Victoria Vantoch. The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon.

Abstract

The 2011 debut of Pan Am, a one-hour network television drama featuring globe-trotting flight attendants and pilots in the early 1960s, is a potent reminder of the historic cachet attached to airline crews. In The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon, Victoria Vantoch explores the iconic image of U.S. female flight attendants as it evolved from the 1930s through the 1970s. As Vantoch effectively shows, airlines' marketing objectives dovetailed with normative gender roles and the burgeoning Cold War in the mid-twentieth century to endow “stewardesses,” as they were then known, with a high-profile role as cultural ambassadors. They represented idealized American femininity in the United States and around the world by embodying beauty and cosmopolitanism, but also domesticity as gracious caregivers in the air. Vantoch also recounts how white stewardesses, and the African American women who wanted to join them, challenged the restrictive airline policies that came with the glamour image: i.e., racial bias, marriage bans, age and weight limits, and draconian grooming codes. The Jet Sex is a strong entry in the growing literature on gender ideology, and its tensions and transformations, in the mid-twentieth century U.S.