Salaries and Benefits

Importantly, in both countries, the incentive to become a flight attendant was more than just an aesthetic aspiration to rival beauty queens. The job’s stable salary and additional financial perks also established it as a pathway to their countries’ middle class. The salaries themselves outpaced what women could earn in the agricultural or manufacturing sectors, which absorbed many other female laborers in both places. In fact, even in relation to more female-identified positions in the service economy—whether in hospitality, healthcare, or office administration—both JAT and Air Jamaica paid their flight attendants more.

In Jamaica, the politically well-connected union representing flight attendants even succeeded in basing their wage negotiations on foreign flight attendants’ salaries. In later moments of austerity, especially when serious deliberations began about privatizing the airline, this practice came under attack. As a cabinet paper from November 1990 stated, “Considering the duties, type and duration of specialized training involved for flight attendants, there appears to be no reason for external (off-island) wage comparison.”⁴ Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, however, stewardess salaries were empowering. Moreover, they were supplemented with stipends paid in US dollars for cosmetics, some clothing items for layovers, and per diems.

Pay was also quite good at JAT. One stewardess who started in 1962 noted that she was already making good money at a large Belgrade-based import-export firm. In her case, she noted that she “probably would have been better off staying in my old job” in terms of salary.⁵ Nonetheless, her wages at JAT sufficed to rent her own apartment and even to purchase her own car. More typically, the young women and men who entered JAT’s flight attendant corps did not have previous jobs that paid as well. One male flight attendant found that his first JAT paycheck in 1969 was considerably larger than his earnings from working the front desk of Belgrade’s most glamorous hotel, the Metropol. Two years after starting, he could afford to rent his own apartment for the first time. When he opted instead to remain living with family, he was able to purchase a used BMW 1600 sedan, quite the status symbol for a young, single worker in Belgrade at the dawn of the 1970s.⁶

Meanwhile, an original stewardess at Air Jamaica also found she could enjoy the good life, though her tastes leaned toward travel: “Early in the 1970s, myself and two other flight attendants decided that we were going to go on a trip” to London, Athens, and Barcelona over a few weeks. Testifying to her newfound financial independence, she noted, “I actually had to borrow money from the bank,” a feat that made her feel empowered: “Here I am, you know, I can do this!” The opulence of her travel actually made her self-conscious: “And then you come back and somebody would say …‘Where were you for the last couple of weeks?’ And you start to say it, and then you’ll be like, that kind of sounds like bragging, maybe I shouldn’t say.”⁷

Because these jobs provided a solid income, employers could be very selective. JAT by the 1960s instituted a six-month probationary period, during which time an employee could be terminated without cause. Thereafter, only a certain number were granted full-time contracts, while others were placed in a pool of part-time workers who typically worked only in the busier summer months and around holidays. Air Jamaica did something similar in the 1980s as part of cost-saving cuts. One employee, who started in 1988, spent her entire five years at Air Jamaica as a so-called “temporary” employee, lacking the guarantee of a monthly salary, pension benefits, or even the scheduling seniority that came with a permanent position. For many months, she went without scheduled hours and instead was “on call,” awaiting word via phone to report the next day.⁸ Despite this increase in contingency, jobs at Air Jamaica remained prized. As one flight attendant recalls about the 1990s, “With the job situation in Jamaica being very limited, I mean, I heard that during one [open call] for applications … they wrapped around the whole building… . Thousands of them showed up.”⁹

Once a candidate was fortunate enough to land a permanent position, their employer provided more than a base salary. Along with their contingent colleagues, Air Jamaica and JAT stewardesses both received a certain number of tailored uniforms with matching shoes and bags. Jamaican stewardesses also received—for some of them, at least—their first-ever winter coats and boots. Both airlines additionally provided stipends expressly for cosmetics. One Air Jamaica veteran recalls that in her starting year, 1987, she received several supplements in US dollars: “We got paid, because you had to wear makeup, so you got US$90 a month … for grooming. And then we got either $250 or $400 for shoes a year.”¹⁰ Permanent employees in both countries also enjoyed benefits mandated by their countries’ labor-friendly laws: health care, maternity leave, a retirement pension, and paid time off.

Additional perks in socialist Yugoslavia were exceptionally generous. It was common under the Yugoslav system for companies to provide employees with housing and fully paid vacations.¹¹ The housing benefit, if they could get it, provided a worker and her family with a high-quality home for below-market rent. At JAT, top priority for corporate apartments went to managers and pilots, though interviewees reported that a fair number of flight attendants also qualified. More common, however, was that flight attendants found housing on their own or lived with parents or extended family. In all cases, flight attendants asserted that they had high-quality and affordable housing choices, even in a tight housing market like Belgrade.

JAT also excelled at subsidizing workers’ vacations. It was typical in socialist Yugoslavia for companies to maintain seaside resorts on the Adriatic, with workers invited to sign up by the week for accommodation for their families. In JAT’s case, the perks were even better. As a stewardess who started in the late 1960s noted, “We had at that time two months of paid holidays, one in summer and one in winter.”¹² JAT employees could sign up for an all-expenses-paid winter ski trip, which allowed them access to Yugoslavia’s best resorts. She recalled, “One year I went to Bled [Slovenia] on a JAT vacation with my young daughter, and at the same hotel, President Tito appeared with his wife to have doughnuts for breakfast.” As she explained, “my daughter wanted to go say hello to Tito. She was three, and she looked up to Tito like he was a god… . And she started to cry,” until a fellow JAT stewardess successfully bargained with the security detail. With their permission, “My daughter went over, tapped him on the shoulder, and Jovanka Tito placed her on her knees, and she stayed a long time.”¹³ Such glamorous perks were, of course, otherwise available only to Yugoslavia’s most privileged.

