraft in 1959. Even before the jet era, more advanced planes like the Douglas DC-6 with pressurized cabins allowed planes to fly higher in the sky, with less turbulence, and offered the passengers air conditioning. Also, the U.S. still regulated commercial air travel through something called the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). While another agency, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), was in charge of governing air traffic and making sure planes were safe, the CAB put in a draconian series of price controls, so until the CAB was abolished in 1979 (under a Democratic Congress and Democratic President Jimmy Carter) airlines were forced to charge the same prices and couldn’t compete that way. So they had to do elaborate ad campaigns to focus on service, image and various intangibles to make flying on their airline seem more pleasant than a competitor’s. Among these were promoting the beauty of their stewardesses, which meant making them look as interchangeable as possible. Former flight attendant Patricia Ireland said, “We all got our hair cut just the length of our chin bone. We were all supposed to look the same, both our hair, but also our makeup. Red lipstick, mandatory. There was an idea, I think, to make us into little machine parts and not think of ourselves as individuals.” Another ex-stewardess, Kathleen Heenan, said that when she looked at the graduation photo of herself and 19 other women who were in the same flight attendant training class, she literally couldn’t pick herself out of the crowd. The rules for stewardesses were quite demeaning and arbitrary: you were supposed to maintain a low weight depending on your body height, and if you were over even by one pound you would be given a demerit and a deadline to lose the extra weight or be fired. You were also forced to retire at a relatively young age – either 32 or 35, depending on the airline – and you weren’t allowed to be married because the whole fantasy the airlines were selling was that stewardesses were at least theoretically sexually available.

What was in it for the women were not only better pay than the other traditionally acceptable women’s jobs – secretary, librarian, teacher – but the promise of worldwide travel. Stewardesses were paid to go to fabled places like Paris or Rome, and could do it on the airline’s dime. One woman recalled that being a stewardess had something of the same air of glamor as being a movie star, and others said you could crash other people’s weddings. Also, in order to be a stewardess you had to be white because there was enough racism embedded in the kinds of men who ran airlines that the assumption was that no one would want to fly on an airline that hired Blacks or other women of color. That particular glass ceiling was broken by a feisty young African-American woman named Pat Banks, who was reading a fashion magazine in 1956 when she saw an ad for the Grace Downs Air Career School in Manhattan. “I applied and I was accepted in 1956,” Downs recalled, even though at the time she’d never even been on an airplane. “I was the only student of color in the school,” Banks said. “There were no Black teachers, no Black students. I remember we had a makeup class and someone made up my face. I have to laugh now because I was white. And when I looked in the mirror, I'm saying, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to get home like this?’ They had no makeup, of course, for people of color.” Banks completed the course and applied to three airlines: TWA, a major carrier, and two regional airlines, Mohawk and Southern-based Capital. Unfortunately, she got no response to any of her applications, and a veteran stewardess took her aside one day and said, “Pat, I hate to see you go through this, but the airlines do not hire Negroes.” Banks told this story to a neighbor who knew African-American Congressmember Adam Clayton Powell, at a time when the U.S. didn’t have a civil-rights law prohibiting race-based discrimination in employment but New York state did. Ultimately Banks filed suit against Capital, the one airline of the three she’d applied to where the statute of limitations hadn’t yet run out, and after years of fighting she finally won her case in February 1960. “I was working for Con Edison, going to college at night,” Banks recalled. “And there was a little candy store on the corner where I used to get the bus to go home. When I got into the candy store, the man in the store said, ‘Pat, Pat, you won the case,’ I couldn't wait to get home. My mother says, ‘Patsy, the phone is ringing off the hook. You won! You won! You won!’ Oh, my God.”

The show also details the history of flight attendants joining labor unions and organizing, even though many of them had come from politically conservative homes where labor unions were anathema. One pioneer in organizing flight attendants was Dusty Roads, who was looking at the age limit creeping up on her. “My family was very Republican and unions were naughty, naughty, naughty, terrible,” Roads recalled. “Nobody in my family had ever belonged to a union. That was just, oh my goodness, we're college people, we don't join unions, oh!” Though Roads was protected by a so-called “grandmother clause” that would allow her to keep flying even after she turned 32, she decided to organize a media event that featured four flight attendants under 32 and four who were over 32 – and challenged people in the audience to tell who was who and what age they were. Roads also launched a lobbying campaign. “I figured out that the Congress was in session on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and then they went home on Friday,” she said. “So I bid the Washington trip on Monday, and I'd always have a bunch of congressmen on board and they got to know me. ‘Dusty, how’re you doing?’ I said, "Oh, I’m really upset about this. My best friend's being fired because she’s 32.’ They said, ‘What? They fire you?’ Here, these guys are 60.” Things started to look up for the flight attendants in 1964, when the U.S. Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, and thanks to a last-minute amendment by Senator Howard Smith (D-Virginia), it banned discrimination in employment based on gender as well as race. Smith was a racist who most likely made this amendment as a “poison pill” thinking that so many Senate and House members would find the idea of banning gender-based discrimination so absurd they’d vote against the whole bill, and/or out of conviction that white women deserved protection at least as much as Black men. But the word “sex” went into the final bill as passed alongside the word “race,” and when the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), created under the law to enforce it, opened for business, flight attendants seeking an end to sex-based discrimination were the first to file complaints.

