Chapter 5
Dragica Pavlović
JAT Stewardesses at the Crossroads of East, West, and South
Dragica Pavlović’s debut as Yugoslavia’s first flight attendant was inflected with both the optimism and sobriety of the country’s early postwar efforts to craft a viable aviation industry. Her inaugural flight in spring 1948 was designed to be yet another milestone in the country’s strivings to “walk in step with Europe,” in the words of aviation planner Milenko Mitrović.1 She and four other attendants were hired as part of the country’s first Five-Year Plan, which strove to make JAT a tool for bringing West European tourists to Croatia’s Adriatic Coast. Thus, when Pavlović boarded her first flight just two years behind her stewardess peers at airlines further West, including Alix d’Unienville at Air France, Yugoslav officials expected to celebrate an important moment of parity. Instead, the thirty-three-year-old Pavlović never made it from Belgrade to Zagreb. A storm arose soon after takeoff, forcing the plane to turn back rather than risk landing on Zagreb’s slick grass runway. The aborted flight thereby served as a reminder of Yugoslav aviation’s enduring disadvantages: a lack of meteorological equipment, inadequate aids for landing in fog or darkness, and a dearth of concrete runways all played a role in souring Pavlović’s debut.2
Of course, another storm was brewing as well, this one political in nature: within months Joseph Stalin would expel Yugoslavia’s Communist Party from the Cominform and thereby initiate a sustained period of destabilization in the country. In the ensuing turmoil, JAT was reduced to a de facto charter service, its partner airline JUSTA was dissolved, and the country’s civil aviation authority descended into political infighting. Dragica Pavlović was the lone flight attendant to keep her job through this chaotic period, which stabilized only in the early 1950s. Pavlović ultimately found herself with a distinguished title: she is remembered, to this day, as Yugoslavia’s and JAT’s first flight attendant, with her short-lived colleagues from the class of 1948 long forgotten.
Pavlović remained an active stewardess until her fiftieth birthday in 1965, at which time she moved to JAT’s ground operations in Belgrade and continued working until she completed a full thirty-year career. The length of her tenure was, of course, unmatchable by her colleagues working for Western European and American carriers. Yet, her tenure’s length is only one way in which Dragica Pavlović’s career differed from the traditional narrative recorded in Western-dominated aviation histories. Her nearly two decades of flying were also intertwined with the unique maneuverings of Tito’s Yugoslavia between the three worlds of the Cold War. The length of her career exemplifies the country’s socialist-inspired—ergo, in this rendering, Eastern—orientation, including a fuller embrace of de jure equality for working women. Meanwhile, because her job after the Tito-Stalin split increasingly focused on performing work akin to being a hostess of one’s own home, that is, serving as a domaćica (housewife/hostess), Pavlović had much in common with flight attendants in the West.
This status as a cultural hybrid between East and West was not exceptional in Cold War Yugoslavia. As the historian Predrag Marković chronicles in his history of the city of Belgrade:
In Yugoslavia, East and West—their ideologies and ways of life—are not something that gets imposed from the outside. East and West have been internalized in this country and in this city. Starting in 1948, in society, the economy, cultural life, and everyday life, there has been a battle underway between different forms… . In every sphere of life one can establish a pair of options, one which presents itself as the West, and the other as the East.3
Thus, especially once the Yugoslav government commissioned JAT in 1949 to begin flights to the German-speaking countries of Western Europe, the East-West cultural fluidity that took hold among JAT’s flight attendants was a familiar cultural positioning.
What was not endemic to the Yugoslav region’s culture and history was the third prong of Tito’s foreign policy: a kinship with the countries of the Global South. With the build-out of JAT’s lines across the Mediterranean, Dragica Pavlović and her peers spent increasing amounts of time on flights and layovers in places like Cairo and Beirut, and Pavlović also worked as a flight attendant for Tito’s delegation during at least one of his extended tours to India, Southeast Asia, and Egypt during the late 1950s. More broadly, Yugoslav women in the 1950s were encouraged to develop a sense of curiosity about and political solidarity with their peers in the Global South. But, as a new generation of scholars attuned to issues of postcolonialism, race, and culture have pointed out, the country’s government did little to address domestic racism and Eurocentrism, nor did it challenge its citizens to problematize their whiteness and Europeanness in these new relationships with the Global South.4 Thus, while flight attendants like Pavlović were encouraged to express solidarity with women of the Global South, this sense of kinship did not render a North-South cultural hybridity akin to the East-West hybridity noted by Marković.