Cashing in on Per Diems

While these forms of compensation—a good salary, extensive beauty allowances, and generous vacations—were part of one’s contractual benefits, flight attendants at both airlines also found additional income support when they worked beyond their national borders. The key mechanism was per diems paid on layovers. Provided in local currency at rates based on the locale, this additional money granted Air Jamaica and JAT flight attendants even more direct access to the consumer products that were markers of Jet Age feminism’s good life: Jordache jeans, high-end jewelry, and high-tech consumer goods. A JAT stewardess flying in the 1970s and ’80s recounted a list of the most popular goods to bring back home, either for gifting or reselling: “TVs, VCRs, clothes, sneakers, jeans.”¹⁴

While neither Yugoslavia nor Jamaica were closed economies from the 1960s onward, there were a few factors that limited the free circulation of such consumer goods. Fundamental, of course, was the higher degree of poverty and the overall lower per capita spending power, which thereby reduced incentives for Western companies to export to these countries. In addition, however, both the Yugoslav and Jamaican governments frequently used currency devaluations to keep the incomes of their workforce lower than in Western economies, a move that further reduced spending power for Western imports. There were also occasional currency controls and import restrictions in both countries that created artificial barriers to such importation. This tool was most prominently used in Jamaica in the 1970s during the economic reforms and debt crisis under Michael Manley, when some imports became particularly scarce. Such factors made the daily payments in US dollars for overnights in New York—or the equivalent in pounds for London—all the more enviable. A JAT stewardess who worked charters to New York in the early 1970s recalls the per diem being US$33 at the time, while a colleague who flew there in 1979 recalls the amount being between US$35–40.¹⁵

If used as designed, the per diem spiced up life on layovers. It meant chances to visit museums, go shopping, or partake in cultural outings. Several JAT stewardesses boasted that they were regulars at the half-price ticket booth for Broadway tickets, and they may have stood in the same queues as Air Jamaica stewardesses using their per diems to visit Madame Tussaud’s in London. As one JAT veteran shared, while laughing at the good memories, “One of our stewards just loved saying in the New York crew room on the day of our return home, ‘This New York! Every time I come here, I lose one day and one hundred dollars!’”¹⁶

When in more frugal moods, these same flight attendants became experts at saving their dollars, pounds, and Deutsche marks for the future. Since breakfasts were always included at crew hotels, only one additional meal was needed, while otherwise costly cultural outings or shopping trips could be replaced with free outings or downtime at the hotel. Also, since both Jamaicans and the various national groups that comprised Yugoslavia had large diaspora populations, it was often possible to eat one’s second meal with family or friends. “The thing is,” noted an Air Jamaica veteran, “every port we went, somebody had a relative there” who would be happy to host their visiting relative and a colleague or two. In addition to offering a free meal, these relatives also eased cultural transitions, “So they would tell us what is what,” and “how when you go to Rome, you do as the Romans do.”¹⁷ Family members also advised them where to eat and shop cheaply, and stewardesses then shared the news with colleagues.

Once saved, per diem funds could buy items in short supply back home. For Jamaicans in the 1970s, this task was especially urgent. Being in places like Miami with extra money, as one stewardess explained, “gave you a chance to do something for people in your family and friends in the Manley years.” She noted that “every single flight attendant that went to Miami owned a bag to shop, and you weren’t buying clothes and shoes, you were buying food. You bought rice and sugar and things that were in short supply … to make sure that the family was well looked after.”¹⁸ An equivalent practice occurred on JAT flights from Zurich, where the airport boasted a high-quality pharmacy with medical supplies that were hard to find back home. Flight attendants combined lists of items that they assembled from family and friends, then one flight attendant was tasked with making a pharmacy run while armed with a collection of money from per diems and extra hard currency provided by family members.¹⁹

Profiting from Imports and Exports

Flight attendants, like pilots, were uniquely positioned to import desirable goods into their home countries, and this reality fostered in some a desire to profit from the practice. An Air Jamaica stewardess matter-of-factly explained, “Yeah, and some people did use [the job] as an opportunity to start a small business … it was just something that you did.”²⁰ A similar observation was made by a JAT stewardess, who recalls that layovers in Singapore became a focal point for this activity. “I didn’t participate in this, as I only bought what I needed or what I wanted to gift to someone,” she noted, “but there were people who were smuggling … and earning a lot of money on it.” The wealth they accrued in this manner became clear in the years after socialism: “Then they bought apartments, bought land. One steward has a winery, he makes wine, all thanks to that money.”²¹ That said, a vast majority of flight attendants abstained from this practice. They knew that Yugoslav customs could inspect them, and they were held to the same import limits as passengers. Plus, as several interviewees said, “We wouldn’t do anything to sully the reputation of the airline.”²²

Thus, importing televisions, stereo equipment, computers, and other bulky items was not a typical endeavor. Occasionally, however, charter flights returned to Belgrade from Australia, Singapore, or North America without any passengers, but with a full retinue of pilots and flight attendants returning home. In these cases, the flight might also be assigned to land at the military base in Batajnica, located not far from Belgrade’s civilian airport. The Batajnica landings happened without customs checks, meaning that pilots—who typically were notified a day or two before takeoff of their landing location—could then inform the entire crew. Crew members then had time to gather their cash, reach out to their preferred merchants, and purchase as many items (of whatever weight) as they could transport on the empty plane.

