The Political, Economic, and Social Stakes of Pre-jet Stewardesses

While the postwar transition from stewards to stewardesses may seem a strictly social development, there were important economic reasons undergirding this change. Airlines’ rapid expansion after the war relied on thousands of decommissioned military transport planes that were now either donated or put on sale at rock-bottom prices. Lower aircraft costs allowed these resurgent airlines to charge somewhat lower fares, which in turn begat a more diverse passenger base. More women, children, and seniors now accompanied those who had always comprised the bulk of frequent fliers: businessmen. An equally important economic factor was that American and Western European incomes were growing as airlines’ overhead costs declined. The West’s Marshall Plan–stimulated Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) fostered a consumer spending boom, with even middle-class families now able to contemplate air travel. At this point, the economic democratization of air travel intersected with the social force of sexism, coalescing around the notion that women were more capable of serving various types of air passengers. Especially the very young and old often required more attention from flight attendants, and the presumption was that women, as supposedly natural caregivers, would best meet their needs.

Airlines from capitalist economies—those in the West and many in the Global South, including Jamaica—had an additional economic incentive to hire women. The postwar social contract that prevailed in these societies bestowed a family wage on male laborers, with labor unions (no less strong in the Caribbean than in the United States or Western Europe) ready to combat any backsliding. For airlines, which typically operated with small, if any, profit margins and with large debt burdens, designating flight attendant positions or ground attendant positions as women’s work offered a reprieve from this expensive compensation scheme. Thus, to justify excluding men, airlines after World War II increasingly wrote flight attendant job descriptions to emphasize feminine skills like serving food, comforting worried passengers, caring for children, and providing a sexy look. As such, these positions became decidedly pink collar: they were now women-only and thereby lower-paying jobs offering primarily short-term employment. They were also riddled with other forms of gender discrimination, including sexual harassment, a disadvantage that their employers only encouraged.⁴

Airlines in the West were by far the worst transgressors in assigning restrictive regimens to stewardesses that were unlike anything imposed on airlines’ all-male pilots or even on their few remaining stewards. Across Western Europe and North America there were bans on marrying, having children, working after a certain age (usually thirty-two or thirty-five), and being over a certain weight. These airlines also notoriously hired based on a woman’s looks, with their training focusing on beauty tips as much as safety or technical expertise. The average stewardess in the United States in the 1950s worked only eighteen months, most typically “retiring” to marry.⁵

In the West, the combined effect of imposing low wages and negating long-term career options made stewardessing a low-pay, dead-end job, especially since purser positions were off-limits to women at most airlines with international routes. This discriminatory regime was considerably less entrenched in Yugoslavia and Jamaica. Instead, stewardesses in these countries demonstrate that pink collar discrimination could be ameliorated through political commitments to equality. JAT never imposed marriage bans or age-based retirement schemes due to explicit clauses in the country’s 1946 constitution protecting working women, while Air Jamaica executives failed to implement such restrictions because stewardesses and their politically well-connected union pushed back.

All the same, neither JAT nor Air Jamaica addressed the rampant sexual harassment stewardesses endured on the job, nor did they undo the strict gender segregation that foreclosed women’s opportunities to advance into jobs like piloting or managing. Both Jamaica and Yugoslavia kept pilot positions in the hands of men longer than in the West: Air Jamaica’s first female pilot began work in 1979, while JAT never made this move before the Yugoslav state disintegrated in 1991. Meanwhile, in the West, SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System) hired the first female pilot, Turi Widerøe, in 1969, with other carriers in North America and Western Europe typically following that lead in the 1970s. Overall, then, the reality for a stewardess seeking job advancement was similarly frustrating, especially before the onset of the Jet Age, regardless of whether she hailed from the West, East, or South. This type of aspiring career woman could progress only by joining the airline’s hiring committee or its training program for future stewardesses, while hoping that she, like Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick, would have the improbable good fortune of being selected to manage the airline’s overall stewardess operations, the lone upper management spot open to women.

Overall, part II is the social counterpart to part I’s political and economic content, as it details the rise of stewardesses as embodiments of their nation’s strivings to attain modernity via aviation. These women, no less than the airlines who hired them, were a vital part of efforts in Yugoslavia and Jamaica to craft a modern identity in which these countries also mastered technology and fit into the cosmopolitan world that aviation fostered. Stewardesses particularly matter for what they reveal more broadly about norms of womanhood in this future-scape. They were, after all, the only cadre of working women allowed in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan, most technologically sophisticated milieus. Thus, the first stewardesses in France, Yugoslavia, and Jamaica served as an avant garde for their fellow countrywomen on the ground.

Importantly, stewardesses were also working-class women, albeit with training, personal comportment skills, and a salary that allowed them to aspire to become, or at least pass as, members of the middle class. Even in socialist Yugoslavia, where social class distinctions were officially anathema, JAT stewardesses knew that their salaries, transnational mobility, and other perks (like their lavish company vacations) elevated them over other working women. Still, these were working women with a class status several notches below the airplane’s other occupants, whether predominantly elite-class passengers or upper-middle-class pilots.

Such gender-based socioeconomic imbalances were especially galling in the aftermath of World War II, when women the world over—but especially in fascist-occupied territories like parts of France and Yugoslavia—took on notionally masculine roles, including soldiering, and sacrificed their lives to support the war efforts. Yugoslavia’s stewardesses were at first modeled after the partizanka, a female Partisan soldier under Tito’s command, though they surrendered this masculine-coded status as JAT’s routes stretched further westward in the mid-1950s. A similar rollback of wartime roles was especially embittering for France’s Alix d’Unienville, whose feats rivaled those of Yugoslavia’s partizanka, leading to her decoration with the Croix de Guerre before she earned her wings as a stewardess with Air France.