“This Struggle Must Bear Fruit Also for the Women of Yugoslavia”
When Yugoslavia’s communist-led National Liberation Front during World War II pushed ahead in its guerilla war to expel fascism, an estimated one hundred thousand women picked up arms and served as soldiers during the war, with two thousand attaining officer status.5 These partizanke (female Partisans) were stellar examples of women demonstrating their ability to be men’s equals: they served with valor in all the ways men did, defying the notion that gender norms were hardwired by one’s biology and therefore immutable.6 Tito himself realized that these wartime contributions would beget greater gender equality once peace returned. In 1942, at a meeting of women involved in the war effort, he asserted: “The women of Yugoslavia, who in this struggle are sacrificing so selflessly, they who so persistently are standing in the front rows of the battle for National Liberation, have the right to establish—here, today, once and for always—this fact: that this struggle must bear fruit also for the women of Yugoslavia, that never again can anyone wrench from their hands these hard-won fruits!”7
Just behind the Partisans’ front lines lay another vast network of female collaborators; they were organized into a communist-led umbrella group known as the Women’s Anti-fascist Front (Antifašistička fronta žena, or AFŽ). AFŽ members not only supplied the Partisans with food, medical help, information, and shelter, but they also started campaigns to foster greater independence in women. Since the Partisans held territory primarily in the hilly rural areas of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia, the AFŽ was most active precisely in the most traditional and heavily patriarchal areas of the country. Up to one million women participated in the AFŽ, taking advantage of its educational centers that taught them how to read, practice better hygiene, and improve childcare techniques. AFŽ newspapers became important instruments to mobilize women as devoted anti-fascists and future communists. Yet, while these advances were potentially life-changing for women, their location in highly traditional areas required compromise. As the social philosopher Tijana Okić notes: “The mobilisation of women into the AFŽ coexisted with traditional attitudes, and the women who contributed to the Partisan cause did so, as a rule, by performing traditional women’s tasks and chores: cleaning, washing, looking after and caring for others. Thus, from the outset, the work of the AFŽ was conceived strictly as women’s work.”8
In the ensuing years, traditional notions of womanhood coexisted awkwardly with socialist-inspired and wartime-proven notions of women’s equality. For the first time, women in socialist Yugoslavia were given the right to vote, and they found extensive encouragement to work outside the home and pursue the necessary education and training for lifelong careers. The subsequent changes to women’s lives, when compared to both Yugoslavia’s peasant-based agricultural and bourgeois-based urban societies in the prewar era, were dramatic, if still incomplete. Young women were now expected to attend school at least through high school, and universities and other institutions of higher learning opened to them more fully than ever.9 Beyond schooling, there was further movement of women into the public sphere. In some regions of the country, such as heavily agricultural Bosnia-Herzegovina, the number of women entering non-agricultural workplaces increased by two-and-a-half times, assuring them the modicum of personal autonomy that derived from earning a wage in their own name.10
The highlight of women-centered legal changes in postwar Yugoslavia was the Soviet-inspired constitution passed in 1946, which included the progressive article 24 on women’s rights: “Women possess the same rights as men in all realms of state, economic, and social-political life. For the same work women have the right to the same pay as men and enjoy special protection in relation to work. The state particularly protects the interests of mothers and children with the establishment of maternity hospitals, orphanages, and kindergartens, and through the right of mothers to paid leave before and after giving birth.”11 Coupled with liberalized divorce laws and other family law reforms, women gained a more solid legal footing, leading some, including Dragica Pavlović, to opt out of marriage completely. Such was the social and legal context in which Yugoslavia’s first flight attendants were hired.
Gender Uncertainty at Takeoff
Planning for JAT to add flight attendants dates back to its founding year of 1947. Zdravko Pudarić, the head of expansion plans at the Civil Aviation Authority, articulated a plan to introduce “service of stewards and stewardesses” as a way of “increasing the comfort of passengers” in a meeting with the country’s Main Tourism Authority.12 The context of his comments established a Western-oriented motive for this, since flight attendants were part of a larger effort to generate an influx of Western tourists, whose home airlines already offered stewardess service. Thus, despite tight space restrictions on JAT flights, Pudarić wanted flight attendants to provide the level of comfort that was now expected in the West.
These plans moved forward just months after JAT’s inaugural flight in April 1947, with the first recruiting ad placed in August. Later plans divulged in internal memos show even more growth envisioned for 1948: consistent with Pudarić’s efforts to double the country’s aviation miles that year, there were plans to hire an additional six “stewardesses” for both JAT and its sister airline JUSTA, the Soviet-Yugoslav joint venture.13 The gendered designation in this text is noteworthy, especially given Pudarić’s earlier gender-neutral phrasing and the wording of the newspaper ad that led to Dragica Pavlović’s hiring, alongside her four shorter-lived colleagues. The ad ran in the classified section of one of the country’s major daily newspapers, Belgrade’s Politika, under the generic headline “Konkurs” (competition).14
The ad’s wording regarding the applicants’ desired gender stands out for its lack of clarity. The terms used for flight attendants around the Western world circa 1947 were almost all gendered in deliberate ways: “steward” or “purser” designated men, “stewardess” or “hostess” designated women. The Yugoslav ad, however, at first explicitly welcomed men or women to apply, informing readers: “The Main Civil Aviation Authority requires a certain number of comrades” for the position, spelling out in the original Serbian that both female comrades (drugarice) and male comrades (drugovi) were welcome to apply. The ad goes on to describe the position not as that of steward or stewardess, but rather as službenik letač, a novel pairing of nouns that literally translates as “serviceperson flyer” and might be hyphenated in English. Were this the last reference to candidates’ gender, it would have been clear that the Aviation Authority sought applications from both women and men, and presumably on equal terms.15 Yet, several lines later, the ad returns to the topic: “Chiefly female comrades are being considered.”16 The statement’s delicate nature, coupled with the gender indeterminacy found elsewhere, leads to a clear conclusion: in this moment when the new constitution compelled ever more workplaces to discount gender in hiring, aviation planners were conforming to the letter of the law, while nonetheless aspiring to the Western standard that the field become heavily feminized.