Importing on such an extensive basis required lots of savvy, the risky handling of cash, and good information on Yugoslav customs controls. The Batajnica landings were also too rare for those seeking to profit consistently off such trade. Thus, the most enterprising employees developed a strategy that arose because so many Yugoslav citizens worked abroad temporarily, whether as Gastarbeiter or as workers with Yugoslav engineering companies in the Middle East and Africa. One steward recounted how his preferred importation practice transpired:

At that time, every person who worked outside the country … for at least four years got a list of items that he could bring back to the country without custom. And I found a Bosnian trader … who sold me such a blank list for 1,000 German marks. Each blank paper I bought could yield me, well, it depends. Before home computers, I could get about 5,000 to 10,000 marks per list. With computers, though, I could get up to 15,000… . And, of course, my expenses were very small, since we did not pay for transport.²³

As this steward detailed, “Other flight attendants were living from their salary, from what JAT gave them.” In contrast, hardcore traders comprised those “who understand the business … And the biggest problem is how to sell [within Yugoslavia]. Everybody could buy, but the problem really was how to sell.” When he was asked by fellow flight attendants about what to buy, he responded, “I can’t tell you what you to buy. But you better buy something that you can sell.”²⁴

The handful of JAT flight attendants who engaged in intensive importing were mostly male. Indeed, as one interviewee said, “They were mostly stewards, and they were hanging out together,” comprising a somewhat isolated group less concerned with their work as attendants than their endeavors as traders. At Air Jamaica, however, even after men entered the job in 1988, much more trading took place among stewardesses. This was activity that my interviewees who flew in the 1970s identified as essential. However, even as import restrictions eased in the 1980s, certain goods were still priced lower outside the country. This disparity was an incentive to import clothes, jewelry, or household goods—anything that sold in Jamaica at a higher price.

As the financial situation at Air Jamaica deteriorated in the late 1980s—with the accompanying talk of privatizing the airline, growing attacks from the government on flight attendants’ high wages, and increased hiring of “temporary” stewardesses—stewardesses increased their importing activities. Some packed multiple suitcases for the flights back to Jamaica, even in excess of the regular baggage allowance. This prompted the manager of base operations in Kingston to issue a bulletin in December 1989 stating that she had been “inundated with complaints from Station Managers regarding luggage of Flight Attendants operating as crew.” The bulletin “further warned that disciplinary action would be taken against anyone found breaching the regulations regarding baggage.”²⁵ This warning led to the dismissal of at least one stewardess, who in 1990 tried to check six suitcases for her flight to Kingston. The flight attendant’s firing was upheld by Jamaica’s Industrial Disputes Tribunal, who found that the company’s action was consistent with its labor contract.²⁶

Interviews with Air Jamaica veterans reveal a similar pattern as at JAT: many engaged only in occasional, small-scale importing for family and friends, while others made this their main focus, superseding their in-flight duties. Permanent hires were loath to risk their salaries and benefits by trading frequently, but temporary hires lacked this incentive. One temporary hire from the early 1990s reflected, “You have to realize that the airline’s a very attractive place for a lot of illicit behaviors … So you’re going to have people coming in just for that.” When asked whether her mention of “illicit behaviors” included drug trafficking, the stewardess responded, “All that. Right. So you’re going to have certain people that … that’s why they came [to the job]. We heard some people say that’s why they joined.”²⁷

By the 1980s, Jamaica was a key node for drug shipments into North America and, to a lesser extent, Europe. The airline’s direct flights to both continents made it a ripe target for smugglers, who were increasingly tied to Colombia-based cartels using Jamaica as a way station for cocaine and high-quality marijuana shipments. In October 1986, the front page of the Air Jamaica Staff Newsletter issued a dire warning to employees under the headline, “Drugs and the U.S. Threat of Aircraft Seizure.” Pointing to recent arrests of Air Jamaica employees “to rid our aircraft of the drug menace,” the newsletter warned of dire consequences for employees and the entire airline if smuggling continued. It stressed that “the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has threatened to impose severe fines on the Airline and to seize our aircraft if the problem continues.” It admonished “every employee to be alert against this cancer which could ruin the entire operations of the Company.”²⁸

Stewardesses were not the only, nor even the primary, means that traders used to ferry drugs further north. More suspicion was cast on baggage handlers and ground crews, who could access cargo holds with minimal supervision. Nonetheless, stewardesses knew drug smuggling could offer quick money if they accepted the risks. Those not involved in the drug trade saw colleagues profit handsomely from this enterprise. The same stewardess reported that colleagues bought themselves homes, even multiple pieces of real estate. Another colleague from the late 1980s and 1990s lamented, “I mean, I have been on flights where [flight attendants] have been busted. It just breaks your heart. Just. Literally. Breaks your heart.”²⁹

Another stewardess explained, “Remember that Jamaica is a Third World country.” As such, “the opportunities are not as vibrant as in other First World countries. So you have to find, you have to create your job… . Let me tell you, the country is not investing in manufacturing, they’re not investing in farming the way they should. And not creating jobs for people.” It was this dearth of stability-producing opportunities that stimulated flight attendants’ resourcefulness: “So Jamaicans, right now, they are known as having [higher levels of] entrepreneurship than any other Caribbean country. The entrepreneurial spirit is high here, and that’s just because of the lack of opportunities.”³⁰ While this was certainly not their employers’ design, every time a stewardess took such steps toward entrepreneurship, she also seized the type of financial autonomy characteristic of the West’s Jet Age feminism. In an otherwise dead-end, pink-collar profession, this was the most realistic path for advancing not only into the middle class, but higher.

Passengers and Sexual Risk

Even as JAT transitioned to the Jet Age in 1963, a few of its under-traveled domestic routes—to small southern towns like Mostar, Žabljak, or Berane (Ivangrad)—were still serviced by the airline’s World War II–era DC-3s. Then a novice stewardess, Milica Lukić recalls a practice that initially confused her, though she later looked back at it with laughter. When these flights filled up, one passenger would join her, the lone flight attendant, on the plane’s front bench. It was never difficult to find a male volunteer, she noted wryly, adding, “from those days I have quite the collection of business cards.”³²

These were incidents that, while they may have been sexually charged for the customers, were easy enough to navigate. More challenging, she recalls, were the risks that accompanied flying to the Middle East in the 1960s. At layover hotels in places like Cairo, she and other stewardesses stayed alert through the night, as stories abound (though no interviewees affirmed that this happened to them) of hotel receptionists selling men access to single women’s rooms. Similarly, regardless of the layover city, stewardesses avoided rooms with connecting doors: “If there was a steward on the crew and he had a normal room, I would ask to trade with him,” noted Lukić.³³ Such fears highlight the sexual risks that existed for any female traveler at the onset of the Jet Age. Whether on planes or in hotels, women traveling without a companion knew these risks existed and took measures to protect themselves. Stewardesses were different than other women in two ways: they traveled more frequently and their employers marketed them as sexually available.

