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Kathleen M. Barry, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants.

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Kathleen M. Barry, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2007)

KATHLEEN BARRY'S fascinating study of the history of flight attendants offers another chapter in the story of women and job-typing, a story that follows in the footsteps laid by Dorothy Sue Cobble, Alice Kessler-Harris, Arlie Hoschild, Ruth Milkman, Barbara Melosh, Nancy Gabin, and other historians who have examined the ways in which women negotiated the prescribed gender roles in which the "manly" goal was earning a reasonable wage. All of these historians argue that women had to transgress what were decidedly "feminine" boundaries to gain economically. Barry's work on flight attendants demonstrates that this negotiation process was particularly difficult for women whose very jobs were created around "feminine" characteristics like glamour, allure, care, Service, and, by the 1970s, sex appeal, so that stewardesses' skill, drive, ambition, and sweat had to be hidden in order for them to be considered good at these "feminine" jobs.

When passenger flights first began in the late 1920s, airline executives had to decide who would attend to their new customers. Barry describes the ways in which airline executives' gendered and raced assumptions played a large part, if not the only part, in determining who would be best qualified for this new job. Black men, Barry argues, were the most obvious choice. Traveling by air was not that much different than traveling by...

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