This tension continues elsewhere in the ad, especially when compared to the criteria advertised by Air France for its 1946 class. Like Air France, the Yugoslav ad stressed foreign language knowledge, with the requirement that one know either French or English, with an additional willingness to consider German speakers. Absent, however, is any mention of one’s physical appearance, whether weight, height, or waist size. Also conspicuously absent is Air France’s focus on marital status. Indeed, the only criterion that was discriminatory compared to other positions available at JAT was an age restriction. Mimicking Air France, the Yugoslav authorities added that “one’s age may not exceed 35 years.” When coupled with its preference for “primarily female comrades,” one finds here a pretext to privilege youthful, notionally attractive women when the candidates appeared in person for interviews.
Indeed, this refusal to consider candidates older than thirty-five is even more curious when compared with JAT’s working manual from 1949. This document stipulates that an applicant for any other work position could be between the ages of eighteen and sixty, since this norm, in the aspirational language of the time, would “enable a socialist work discipline.”17 Only flight attendants were held to a different, decidedly less socialist type of work discipline—one that instead conformed to Western European standards.
The spirit and letter of the 1946 constitution also failed to challenge the total dominance of men in aviation positions that required extensive technical training, including the cadre of engineers, mechanics, and business planners who were essential to running an airline. The pilot corps at both JAT and JUSTA also remained male-only. While this exclusion might have been a result of women’s lack of technical training and piloting opportunities (either civilian or military) before and during the war, nothing changed in Yugoslavia in the four-plus decades after the promulgation of the 1946 constitution.
Instead of forcing an end to this male stranglehold, the constitution’s commitment to grant women equal access to workplaces was simply ghettoized, with women effectively limited to stewardessing and lower-level roles in administrative offices. Thus, for example, at JUSTA in October 1947, there were only seven women among the airline’s ninety-two employees (less than 8 percent of the workforce).18 When JAT’s flight attendant corps finally stabilized and eventually started to grow a few years after the Tito-Stalin split, this mostly female cadre of workers became members of the sort of cordoned-off “pink-collar” labor force that exposed them to various forms of abuse. By 1958, JAT’s flight attendant corps had grown to twenty-one workers, eighteen of whom were women. Meanwhile, all forty-nine pilots and twenty-one radio operators at JAT were male.19 Flight attendants at JAT, just like at Air France, were becoming an unfortunate paradox: they were, by default, the women with the highest status in the country’s aviation field, even though they inevitably lagged far behind pilots, planners, and administrators in pay and prestige.
The Stewardess as Part Partizanka, Part Domaćica
In her first decade of work, Dragica Pavlović experienced the cultural tensions facing Yugoslavia’s women profoundly. On the one hand, she exercised more personal freedom than her peers in the West. At the same time, as gender historians writing on socialist Yugoslavia have stressed, the role models for women constituted a double burden. The powerful partizanka soldier was one such model, while the other was the domaćica, the housewife-hostess whose value was found in conforming to traditional gender norms as a stay-at-home—or at least a part-time stay-at-home—wife and mother.20
In fact, women across the Eastern bloc were experiencing the bitter reality of the legal liberation offered them by communist leaders. As historian Eric Hobsbawm observes:
While major changes, such as the massive entry of married women into the labour market might be expected to produce concomitant or consequential changes, they need not do so—as witness the USSR where (after the initial utopian-revolutionary aspirations of the 1920s had been abandoned) married women generally found themselves carrying the double load of old household responsibilities and new wage earning responsibilities without any change in relations between the sexes or in the public or private spheres.21
While she chose to remain unmarried and therefore free from the most demanding duties of a domaćica, Dragica Pavlović nonetheless manifests the unrealistic expectations impacting the first generation of JAT stewardesses. Her work experience and that of her peers was an awkward combination of partizanka assertiveness and domaćica traditionalism.
As the image at the beginning of this chapter illustrates, JAT’s managers amplified this confusion via the work rules and uniforms they created for Pavlović and her coworkers. In terms of her uniform, at least, JAT adorned Pavlović so as to keep alive the memory of the country’s glorious victory over fascism. In the image, she is depicted during JAT’s customary preflight greeting to passengers. Though her smile softens the effect, she stands atop the staircase, dressed in a military-inspired uniform, giving the Partisan salute. Visually, then, stewardesses were bedecked in the legacy of the empowered partizanka.
The Partisan salute remained a part of all JAT flights until around 1954, enduring through the Tito-Stalin split, after which it also reminded citizens that Yugoslavia’s liberation from fascism was homegrown and less dependent on the Soviets than elsewhere in the Eastern bloc.22 In other words, Yugoslavia was unique as a nation because its hard-fought victory over fascism was largely achieved by and for themselves. The eminent scholar Joseph Frankel in 1955 called the Partisans’ struggle for national liberation the “crucible in which real Yugoslav unity was formed,” a succinct assertion of the Partisans’ legacy in the myths that strove to create a sense of brotherhood and unity among the country’s fractious constituencies.23
Note that Pavlović’s hat is a loyal replica of a Partisan’s cap: all cloth, with no firmness, so that it could be removed and pocketed when duty called. It was not inspired by the rigid women’s hats from earlier times, whose large size and brittle firmness forced elite women into non-active, ornamental roles (lest their hat fall off). It is true that stewardesses in the United States and Western Europe also sported uniforms that, like at JAT, were inspired by soldiers’ attire, a holdover from steward uniforms from the 1920s designed by Pan Am and Imperial Airways to imitate naval officers. However, Western stewardess uniforms in the 1940s were also typically coupled with pillbox hats, exactly the sort of rigid ornamentation that compromised their mobility and emphasized their role as fragile beauty objects.