Passengers at Air Jamaica may have felt particularly entitled to be overt about their attractions to stewardesses. After all, they had purchased seats on “love bird” planes with the promise of ogling “rare tropical birds.” One flight attendant from 1971 who competed in the Miss Jamaica pageant before joining Air Jamaica cited the fashion show as a moment of particular concern. On the whole, she supported having the fashion shows and even volunteered for media events where she served as a model. Yet, with the in-flight shows, she saw an unwelcome contrast with her pageant days: “Passengers were kind of getting out of hand … They would touch you.”³⁴ Several women distinguished between unruly passengers based on nationality. One insisted that most problematic behavior came from “more the Americans, I would say, the Jamaicans and the Americans,” while British and European guests were comparatively well-mannered. She added of Jamaican passengers: “They felt at home with us, sometimes too much at home.” She also claimed that the lewd behavior came more often from wealthier flyers: “We used to complain about the first-class passengers all the time. It’s as if they felt that they could do things or say things that they shouldn’t.”³⁵

A stewardess who flew in the 1990s also claimed Jamaican passengers were particularly difficult to manage: “Jamaican men are very touchy; they are very verbal; they’ll say things to you. You know, if you have a big butt they will comment on it, you know. Just inappropriate kind of talk.” She then recalled—with laughter—an episode from when the fashion shows briefly returned to Air Jamaica in the mid-1990s under the ownership of Jamaican business magnate Gordon “Butch” Stewart. Clad in swimwear while walking the aisleway in coach, “I remember one day this man said to me, ‘Stand right there and turn for me darling, turn for me!’”³⁶ Other flight attendants found that non-Jamaicans were equally offensive, if perhaps in a more muted way. One stewardess who started flying in the late 1980s shared her view that, “With the foreigners, it was weird. Because men would be coming here to get married, and they’d [also] be coming to hand [me] a magazine and inside [they had placed] their contact info.”³⁷

In response to these unwelcome advances, stewardesses developed coping strategies. One of Air Jamaica’s original stewardesses resorted to being what Jamaicans call “facety” (feisty or combative) when the company again pushed the boundaries in its marketing campaigns:

They gave us these pin buttons, big buttons, to wear that was very suggestive but not quite blatantly sexual, “Ask me almost anything!” So, this is a different moment in history, but … you had this marketing of your body.

My family will tell you that I need to be very careful, so that what I am thinking doesn’t show on my face. I had never been in a position where I was made to feel like an object. I found that difficult to deal with. I’m what is known as a “facety Jamaican.” In other words, you can only just go so far and no further. So I was not into the whole, “Look at me, look at me.”

In my mind I had come here to do a job. I was required to serve drinks and a meal, make sure you were safe, to be polite but not over friendly. I’m not sure everybody realized that there should be a line drawn, but I definitely drew a line.³⁸

A colleague who started a generation later in the 1980s was equally exasperated with passengers’ objectification. She was particularly frustrated when they touched her: “One of my most used sayings on Air Jamaica was, ‘Please don’t poke me!’ Because you’re standing, and they’re looking, and then [they poke me anyways]. ‘Excuse me! I’m right here. You don’t need to!’ And it was not just Jamaicans. People just touch you.”³⁹

Sexual Risk from Pilots and Stewards

Women working for JAT and Air Jamaica experienced perhaps even more risk from their straight male coworkers, especially pilots but also their male peers working as stewards. My interviewees insisted that a vast majority of pilots were exceptionally professional and a pleasure to work with. As one JAT stewardess succinctly explained, “We [at JAT] were lucky with pilots. They were, to be honest, very talented. They were skilled, and they met very high standards … [and] they were also very professional. You would never ever hear, when sitting somewhere with the captain of your crew, [him] talking anything bad about his colleagues.”⁴⁰ Other stewardesses married pilots and built long-term, mutually nurturing relationships with them. One Air Jamaica stewardess happily reported that she and her pilot husband have “been married for, what, 36 years?!” She then recounted that their love affair started before he became a pilot, when he worked as an Air Jamaica mechanic and she as a stewardess: “I wasn’t even paying him any mind. I mean I was just going about my business, you know,” she began. Her future husband, after spending time abroad, “came back to work in Jamaica as a mechanic in Montego Bay. So, he says that he used to go and check the [flight roster] to see when I was flying through, and then he job-switched with another mechanic for that shift.”⁴¹

The flipside was a pattern of sexual aggressiveness from a handful of pilots that forced stewardesses to develop more coping strategies than those used on passengers. One JAT stewardess confirmed that unwelcome advances came “from pilots, stewards too, but mostly pilots.” She added that the complaints she heard “have never really been fully clarified. But generally speaking, there would be parties with drinking and then maybe from one side there would be unwelcome contact. But, [again,] these things never were fully clarified, everything was covered up a bit, kept quiet.”⁴² Her emphasis on the lack of clarity regarding these issues, in her case, reflected the secondhand nature of these claims, but also the fact that the company had no mechanism—and no desire—to investigate sexual harassment and abuse.

