Femininity in flight : a history of flight attendants /

Barry (Cambridge) tells the story of flight attendants from their origins as nurse-stewardesses in the 1930s through their union struggles after WW II to their women's rights and women's liberation organizing during the 1960s and 1970s. This model history of a pink-collar occupation integrates into one coherent story about the growth of the service sector, demographic patterns of women's employment, airline marketing strategies, and the collective mobilization of women for labor rights and professional respect. Sparkling prose, informative visuals, and keen analysis bring alive the story of women's flight service. Airlines marketed flight service as a glamorous job for young, single, physically attractive, white women. Enamored with their public image, stewardesses nonetheless unionized for better wages and working conditions in the two decades after WW II. Then, when married women's employment and civil rights activism surged, a numerical minority of these so-called glamour girls launched public campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s against sexual harassment, age discrimination, and marital and appearance restrictions. Prodigiously researched, this book adds to a small group of first-rate histories of women's service work. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. M. Greenwald University of Pittsburgh

Although these two new works draw on many of the same sources, their approaches are strikingly different. In her cultural and labor history, historian Barry traces the development of the occupation of flight attendant, beginning with the hiring of the first stewardesses in the 1930s. Readers get a comprehensive, scholarly look at an occupation originally based almost entirely on cultural expectations of early 20th-century white, middle-class femininity-beauty, charm, domesticity, and concern for the comfort of others-yet requiring a great deal of courage, resourcefulness, and hard work mainly hidden from public view. In the spirit of Georgia Panter Nielsen's From Sky Girl to Flight Attendant, Barry devotes much attention to the efforts of flight attendants to organize into labor unions, chronicling their fight to be taken seriously as laborers as opposed to glamorous "airborne waitresses" onboard merely for the amusement of (predominantly male) passengers. This thoroughly researched work will suit both academic and lay readers. Recommended for all history and women's studies collections. While also providing some history, Whitelegg (director, special projects, Ctr. for Myth & Ritual in America) mostly takes a contemporary look at the lives of flight attendants, drawn from interviews with over 60 current and former flight attendants and other airline workers. The author's concepts of the "space-out" (the ability of flight attendants to expand their personal autonomy) and the "squeeze-in" (the constricting of their personal autonomy by competing forces) provide themes for the book, which is structured according to a flight attendant's typical journey, from briefing to debriefing. He also takes note of the effects that 9/11 has had upon a flight attendant's work. Whitelegg's observations and use of candid, day-in-the-life snapshots are interesting, though this work's scholarly value may be somewhat weakened by its conversational tone and breadth of scope. Suitable for larger social science collections.-Elizabeth L. Winter, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.