Beyond these exterior symbols of partizanka-like strength, Pavlović also demonstrated similar assertiveness via her professional achievements, which would have been unthinkable for her peers in the West. Her thirty-year career was marked by a series of impressive highlights. Ten years in, during 1956, Pavlović tallied an amazing one million kilometers of flying, for which Tito himself decorated her with the Order of Labor, one of the country’s highest honors. Furthermore, near the close of her flying years in 1963, she was elected by fellow JAT employees as president of the Workers’ Council, the organization within Yugoslav companies that represented workers’ interests to the company’s management. While Pavlović ultimately declined the post, her election itself speaks to a profound disparity between Yugoslavia’s stewardesses and those in the West: a JAT stewardesses could even, in exceptional cases, be elected to the company’s most important organ of “workers’ self-management.”24
Pavlović’s personal life also reflected the increased potential for Yugoslavia’s new women to take on greater autonomy. From the beginning, JAT allowed stewardesses to marry at any point, a fact that gave Yugoslav stewardesses far more personal choice than their peers in the West. Yet, this freedom also made Pavlović’s choice to stay single somewhat suspect. In public, Pavlović conceded that it was her work commitments that diminished her marriage prospects. For example, when asked in 1956 why she was still unmarried and childless, she cast herself as a chronic workaholic: “I spend most of my time on the ground, but even there I am busy with work involving the plane: assigning duties, overseeing things tied to my duties, etc.”25 A 2007 retrospective from JAT similarly suggested that work had replaced her family life: “Dragica was fully devoted to her job and her commitments at JAT. Although she often points out that … everyone in the company in the early years was like one large and united family, she never had a family of her own. She simply had no time to marry, and life passed by quickly.”26
All the same, the very fact that Pavlović had to justify her status as single reflects a lingering traditionalism: women in Yugoslavia still experienced ample pressure to conform to the traditional norm of becoming a domaćica, complete with husband and children. This pressure was little different than what women in Western Europe and North America encountered. Air France’s famous Alix d’Unienville “solved” this conundrum by staying completely—though conspicuously—silent about all aspects of her personal life in her chronicle, while Pavlović’s invocations of workaholism are equally conspicuous in their attempts to mislead. After all, her assertions overlook the fact that she was already thirty-three years old when she began at JAT, meaning that her prime years for marrying were already quickly passing. If she had a deep desire to marry, she likely would have done so before starting at JAT.
Instead, a stewardess who started flying in 1956 offers a more plausible explanation: “Well, for Dragica,” she claimed, “there simply was no match.” In this colleague’s memory, Pavlović enjoyed adventures in many forms, with her JAT years only accentuating this preexisting trait. Once at JAT, her stellar reputation put her in line for a wide variety of out-of-the-ordinary experiences, including serving Tito, his wife Jovanka Broz, and other state officials on at least one weeks-long voyage to South and Southeast Asia. When she compared these adventures with marriage and child-rearing, Pavlović—at least in the recollections of her colleague—refused to settle for second best; a husband and children would mean forgoing a life of adventure.27
The interviewee stressed, however, that Pavlović’s choice to prioritize her work over marriage was neither encouraged nor was it common among stewardesses. Unlike Pavlović, this colleague married in 1958, and she recalls that “every girl of my group [the class of 1956] went to work and [eventually] was married.” Notably, marriage itself did not always render such women more pliant domaćice for their husbands. In this stewardess’s case, a pattern of tensions with her husband and their respective families quickly arose, even on the night of the couple’s engagement party. The stewardess was assigned a domestic route to Titograd (Podgorica), which would return her to Belgrade by the early afternoon, in plenty of time to attend the party. However, fog rolled in and closed Belgrade’s airport, forcing her to remain in the Montenegrin capital overnight. As she remained alone in a hotel room, “my family and my fiancé’s family, they had an engagement party without me.”28
Thereafter, this stewardess reported that she was torn by attraction to her adventures as a stewardess and pleas from her family to stay home: “My mother was always worried, ‘Are you in one piece?’ she would ask, and so on. And my mother-in-law would chide me when I had layovers: ‘Are you staying somewhere else again tonight?’” The tension between her mobile lifestyle and the traditional expectations for a sedentary domaćica was too much for this stewardess. Her marriage ended just two-and-a-half years later, in a divorce that she initiated under the liberalized laws implemented by the communist regime. Yet, throughout a series of personal choices—to marry, then to divorce—she maintained her position at JAT, something that would have been impossible for stewardesses in North America or Western Europe. Ultimately, she opted to end her time at JAT in 1962, though she moved on to what she described as equally interesting work with various embassies in Belgrade, which took advantage of her language skills and schooling in the ways of high society. She also chose never again to marry.29
Of course, while Pavlović and her peers partially embodied the partizanka, their ghettoization into JAT’s only “pink-collar” workforce exposed them to plenty of traditional sexism. Most commonly, this involved service-oriented roles not only for passengers but for the cockpit crew as well, whether on the plane or on layovers. At times, even more overt sexism was manifest. In her earliest years, certain male colleagues, including JAT’s chief pilot, felt threatened that women like Pavlović tried to forge a career in the skies. When she reported to him for her first day of in-flight training in October 1947, the pilot betrayed his personal investment in keeping the airplane a male-only space. As she greeted him, he turned to her with an unsolicited put-down: “I don’t need you; I can fly without you.”30 This aggressive act demonstrated a reality that lingered for JAT’s stewardesses through the coming decades: even while buttressed with legal assurances of workplace equality, they sometimes found themselves delegitimized by male colleagues and customers.