Another JAT stewardess admitted that she was the intended victim of such behavior:

It happened to me on a layover in Beirut that one steward who was older than me … Well, we all had dinner together on layovers, then we all stayed a bit longer for a couple of drinks. And when I came back to my room, I found that steward in my room. You know, in the Middle East, you can get another room’s key by paying a bit …

So, he was in my room waiting for me, but I opted to stay elsewhere for a while, and eventually he fell asleep … And then I took his room key from his pocket and my small suitcase and changed rooms with him. Of course, he was drunk …

And the next morning on the flight he was still so hung over that he couldn’t help with the heavy door on the Caravelle jets. So I had to call the flight engineer to help out instead.

In this particular case, the awkward and nearly comical conclusion to the story allowed the stewardess to laugh off the encounter, to continue working side by side with this colleague, and to dismiss the event as what she described “Balkan” behavior and nothing more. Of course, she also vividly remembers this event decades later.⁴³

This same stewardess saw this behavior as a pattern that was especially common at JAT’s layover hotel in Zagreb (the Hotel Esplanade), where the company leased a large bloc of rooms, all on the same upper floor. Here, a handful of her male colleagues would go “knocking on the doors during the night. And if you didn’t open, they continued [down the hall].” This was their way of looking for sex before turning in for the night. She continued, “So, one of my colleagues said to a pilot [who was doing this], ‘Stop this!’ She knew he went from door to door.” She then added that the pilot dismissed her concern with a simple, “So what?” and was never held accountable for his actions.⁴⁴

This mixture of coping strategies—keeping vigilant, evading direct confrontation when possible, confronting violators when necessary, and not reporting incidents to management—was also common among Air Jamaica stewardesses. Rather than immediately expressing discomfort in a confrontational, “facety” way, the primary coping strategy for unwelcome advances was deflection. This included cases when workplace conversations became unprofessional. As one interviewee recalled, “I mean, the most lewd things were said in the cockpit, so you had to, you had to be able to deal with it. You had to let them know that it didn’t bother you.” In one incident, she sat in the cockpit for takeoff alongside the pilots and a visiting official from the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA): “And [the chief pilot] turns to the FAA guy, and says, ‘Mike, you know what? … I’m sure everybody in here, just like that seat belt across [the stewardess’s] left breast, is just wishing that they were in that position.” The stewardess remained unfrazzled and played along, while shutting down the chance for escalation: “I would have to say something like, ‘But that you’ll never know!’”⁴⁵

Many of my Jamaican interviewees, like those from the former Yugoslavia, were willing to explain away these behaviors as a cultural trait of their home societies where such banter was more tolerated. Another stewardess explained pilots’ and stewards’ risqué exchanges in this way: “How Caribbean men interact with women is, umm, friendly. And we understand certain levels of interchange, and, yes, there is a point at which you step over. But it is much more friendly than in North America, to the point where you could be charged, considered liable, for stepping over the boundary in North America for what you say in the Caribbean.” In her estimation, Jamaicans have their own sense of limits on such banter that factored in other elements, including being a part of the same corporate workforce and, potentially, having familiarity with a particular man from social circles outside work. “So, how we banter between each other as a culture, as a camaraderie in a flight crew, in the same corporation, is all different levels,” she began. “And if you knew the person prior to your association in the corporation, it’s a different level. [This] is a whole different frame of reference to North America.” In her analysis, the freer-flowing banter had two explanations, “It’s a cultural thing, and a level of familiarity.”⁴⁶

Of course, when physical predation was a risk, then Jamaican women also activated more aggressive coping strategies. The most effective countermeasure involved women looking out for each other. One stewardess flying in the 1970s spoke of how stewardesses quickly schooled each other not to host crew parties in their rooms, leaving the hosting duties to pilots: “You pretty soon learned not to have food delivered to your room [for the entire crew]. Because then they would linger. We would get together in one room, and you needed to make sure it was somebody else’s room, so that when you’re ready to leave you can pick up your bag and leave.”⁴⁷

Several more senior stewardesses played this protective role for newer hires. As one stewardess added:

There were also … senior people, which I am also, [that were] real mother hen[s], because if I saw somebody was going in hard on a youngster, … I would say [to the stewardess], “Are you comfortable with this? If you’re not comfortable, let me know.” And I had no problem talking to the pilots any which way, you know, letting them know to quit. And if I realized that there were people who were not going to quit, then I would keep on.

We normally got rooms with two double beds. And I would also say, “You, young person,”—it could be a young man or a young woman—“if you are not comfortable, I’m not usually in my room, because I’m normally not at the hotel. [So,]… stay in my room, where they don’t have you down [on the company’s room roster] and can’t find you.”

This same interviewee saw younger hires as particularly vulnerable to such predation: “You kind of need to protect them, the new ones, the naïve ones, because a lot of them thought—the new ones from the beauty contests—they thought that they were special. And they didn’t realize that they weren’t very special, they were just there to be used.”⁴⁸

Throughout these accounts, one finds an alarming dark side to the exhilarating aspects of women’s sexual liberation as promoted by Helen Gurley Brown’s work and Mary Wells Lawrence’s application of Jet Age feminism to the airline industry. In stewardesses’ actual lives, the threats of sexual predation, from passengers and coworkers alike, required a code of unwritten rules and coping strategies to deflect unwelcome advances that they faced regularly. It also required tolerating a deeply unjust reality: that airlines like JAT and Air Jamaica “covered up” and “kept quiet” on such incidents, as one stewardess described JAT’s corporate response.⁴⁹

Stewardesses and Companionate Marriages

An exceptional challenge for the women at JAT and Air Jamaica involved not only the classic double burden faced by all working women (a full-time job plus the lion’s share of household duties) but also the additional factor of frequent travel. Overnight absences were very common for stewardesses, as even those whose schedules were round trips back to their home cities were sometimes stranded by bad weather. Additionally, both airlines flew intercontinental routes that required one or more overnights overseas. JAT also had a month-long station in Singapore at which flight attendants flew between Singapore and Australia, while Air Jamaica stationed stewardesses for several months in Frankfurt who flew only as far as Newfoundland before returning to Germany.