According to Jean Montague, who was with Dusty Roads when they first filed their complaint, “There were people putting typewriters here and chairs there and getting it all straightened out. They had just opened the doors. They weren't really ready at all.” They had inside help: a woman attorney named Sonia Pressman who started leaking information to the media about the persistence of sex-based discrimination and how the EEOC was refusing to address it. “There were commissioners who were favorable to women's rights,” Pressman explained. “But the Executive Director was opposed to women's rights, the Vice Chair was opposed. And on the staff level, I was the only woman speaking out.” The documentary, directed by Sarah Colt (who also wrote it) and Helen Dobrowski (who also produced), parallels the organizing by flight attendants with the overall trajectory of the women’s movement and so-called “second-wave feminism,” including the national shock waves when psychologist-turned-homemaker Betty Friedan published a book called The Feminine Mystique in 1963. Friedan, who’d given up her own career to become a wife and mother because that was the social expectation on women then, wrote about what she called “the problem that has no name,” the continued unhappiness of women despite the social conditioning that all women were supposed to be completely fulfilled by housewifery and motherhood. In 1966 Friedan and others founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) as a kind of gender analogue to the NAACP, and NOW supported the flight attendants’ cause as they took on discrimination not only by the airlines but by officials in the unions that were supposedly representing them.

At the same time “Fly with Me” also demonstrates how the advent of the sexual revolution in the early 1960’s, due largely to the invention of the birth-control pill and its legitimation by the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) – a case members of the current radical-Right majority on the Court have said they want to revisit and maybe overturn the way they did with Roe v. Wade – led to even more sexual objectification of flight attendants by the airlines which employed them. Among the campaigns that sold stewardesses to the flying public as avatars of sex were Braniff’s hiring a major fashion designer to create new and far more revealing uniforms for their flight attendants – one woman recalls how these dresses were literally made of paper and when she put one on she had to worry about whether it would tear – and National’s air campaign featuring head shots of stewardesses with the slogan, “Fly me.” The implications of this weren’t lost on the flight attendants themselves. Flight attendant turned writer Casey Grant recalled thinking, “‘Fly Me.’ Fly me how? What are you going to do, get on top of me?,” and Kathleen Keenan remembered her reaction: “It was pretty close to ‘Fuck me.’ I hated that. It was really an insult.” “Fly with Me” also covers some of the other social changes, including the Viet Nam war – which affected flight attendants because the U.S. government leased private commercial aircraft to fly troops to Viet Nam and back – and the increasing number of bomb threats called into airports, which meant flight attendants had to do the ultra-hard work of leading an orderly evacuation off a targeted plane.

The documentary builds to a climax with the 1974 court victory in a case brought by Mary Pat Laffey and other Northwest Airlines stewardesses angry that they were being passed over for jobs as pursers – who did the same work stewardesses did except a) they were all male, and b) they got paid a lot more. What’s more, they didn’t have to go through weight checks, they were allowed to wear glasses on the job (flight attendants weren’t), and they could stay in single rooms on layovers while stewardesses had to double up. The case finally went to trial in 1972, and Laffey has vivid memories of the judge literally laughing at the defense Northwest presented that staying in double rooms was what the women wanted. In 1974 the judge issued a sweeping ruling awarding the plaintiffs full back pay for the differences between what they could have earned as pursers and what they’d actually made, as well as compensation for the inconvenience of having had to stay in double rooms. But, as their attorney, Michael Gottesman, recalled, “Their strategy was to take every opportunity that was legally available to them to defer the final moment when they were going to have to pay this money out. It took 11 years.” Laffey remembered vividly the day in 1985 when Northwest finally exhausted its appeal rights and had to pay up: “My sister was folding her laundry and she called me and said, ‘Patty, you won.’ I said, ‘What?’” “Fly with Me” is an excellent slice of American history and a reminder of how major social changes can come from the unlikeliest of sources – as well as a cautionary tale of just how fragile social advances are and how easily they can be taken away if we let our guard down and allow the forces of reaction to take power again.