The Domaćica Serving East, West, and South
When JAT in the mid-1950s purchased its fleet of more modern and larger Convair-340s to serve its routes from Paris and London in the West to Cairo and Beirut in the South, its flight attendants were enlisted as public relations tools. One of the airline’s first major marketing campaigns directed at an international audience crafted a Western-style aura for stewardesses and the airline. That said, it still included several noticeable cultural traces of the communist East and also a greater openness to the Global South, even though the stewardess on display conformed quite closely to Western notions of homey servitude.
Published in 1956, a high-gloss, photo-rich, four-page pamphlet titled simply JAT was destined for travel agencies and ticket offices in West Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.31 Thus, the brochure’s audiences were among the first Western consumers to determine whether JAT was appropriately “walking in step” with its Western competitors and to what extent JAT’s connections via Belgrade to the Global South could compete with the reliability and comfort of the US’s Pan Am and TWA, Britain’s BOAC, and Air France.
Technology, rather than stewardesses, was chosen as the core rhetorical appeal to this customer base. The cover photo is a full-page image of JAT’s Convair-340 sitting on Munich Airport’s tarmac, with Bavaria’s snowcapped Alps in the background.32 When opening the pamphlet, a series of smaller images reinforce this focus on technological sophistication, offering views of the plane’s spacious interior, the high-tech cockpit, and more external views of the plane. The CV-340, labeled in the text as “the most modern two-engine passenger plane” available, came with both a pressurized cabin and improved temperature control, which translated to a comfortable travel environment.33 When coupled with text detailing JAT’s rigorous pilot training, the overall effect was to assure prospective passengers of a fully up-to-date experience: “Safety, comfort, and speed are the main traits which most eloquently speak to the reliability of Yugoslav aviation.”34
The wide variety of images that included people aboard the JAT plane, both passengers and a stewardess, reinforced this trope of modernity and comfort. One image portrays a young boy happily drinking a cup of juice, while another, depicted in the above photo, shows a girl of a similar age sharing a smile with a stewardess—her hair stylish and lipstick glistening—who is kneeling down to share a comforting word. The child looks back at the smiling stewardess adoringly, as she might to her own mother. A third image would surely not have been found in marketing for Western European airlines: an older peasant man boards the plane, his hand-carved cane, Ottoman-era cap, and traditional woolen shoes typical of remote rural areas in southern Yugoslavia, offering a stark juxtaposition with the ultramodern aircraft. Seen together, these images of airlines’ most physically fragile passengers (the old and young) stress JAT stewardesses’ domaćica-like readiness to be a caretaker, nurturer, and voice of reassurance.
Despite such adherence to Western gender expectations, other aspects of the pamphlet diverged from what these customers might anticipate. The next photo collage involves not stewardesses, but instead passengers who were “famous personalities.” However, rather than mimicking the star culture of the West that would have prioritized movie actors, singers, and literary figures, JAT’s “famous” guests were exclusively politicians, with leaders from the Global South warranting primacy of place. The largest photo of the seven showed Tito shaking hands with the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The camera captured the two leaders on the tarmac of Belgrade’s Airport, with a CV-340 behind them and the text stressing that Nehru arrived “in a special JAT aircraft.” Another image portrays Burmese leader U Nu, while all the others show ministers from the European destinations where JAT’s CV-340s now flew: the United Kingdom, France, Greece, and Turkey.35
In this projection of a Yugoslav version of the world, a few important elements stand out. First, it is immediately noticeable how significantly Yugoslav foreign affairs and its aviation sector had evolved since before the Tito-Stalin split. Tito’s 1947 musing that Yugoslav aviation would be focused on linking the country to other Soviet satellites had been completely jettisoned a decade later, when countries to Yugoslavia’s east were the only ones left out of the pamphlet. Meanwhile, as the images of Nehru and U Nu attest, the growth of Yugoslavia’s aviation sector offered the potential to complement Tito’s far-flung diplomatic activities with a corresponding flow of goods and people southward. The Cairo route into Africa and the Beirut route into Asia were initial steps in this direction.
At the same time, this display of a Yugoslav cosmopolitanism—mixing elements of East, West, and South—replicated the West’s social conservatism on gender roles. Every face among the “famous personalities” is male, with Tito taking center stage. The brochure, like actual Yugoslav politics during the Cold War, did not challenge the norm that politics should be male-dominated. In fact, the image of the stewardess and little girl is the only portrayal of women, thereby reinscribing women into the separate sphere of domaćica-oriented domestic duties like hosting and childcare. The layout’s overall indication was that progress in women’s affairs, if progress is the correct word, lurched westward toward the same homemaking and caring roles expected in West Germany, while the transformative politics of Tito’s diplomacy reached southward. Yugoslavia’s holistic cosmopolitanism (East plus West plus South) thereby risked being far more forward-looking in its state diplomacy than in its cultural politics.