While this sort of mobility might have worked well for a true “single girl,” it was exceptionally challenging for JAT and Air Jamaica stewardesses who married and raised children. The result was that these stewardesses frequently exhibited two traits. First, a high number of my interviewees found men supportive of their career choice and willing to oversee the household for extended periods. Second, if stewardesses’ husbands failed to offer such support, the women commonly opted for divorce.

One JAT stewardess who started in 1972 initially had traditional notions of marriage and family. As a single woman starting her career, she looked forward to JAT’s charter flights that took her overseas for extended stays: “If you fly to America [or] Australia, it meant you would be out of Belgrade for three weeks, or ten days, certainly five days [at the] minimum. And when you came back, you might have two days off and then you’re off flying again.” Seeing this pattern as incompatible with marriage, she recalls, “my thoughts were [that this routine] would be fine up until I get married, and [especially] until I decide to get children and have a family.” Thus, when she got engaged a couple years later, even before children came, she opted to change her schedule: “I stayed in Europe.” She valued being home with her husband at night, as she knew stories from colleagues whose marriages had collapsed due to long separations. There were, she noted, “so many broken marriages, so many broken relationships,” among her colleagues.⁵⁰

Eventually, however, this particular stewardess and her husband found ways to stay together, even raising two children while she went back to flying to America and Australia. Her husband’s attitude was crucial: “I had the right support from my husband,” she asserted succinctly.⁵¹ Another JAT stewardess stressed the need to find a man committed to companionate marriage, even though such men were somewhat rare in Serbian society. When asked how she and her husband stayed together and even managed to raise children, this stewardess smiled and said, “My husband did the job [of raising the children], because we were equal, right?” Her smile turned to laughter as she noted how socialist-era Yugoslavia’s progressive laws on gender equality far outpaced the traditional notions of gender found among many citizens. She then explained how picky she was when dating, “I always detested these men who don’t know how to shop for their own pants, how to cook, how to clean. They’re worthless!” If she had married a man like that, “I have this terrible part of me, a killer awakens in me. I would kill him in the bedroom!” She returned to laughing jovially.⁵²

An ocean away in Jamaica, a stewardess the same age, from the class of 1972, found a similarly collaborative man to marry and raise children with. “I had a husband who was very understanding,” she said. “He knew I loved the job.” Her passion was so intense that she frequently refused to take her vacation time and even pressed to return early from maternity leave: “I couldn’t stay home, no no. I was just itching to go back.” Her husband supported such choices: “My husband, really, he just said, ‘No, you really love this thing here,’” and he agreed that she should return to work.⁵³ Of course, for Jamaican families in the 1970s, companionate decision-making also had practical economic benefits: by prioritizing a wife’s time earning a salary and her various stipends, they could maintain a foothold in the middle class. The combination of economic deprivation from the era of colonialism, the tumult of the debt crisis, the austerity in the Manley years, and the continuing lack of job security and income growth all conspired against economic stability. Companionate marriage was one more tool that stewardesses could employ in their pursuit of economic security and personal autonomy.

The Hazards of Child-Rearing as a Jet Age Feminist

The core promoters of Jet Age feminism, Helen Gurley Brown and Mary Wells Lawrence, did not envision motherhood as an aspiration, at least not for their core market of women in their twenties. Instead, these women were encouraged to work, travel, date, spend money having fun—and use birth control. The Braniff stewardesses that Wells Lawrence refreshed for the Jet Age still were fired when they got pregnant. Stewardesses at both JAT and Air Jamaica diverged from the Jet Age feminist vision, as many of them—probably a majority at both airlines—also chose motherhood. They thereby invested their time off work raising young children and designing complex childcare support systems when the job required their absence.

While early childcare was always deemed a private responsibility of parents in the United States—minimal maternity leave, no state-sponsored day care, no state-sponsored preschool education until the late 1960s—this was not supposed to be so in states devoted to welfare capitalism like Jamaica, nor especially in socialist societies like Yugoslavia. In theory, a worker-run and state-owned company like JAT could have offered childcare for their employees. In reality, however, JAT’s stewardess-mothers had no help beyond what was offered to all citizens: generous maternity leave, coupled with limited access to day care and early education.

The persistent realities of financial limitations and rigid patriarchy in Yugoslavia made childcare a challenge for many women workers, as detailed in Chiara Bonfiglioli’s research into female textile workers.⁵⁴ Many of these women resorted to locking their toddlers up alone in their homes when they worked, especially when their primary source of childcare, grandparents or neighbors, were unavailable. In fact, as Bonfiglioli points out, when the dual commitments of being both full-time workers and mothers was combined with the state’s encouragement for women to become politically active, women in socialist Yugoslavia endured a “triple burden” largely unknown in the West. This reality widened the gap between the state’s de jure gender equality and de facto persistent institutionalized sexism.⁵⁵

State commitments to support working mothers in Jamaica arrived far later than in Yugoslavia. Reflecting the imperative to stimulate economic development through reducing the country’s birth rate, the first state interventions into reproductive politics after independence were focused on disseminating birth control and education about its use. The neglect of women’s needs beyond birth control was rectified only after Michael Manley’s 1972 victory, perhaps especially due to his marriage to Beverly Anderson. Soon into Manley’s tenure, the state began funding women’s education centers and day care facilities, though typically only in public housing communities for poor families. Middle-class working women, including stewardesses, still had to find their own childcare. Thus, the main state benefit for such women came with the first maternity leave law passed in 1979. Stewardesses could then take paid leave for up to twelve weeks. Thereafter, however, childcare reverted to being a private expense.⁵⁶

