Hood emphasizes how selective the process of admission was - I lost track of how many times she mentioned that it was harder to get into stewardess school than Harvard - and how rigorous the training. The book recounting her modest adventures is as airy and insubstantial as cotton candy, and sweet enough to give you a toothache. To Hood, the romance and glamour of worldwide travel were irresistible. “Why did I, a smart, 21-year-old woman in 1978 choose to become a flight attendant rather than a banker or pharmaceutical salesperson or teacher or social worker as my college friends had?” Hood writes in her prologue.
This might not be surprising for a stewardess in the 1960s, but the entire culture had changed dramatically by the time Hood got her wings.
To Ann Hood, this was the ultimate dream job, one she loved with the earnest, wide-eyed enthusiasm that suffuses her new memoir, “Fly Girl.” Although she later became a novelist and short-story writer, Hood views her youthful years as a flight attendant through such intensely rose-colored glasses that they seem to have obscured much of her vision. At American Airlines, the upper limit for a 5’5” woman was 129 pounds. But the most brutal enforcement focused on the relentless regimen of weight checks and public humiliation if a stewardess gained a pound or two. Stewardesses resorted to harrowing strategies to obtain secret abortions that would preserve their ability to earn a living. They could get fired at 32 for being too old, and until then, they were certified as available: Marriage could get you fired, as could pregnancy. “They’re not hard to take.”Ĭatering to men’s desires, the stewardesses were all guaranteed to be good-looking, young and single. “Take a good look at Finnair’s summer routes,” the airline urged customers with a wink and a nudge.
If those weren’t titillating enough, Finnair offered the tanned torso of a bikini-clad stewardess whose exposed back was branded with the black lines of interlocking destinations. “Have You Ever Done It the French Way?” Air France inquired.īeauty was the most important job requirement, a point reinforced by the pageant-winner sashes Southwest Airlines wrapped around its stewardesses: Here’s Miss San Diego! How do you like Miss Los Angeles? The early period when they wore trim suits gave way to the go-go years of hot pants, white boots, raccoon hats and flimsy paper uniforms. “We make love 80 times a day!” Southwest promised in its “Somebody Else Up There Who Loves You” campaign. Fly me,” National Airlines suggested coyly in an era-defining ad.
The ability to get from one place to another was assumed the real lure was the pretty young stewardesses, whose desirability and explicit availability were used as sexual bait to entice the nation’s burgeoning corps of male business travelers. THE GREAT STEWARDESS REBELLION: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet, by Nell McShane WulfhartĪs the so-called Golden Age of Travel boomed in the 1960s and ’70s, the airline industry left no doubt about what it was selling.
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