Yugoslavia’s Praktična žena (Practical woman)
In the mid-1950s, Yugoslav officials started to reprioritize production goals, moving away from a Soviet-style focus on heavy industry and toward providing greater quantities of consumer products. Given their role as the main consumers of household goods, women were key participants in this transition. Various economic planners encouraged, or at least tolerated, this transition for women under socialism into citizen-consumers akin to women in Western societies. Women now had greater permission to serve as arbiters of fashion and beauty, as consumers who were justified in being selective and demanding, and as matrons of a comfortable and stylish family home. At the same time, officials began to redesign Yugoslavia’s consumer market. As Patterson notes, “self-service shops, supermarkets, and department stores that aspired to Western ideals of luxury, choice, satisfaction, and modernity started to spring up across Yugoslavia beginning as early as the late 1950s.”36
In fact, Marković finds an emphasis on women’s beauty in Yugoslav publications that predates even this consumerist infrastructure, including 1951 reports in Belgrade newspapers on a Paris fashion show, replete with accounts of what designers deemed to be in style for the season. He sees these developments as indirectly tied together not just with economic decisions, but also with the easing crisis of the Tito-Stalin split, as the paranoia that followed June 1948 subsided. As Marković notes, “the liberalization of politics brought with it the widening of women’s roles. Alongside mothers and laborers, at the beginning of the 1950s women were also ‘permitted’ to become symbols of beauty and desire.”37 Both Patterson and Marković also agree that allowing regular citizens to shop for fashions in Trieste, which became the premier shopping destination for Yugoslavs after relations with Italy normalized at the end of 1954, was yet another impetus for women to become more deeply enmeshed in the West’s consumption-driven beauty culture.
By 1956, women in Yugoslavia could avail themselves of Western-style consumer tools, including fashion tips, cosmetics tutorials, and dieting regimes that increasingly appeared in the Yugoslav press. The magazine Praktična žena (a title best translated as The Practical Woman) debuted in March 1956, promising to help women negotiate their dual obligations as full-time workers and consumers. As the debut issue explained, “Today, as our women each day play an ever greater role in public life and as they, arm in arm with their comrades of the opposite sex, occupy numerous positions of responsibility in their work outside the home—their home, because they aren’t authorized to lessen their work commitments, often goes neglected.”38
Praktična žena was designed to alleviate these tensions by offering a space “in which women find advice, which may help women-mothers [and] women-as-spouses-and-housewives to manage their domestic duties and the care of their children more simply, so that a more convenient and pleasant family atmosphere can be established in their homes.”39 For the state’s central planners, the magazine offered a lower-cost way to help professional women manage their excessively demanding dual roles as workers and domaćice. In lieu of high-cost solutions like increasing investments in childcare or time-off options for women, the magazine offered no-cost tips for women to excel in both their full-time commitments.
Most of the magazine’s advice had a Western feel. The first issue promised that Praktična žena would not differ from women’s magazines being published “elsewhere in the world,” an oblique reference to the West that was made clearer when it promised to cover the same themes as its counterparts in the United States, Britain, or France: cooking, sewing, film, fashion, physical fitness, children’s issues, and self-care.40 Indeed, future issues frequently imitated these Western publications in their coverage of fashion shows in Paris and Rome, advice on how to dress for social and work outings, and guidance on household management and child-rearing.
Where Praktična žena differed from these Western magazines and instead imposed what might be considered a more Eastern (socialist) focus was its fundamental expectation that readers were working women, most typically holding full-time jobs outside the home. As such, some of its content focused on the workplace, including a regular column titled “Twenty-Five Questions” that profiled a prominent career woman’s work and her strategies for managing her home life. Also reflective of this socialist orientation were open discussions of legal innovations like easier divorce and women’s workplace rights that the Communist Party had introduced.41
While far more limited than its Western-oriented coverage, content profiling the plight of women from the Global South was also included in Praktična žena, marking an effort to strengthen public engagement with Tito’s foreign policy of nonalignment by building solidarity with women residing in these states. This content typically appeared in a regular column called “A Letter from … ,” which profiled a particular woman’s professional contributions in her home country. The issues between 1956 and 1960 included dispatches from Syria, the British colony of the Central African Federation, Lebanon, China, and Liberia.42 The 1957 article profiling Syria covered women’s efforts to organize themselves, assert greater roles in public society, and press for greater rights. Progress at the time was impressive: regarding Syria’s marriage laws, which were previously “based on old, faith-based propositions,” it was now “noticeable that these shackles gradually are being broken in the actual practice of life.” Additionally, working women now enjoyed access to new careers: “What a decade ago seemed unrealizable is today a phenomenon that in Syria is no longer unusual at all: women lawyers, women doctors, women architecture students, women engineers, etc.”43
At the time, such solidarity efforts benefited from the fact that many postcolonial states, Syria included, adopted a socialist track of modernization. Thus, Syrian goals for women’s reforms aligned with Yugoslavia’s: to promote women’s commitments to work and to advance secularist solutions against the so-called “old, faith-based propositions.” Yugoslavia’s postwar Women’s Anti-fascist Front (AFŽ) also supported the latter goal, pressuring Muslim communities, especially those in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, to end Sharia-based restrictions like veil-wearing and limitations on women’s movements in public.44 The similarity of such socialist-inspired reforms allowed Yugoslav women circa 1957 to look out upon the Global South and identify common elements from their own struggles against sexism and patriarchy, despite sizable cultural and geopolitical differences.