The most prevalent childcare option in both Jamaica and Yugoslavia had also served previous generations of parents: older women looked after children, a group that potentially included mothers’ own mothers or grandmothers, aunts, retired neighbors, or family friends. One JAT stewardess from the class of 1970 began work in a way that would have been unthinkable at a Western European or North American airline: she was pregnant when hired on her first probationary six-month contract. Thereafter, she said, “I received my permanent contract, along with my entire class, as I recall. And all of us were really needed, but I immediately left on maternity leave. Immediately.” When she returned to work, and with her husband busily looking for a job, they opted to part with the child: “[When she was] a small child, my mother took care of my daughter. Not in Belgrade, but in Knjaževac,” a town over three hours away. This left the parents precious little time to spend with their daughter: “whenever we had a day or two, we would go out there.” They finally brought the child back to Belgrade at age five, when schooling began.⁵⁷

Thereafter, the husband and wife co-parented in a way that was unorthodox in Yugoslavia: “I decided that it was time for us to live together, especially since my husband no longer had a job … I basically said, if we’re a family, then we need to live like a family. You’ll look after her, and she can go to the kindergarten.” Parental roles were reversed, with the father as the primary caregiver. However, the husband, still jobless, also found that this had advantages: “He took care of her, and he would also take her with him to the café, if that’s what was needed, so he could meet up with his friends. I really don’t think he was deprived of anything.” She did confess that these choices were unsettling: “I [was] not exactly happy about this, but honestly it was good that way… . And then after a while she was big enough to take care of herself.”⁵⁸

This woman’s colleague, the one who originally believed her work to be incompatible with marriage, found a similar mix of support from her husband and extended family. Child-rearing became a shared responsibility, with the husband often preparing meals, waking up the two children, and getting them off to school. Meanwhile, in summers, the couple relied on her family to give them extended breaks. “Because my parents moved to Montenegro,” she said, “I could send my kids there to spend [time]. They were little, and my mom was happy to have them. Plus, they lived in a house with my brother … They could go to the beach and play around and enjoy themselves.” When the children were away, the couple undertook adventures together: “He would come with me if I was on a long flight to, let’s say, Sydney or Singapore. Or for my vacation, we would go and travel around to the places we liked, just the two of us.” Over the years, this travel added up: “We flew to Rome, and then from Rome we flew to Geneva. And then we would go skiing in Switzerland, France, Austria.” As part of JAT’s winter vacations, the children sometimes accompanied their parents: “We got to take our children skiing at Jahorina [in Bosnia] or Kopaonik [in Serbia]… . It was really great.”⁵⁹

Over time, this stewardess realized that keeping her job benefited her family. “If you get your parents to help you out with the kids, and if you have the father of your children to look after them, then you can organize your life,” she discovered. Coupled with JAT’s perks, she said, “my husband and I had all the benefits you could get.” Thus, when she pondered whether to stay at JAT, she now asked, “There are so many of my colleagues with a family, with children, and they still do the same job. Why shouldn’t I?” The question was never fully resolved until her children were older. Instead, each year, she said, “You keep thinking, let’s make it another year. You never said, I’m going to stop now or by the end of this year. You always thought, probably next year would be the best time to stop … It was always next year.”⁶⁰

Stewardesses at Air Jamaica had children just as frequently. A majority entered the job uncoupled and childless, but they tended to marry and have children over time. One stewardess from the class of 1970 remembered that her earliest years were very much aligned with Jet Age feminist norms: “At that time, I was free [and] single. I mean I had no children or anything, so I was just up and down, just trying to do … whatever it was to make life interesting. And, you know, flying with the airlines gave us the opportunity to do so many things,” which included in her case being part of the flight attendant base in Frankfurt, where stewardesses lived for six months at a time. These adventures were curtailed sharply with the birth of the first of two daughters, when she chose to switch to a ground operations job.⁶¹

She was not alone in such moves. The airline by the 1980s had what one former stewardess described as “an aging flight attendant population … who now wanted to really have husbands, start families, have a more predictable schedule, and to really have off Christmas or New Years, or both.” Staying on the job longer “create[d] a cycle of life where they want[ed] to have the husband and the children, and so they didn’t want to work at times.”⁶² Another stewardess from the class of 1969 fit this pattern, as she finally looked to settle down after twenty years on the job. She then married a pilot and started a family, before finally quitting in 1992: “My younger daughter was two years, and I just wanted to go home … My husband had just made captain that year, and I said to him, ‘Here’s the deal: when you make captain, can I stop working?’”⁶³ Her husband’s high salary allowed her to devote herself to their daughters, while his perks still benefited the entire family in terms of being able to travel.

A final account from an Air Jamaica stewardess details how single mothers coped with the contradictions between Jet Age feminism and motherhood. In her case, she lacked not only a husband, but also a parent or extended family member to help with the child. Yet, she found that her salary, supplements, and the additional money she made through trading sufficed for a true luxury: a live-in nanny. That said, her limited budget also limited where she could live. While she held dual citizenship as a Jamaican born in the United States, she settled with her daughter in Jamaica: “When I had my daughter, I was not going to go to the US with a young child as a single mother to put my child in day care while I go and do some little job to come home. No!”

The cost disparities between the two countries meant that Jamaica was the wiser choice: “In Jamaica you can afford to have a helper in your house. And I had a live-in helper every day from when she was born.” Whereas in the United States, as she claimed, “You can’t afford that nanny unless you’re a movie star or very wealthy person,” the reality in Jamaica was different: “In Jamaica you can have someone living in your house and paying them twenty US dollars a day.” She concluded, “So, I was not willing to leave Jamaica,” even though, “if I was married or had my boyfriend with me and it was just the two of us, I would probably have tried [living in the US].” Without affordable childcare, however, the prospect “was just a scary thought for me.”⁶⁴

By the 1970s flight attendants in the West had begun to catch up with their peers at JAT and Air Jamaica. The rights that JAT stewardesses had from the late 1940s to keep working regardless of age, marital status, or whether they had children—these same rights that were quickly won by stewardesses at Air Jamaica just a few years after their 1969 inaugural—slowly began to take root at American, Canadian, and Western European airlines as well. Within the European Economic Community, Sabena Airways’ Gabrielle Defrenne helped dismantle such restrictions. When she won her case against Sabena at the European Court of Justice in 1976 for firing her at age forty, her victory forced changes to the hiring and firing policies of all Western European airlines.⁶⁵ Similarly in the United States, in the aftermath of the inclusion of employment protections for women in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a series of flight attendant plaintiffs forced an end to such practices.⁶⁶ Ironically, Braniff was forced to change its policy on marriage bans in 1965, the same year that Mary Wells Lawrence launched the “Air Strip,” when the airline lost an arbitration case brought by a secretly married stewardess.⁶⁷ Her precedent became a model for stewardesses at other airlines to use the Civil Rights Act in their favor.

In time, then, stewardesses from all the world’s regions, whether West, East, or South, had converging workplace experiences. They also shared increasingly similar frustrations about income vulnerability, sexual harassment and abuse, and challenges with balancing work and family commitments. In this new moment in the 1970s, Western stewardesses joined the efforts of stewardesses at JAT and Air Jamaica to overcome the systemic injustices of Jet Age feminism. Of course, even before this moment the West’s stewardesses also had private coping strategies to compensate for their comparatively low salaries, and they too found ways to navigate the risks of sexual abuse on the job. With the end of marriage and pregnancy bans, these stewardesses then also struggled to develop private solutions to childcare and to find more egalitarian marriages.

Thus, perhaps the only unique elements of JAT and Air Jamaica stewardesses’ narratives involve their opportunity to import and trade hard-to-find goods from the West. These activities arose in economic systems of comparative deprivation, which in turn led their governments to pursue economic development programs that included more import restrictions and currency controls. Surely, some Western European stewardesses also traded in goods like designer jeans (which were always much cheaper in the United States) and some American flight attendants were also tempted to smuggle drugs into the country. But these activities did not occur with the same regularity as in Yugoslavia and Jamaica.

Ultimately, then, Jet Age feminism became not only a worldwide trend in aviation but also a worldwide scourge for stewardesses. Its vision of “liberation” via a consumption-based beauty regimen and the marketing of oneself as not only physically alluring but also sexually freethinking and available had downsides for all flight attendants. The truest allies of these working women were the West’s Second Wave feminists, Yugoslavia’s socialist feminists who called on the state to deepen its commitment to women’s rights, and Jamaica’s Third World feminists like Beverley Anderson Manley, who combined the fight for women’s workplace rights with a racial reckoning for Black Jamaicans. In the end, these movements created a global flight attendant corps in which the worst of the indignities of Mary Wells Lawrence’s “Air Strip” could be jettisoned by 1980. Gone were the very short skirts, the denial of flight attendants’ safety roles, and the patronizing gimmickry of Air Jamaica’s fashion shows.⁶⁸

The future was not all rosy, however. Even as the 1970s saw progress against the overt sexualization of stewardesses, airlines across the world continued to ignore the rampant incidents of sexual harassment that took place on planes and on layovers. A 2018 survey commissioned by the largest labor union for flight attendants in the United States found that 68 percent of flight attendants had experienced sexual harassment while working.⁶⁹ There remains little incentive for airlines to go after passengers, pilots, or fellow flight attendants who engage in such activity. Meanwhile, another glaring failure of Jet Age feminism, income insecurity, has only worsened over time. Flight attendants at airlines in the West did see rising salaries through the 1970s, but a wave of neoliberal changes started soon thereafter, especially in concert with the United States’ deregulation of the airline industry in 1978. The resulting competition has certainly lowered the cost of air tickets for passengers, but it has also led to major cuts in flight attendant salaries, such that only more senior flight attendants at higher-end legacy carriers can aspire to enter the middle class.

Neoliberalism hit both Jamaica and Yugoslavia even harder, though with a different and arguably even blunter instrument: IMF-imposed austerity programs. By the mid-1970s Jamaica and Yugoslavia had unsustainable debt burdens, and the countries’ state-owned airlines were identified as austerity targets. Salaries for flight attendants on permanent contracts were reduced, though they typically remained at levels high enough to keep workers in the middle class. Both airlines now saved money by leaving more flight attendants on short-term, contingent contracts, sometimes for several years. These moves only exacerbated preexisting undesirable behaviors among such flight attendants: more importing of goods to sell on the black market, more creative use of per diems from layovers outside the country.

This evidence illustrates how flight attendants have been deeply disadvantaged by Jet Age feminism. They lacked a voice to counter their employers’ rigorous beauty standards and sexualized marketing campaigns, and they suffered as a result. It was mainly through their own ingenuity and mutual support—these private acts of resistance—that many were able to persist in this career despite its risks. Yet, even as they constantly fought sexism, these women struggled to find common ground with more progressive feminists, who often saw stewardesses as willingly complicit in Jet Age feminism’s beauty and sexual norms. This positioning in a sort of no-man’s-land (if you will) regarding feminism was borne out in one interview with a member of JAT’s class of 1969. When asked, “Do you consider yourself as a feminist?” there was a long pause and quite a bit of facial contortion. Then came laughter.

There was so much that did not make sense about the question. There was the fact that “feminists” barely existed in Yugoslavia when she started working, then had been aligned against stewardesses later in the 1970s when she was still young. There was also the fact that feminism has often been treated as a Western import that did not necessarily pertain to local realities. This sentiment is perhaps even stronger in today’s post-Yugoslav Serbia, with its nationalist, largely anti-Western political climate. When she finally spoke, she first said, “I don’t know how to answer that question. I need to think about it.” Then, as she further pondered her struggles for dignity as a Jet Age stewardess, she did offer one addition: “But I like the place that women now have in the world. They have the right to show their own opinions, and all that is more acceptable now than before. So I think that women are going in the right direction.”⁷⁰