Given her relative fame in Yugoslavia by 1956, the same year Tito awarded her the Order of Labor after flying her one millionth kilometer, Dragica Pavlović was chosen to participate in the “Twenty-Five Questions” segment of Praktična žena. Interestingly, in this very moment when JAT was consciously remaking its stewardesses into more stylish and doting attendants who would be more palatable to Western customers, Pavlović herself also downplayed the partizanka-like elements of the job and instead accentuated its domaćica-like characteristics. When asked to describe her work obligations for readers, she explicitly likened her work to a housewife’s duties: “[What are] the functions of a stewardess? [She is] a domaćica in a home that flies. But her function, this domaćica, is no different than those on the ground. This home also has to be kept tidy, clean—and above all welcoming and hospitable to all travelers.” When identifying differences with what would be expected of her as a domaćica on the ground, Pavlović was circumspect, offering only that the “service on a plane is more dynamic and therefore more interesting and is [as a result] more dear [to me].”45
When the obvious follow-up questions arose about the depth of her commitment to being a domaćica—whether she herself was married and had children—Pavlović was truthful, but also careful to align herself with these traditional roles. First, she assured readers that she remained committed to her extended family: “I do have a family, and I always find time between two flights for my own home on the ground.” Also, when asked whether her work with JAT was so demanding as to require a maid at home, Pavlović insisted that “I love housework and thus take care of it myself.” As such, Pavlović placed herself and her fellow stewardesses within the increasingly dominant norm for Yugoslav women: their work outside the home would only complement their commitment to the more traditional roles of a domaćica. She also established JAT’s stewardesses as avid adherents of Praktična žena’s ethos that women devote themselves to both work and home. As she claimed, “This magazine has been essential for our women. Both my girlfriends and I find lots of beautiful and useful things in it, so sometimes as we leave the skies for land, we [head] to the nearest kiosk and the new issue of Praktična žena.”46
Pavlović’s self-characterization as a devoted domaćica, though without her own husband and children, may well have been true. At the same time, however, the portrayal of her work as “a domaćica in a home that flies” was very much oversimplified. The interviewee who started her JAT career flying alongside Pavlović in 1956 never saw her or Pavlović’s experiences as reducible to the quasi-domestic tasks they performed on board. While these functions came with the job, there were always unique adventures awaiting them, especially on layovers. She claims that Pavlović particularly had a rich life beyond Belgrade, even beyond her occasional opportunities to accompany Tito on his international voyages.
“When the two of us went to Cairo—I was always with Dragica,” she noted, “and she knew the best company.” Pavlović’s access to Cairo’s high society included a close friendship with the consul of the Yugoslav Embassy, which meant steady invitations to exclusive diplomatic parties and other functions, as well as the opportunity for VIP visits to the country’s cultural landmarks: “We saw the pyramids, Alexandria, it was really exquisite.” Pavlović and her colleague also bonded with Egyptian officials in the Nasser administration, with the colleague adding that she even spent a vacation in the late 1950s at an Egyptian official’s family villa.47 Of course, none of these adventures conformed to the experiences of a homebound domaćica. To the extent they brought the same sense of fulfillment to Pavlović as they did to her colleague, they show that JAT’s efforts to cast its stewardesses as domesticized were incomplete, if not deceptive.
Whether enduring World War II in North America or Europe, women were presented with unconventional role models to help them accommodate to a new constellation of responsibilities that pulled them, sometimes quite suddenly, into male-dominated realms. In the United States, Clare Boothe Luce offered herself as a new female political model, demonstrating that elite women could attain greater parity with men. With a combination of feminine moxie, elite class standing, and a willingness to deploy hard-nosed rhetoric, women like Boothe Luce could now elbow their way into the top echelons of power, even into decision-making on national security issues. Thus, in some ways, Boothe Luce is the elite-class equivalent to America’s famous icon of working-class feminism, Rosie the Riveter. The fictitious Rosie, with tied-back hair and bulging biceps, valorized working women’s contributions to America’s war efforts through their assumption of men’s factory roles. Their labor allowed the country to produce the airplanes, warships, and other vital supplies that helped defeat the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese in Asia.
European women, especially those in the (partly) fascist-occupied countries of France and Yugoslavia, had a more starkly militarized induction into traditionally male roles. The highly decorated war hero Alix d’Unienville offered to the French Resistance what Yugoslavia’s far more numerous female Partisans, the partizanke, offered to the Yugoslav National Liberation Front. These women were so committed to the cause that they emulated the most conceptually masculine activities conceivable: that of the solider or, in d’Unienville’s case, the spy. Just behind these frontline warriors, an additional cadre of supporting women were housing, feeding, and supplying these troops, with Yugoslavia’s Women’s Anti-fascist Front (AFŽ) overcoming the rural domaćica’s traditional estrangement from the basic markers of modern citizenship. Even during the war, AFŽ women gained literacy, education, voting rights, and practice in political assembly. As Alix d’Unienville later confessed, the war years were the most stimulating of her life. This sentiment was similarly true for other women chafing against traditional gender restrictions, whether in the mode of Clare Boothe Luce, Rosie the Riveter, the partizanka, or the AFŽ member.
For the women of the West, however, the postwar years meant a retreat from the high-water marks of advancement during the war itself. Most dramatically, Alix d’Unienville went from wartime spy to peacetime air hostess in total silence, with her memoirs completely ignoring her accomplishments for the Resistance. But it is also true that Rosie the Riveter’s appeal receded by the 1950s; many women in traditionally male work roles were forced out to accommodate male veterans. Even Clare Boothe Luce gave up her seat in Congress in 1947, winning just one reelection campaign before deciding that electoral politics was still too challenging for a woman to master over the long haul. She opted instead to become an intraparty influencer within the Republican Party and eventually returned to a national security role as the ambassador to Italy under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953—an appointed, not an elected, position.
Regarding women in Yugoslavia, however, many war-era partizanke and AFŽ members might have hoped to serve as the foundation of a more enduring revolution. The 1946 constitution proclaimed women’s equality with men, especially in the realm of work. And, indeed, for women growing up in the early 1950s, work outside the home increasingly became the norm. As one flight attendant who came of age in these years told me, women in Yugoslavia were now expected to work regardless of their marital status. “And if not, if she was not working, she had to join the AFŽ [or] a youth organization [or] a students’ association.” These groups then required participation on work brigades: “If nothing else, they went on these actions” to contribute their labor to larger social goals.48 It simply was no longer enough in communist-led Yugoslavia to be a traditional stay-at-home domaćica. Instead, one had to become a Praktična žena—a woman who both worked and took care of her domestic duties.
It therefore matters a lot that the earliest Yugoslav visions for flight attendants differed significantly from the experiences of Alix d’Unienville and her fellow Western stewardesses. Dragica Pavlović assumed this job at age thirty-three and continued flying until age fifty, before finding a ground-based position in which to complete her thirty-year career. All of this was a substantial improvement over the situation of Western women. So too was the fact that Pavlović and her peers could keep their jobs while making their own choices about marriage and, as needed, divorce. Even the decorative touches from Pavlović’s early years of flying—the Partisan-inspired uniform and preflight salute, being awarded the Order of Labor, and her ceremonial election to head JAT’s workers—established these women as empowered workers and citizens in ways that the West refused to countenance.
At the same time, however, the endemic sexism in Yugoslavia that was left unaddressed under socialism, coupled with Yugoslav aviation administrators’ preoccupation with “walking in step” with Europe, ultimately entailed a backsliding on these empowering traits. When the airline first tried to market itself in 1956 to Western European clientele, it proudly cast Yugoslav geopolitics as a groundbreaking improvement over Western parochialism, with glossy images of Tito using JAT’s airplanes to link himself more closely with India’s Nehru and Burma’s U Nu, as well as to Western officials. Simultaneously, however, Yugoslavia’s progressive gender politics disappeared, as the brochure’s lone stewardess lacked any trappings of her partizanka-like authority (no salutes, no military uniform or Partisan cap). She was now remarkable only for her perfect perm and lipstick, her glowing smile, and her ease in catering to a child. Also in 1956, in an interview with Praktična žena, Dragica Pavlović recast—indeed, arguably misrepresented—her work, stating that a flight attendant is simply a “domaćica in a home that flies.”49 Thus, regardless of Yugoslavia’s increasing geopolitical convergences with the Global South, its culture regarding gender norms was converging instead with the West.
Somewhat ironically, then, Alix d’Unienville’s chronicle En vol—captivating for its audiences and at the same time deceptive in its erasure of the author’s own internal anguish regarding gender roles—served as a crucial moment in pre-jet Yugoslavia’s move away from partizanka-inspired stewardesses. When French editors rereleased the 1949 classic in 1958, Praktična žena acquired the rights to include chapters of the work over the course of eleven issues, run under the title “Diary of a Stewardess.”50 These issues used passages from d’Unienville’s book to temporarily replace another segment that was typically more attuned to Tito’s foreign policy aspirations, a feature titled “Women in the World” (“Žena u svetu”) that occasionally profiled women in the Global South, especially those from countries that had joined the nascent collection of nonaligned nations under the inspiration of Tito, Nasser, and Nehru.
As Praktična žena’s editors introduced d’Unienville’s work, they barely diverged from the remarks of the original French editors, stressing how the author chronicled the expansive mobility of a stewardess’s travel and the astounding speed with which her life would rush by. With no additional caveats about d’Unienville’s retirement from Air France or her ignored legacy as a decorated war hero, these editors presented the same allure of the stewardess’s life that mesmerized French audiences a decade earlier:
In place of our ordinary letter from some part of the world, today we commence our presentation of a series in which French stewardess Alix d’Unienville conveys her impressions from flights around the world. While reading these pages you will travel with the French stewardess to Casablanca, Zurich, Rome, Karachi, New York, Dakar, Nairobi, Khartoum, Saigon, and Cairo. But as the author states, “I can’t claim that I know, for example, the soul of India just because I spent a few hours in Calcutta.” In actuality, Alix d’Unienville provides impressions of people whom she meets in passing, of passengers, of landscapes she flies over.51
The overall effect, especially on younger women in Yugoslavia, was the same as it was all over Western Europe. With Yugoslavia in 1958 only four years away from entering the Jet Age and with Belgrade’s new airport poised to become a growing hub for air traffic heading east, west, and south, stewardesses were becoming more and more beloved. Certainly, their globe-trotting was a major part of their allure, but so too was their mastery of the touches of Western womanhood: their youthful beauty, their immaculate grooming, and their ability to serve as domaćice to the same standards as stewardesses at Air France and Pan Am.