Part II entertains this question: Why, after the decisive myth-busting of women’s roles that took place during World War II, did societies in all three parts of the Cold War cosmos create a traditional rendering for the stewardess, even as she was supposed to be a quintessentially modern, cosmopolitan, working woman? One might theorize a Cold War political and social imperative to return to the prewar status quo for the sake of national security. If that was indeed the case, the situation might have been particularly pressing in France and Western Europe, perhaps even in Jamaica, which were threatened by the rise of communism. Like in the United States, it is possible that the fight to maintain the political status quo encouraged a restoration of the social status quo ante, including reverting to traditional gender norms.⁶ But what could account for stewardesses’ similar stylization in communist-led Yugoslavia? After all, leaders here heralded their postwar regime as the product of both a political and social revolution. The country’s communists promised to introduce women’s equality, and they attained power in late 1945 partly thanks to expanding the vote to women. Thereafter, they ratified a new constitution in 1946 that granted expansive new rights to working women.

What becomes clear throughout part II is that a backlash to working women’s liberation took hold in all three worlds of the Cold War. Societies in the West, East, and South were all loath to acknowledge the radical and yet obvious conclusion of the war: women were just as capable as men in work roles. This included being more than qualified for higher-skilled, higher-tech jobs in aviation. As a tense compromise between progress and backlash, the job of flight attendant was carved out as the sole niche for women in aviation. Then, despite sometimes subtle and sometimes significant differences in workplace rights depending on their country of residence, these cosmopolitan working women all endured work rules that were backward looking, encountering everyday proscriptions that stunted their aspirations for equality: limits on promotion, subordination to male supervisors, grooming standards enshrined as essential job prerequisites, and vulnerability to unwanted sexual advances. None of the Cold War worlds countenanced working women’s full equality.

Western Europe’s Women en vol

A few years after she started as an Air France stewardess, Alix d’Unienville became Europe’s most famous woman in the job. She first gained notoriety in 1949, when she penned a highly acclaimed chronicle of her work exploits. A work of literary journalism titled En vol: Journal d’une hôtesse de l’air (In Flight: Journal of an Air Hostess), the book indulges the cosmopolitan yearning to fly everywhere, which for d’Unienville meant New York in the west to Saigon in the Far East. It also includes various encounters, some entertaining and some confrontational, with passengers and coworkers along the way. When d’Unienville won France’s esteemed Prix Albert-Londres for journalism in 1950, two things were clear: much of the public was enthralled by her account of a globe-trotting, working woman, and thousands of young women across Europe were eager to join her. The book was translated into multiple European languages.

Her descriptions of working in flight combine sometimes poetic descriptions, such as her rendering of the sublime kaleidoscope of shapes and colors observed from the plane’s windows, with more mundane prose about everyday annoyances, like handling overly demanding flyers. In the very first chapter, for example, she chronicles a stress-filled flight from Paris to Rome during a thunderstorm.⁷ As for life on the ground, d’Unienville again accentuates the mundane challenges of her everyday routine. She catalogs various hardships of traveling, including enduring intrusive border guards, laundering her uniform in sinks late at night, and battling insomnia in noisy hotels. That said, she also includes the enjoyments of sightseeing in foreign cities and the unscripted fun of occasional late-night outings with colleagues.

Even while d’Unienville faithfully reproduces the routine of most of her workweeks, the book’s publishers, as well as the committee for the Prix Albert-Londres, found her chronicle revolutionary. Their excitement arose for one reason: En vol’s proceedings were experienced and chronicled by a woman. As the book’s preface, not written by d’Unienville, explains, “For the first time the traditional crew, formerly composed solely of men, has been complemented with a feminine presence: that of a hostess charged with seeing after passengers’ well-being. The author of this memoir, who was one of the first women to practice this profession, may not always bend to the necessities and rules of commercial aviation, but this same independence gives her an original viewpoint, often unexpected, of this new ‘heroic era’ of aviation.”⁸

Yet, even as the publishers celebrated d’Unienville’s “independence” and her “original viewpoint” in this new “heroic era,” the heroine at the center of this narrative is elusive. Beyond superficial coverage of her joys and annoyances, readers of En vol discover only scant details about d’Unienville herself and how she makes sense of her work and her travels. She does not weigh in on world politics, and even discussion of her social life is impersonal, with no friend or colleague mentioned by name. Also absent is discussion of how d’Unienville structured her private life to accommodate her globe-trotting work: what life at her Paris home looked like, how friends and family members helped nourish her through the job’s hardships, or whether she dated or otherwise found romantic companionship.

Perhaps most disappointingly for feminist-inclined readers, d’Unienville also ignores the gender-based inequities of her work and how they impacted her. Readers remain oblivious to chronic abuses: distressing experiences of sexual harassment; a rigorous regime of bodily strictures (perfectly kept uniforms, strict weight requirements, girdle checks, closely governed hair and makeup regimes); myriad sexist put-downs from pilots and managers; and deeply unjust restrictions placed on a stewardess’s ability to marry, have children, or to keep working regardless of age. None of these indignities appear in d’Unienville’s text.

Instead, when scouring the text for inklings of a feminist consciousness, one finds only superficial accounts of gender issues. For example, when chronicling her first visit to New York, d’Unienville discusses America’s sexism in an oblique way, framing her observations in a discussion of American politesse: d’Unienville admits that she and her fellow French stewardesses “kept a rather poor idea of American men, the officers or soldiers whom we had seen hanging out on the Champs-Elysées or Piccadilly Circus, rolling drunk on café terraces and whistling at girls” at the close of World War II. She adds, however, that her experience in New York nightclubs altered that perception. Here, she found American men respectfully standing up whenever a woman rose from her seat: “The American man at home is a jovial, but correct gentleman. His politeness towards women is perhaps more refined than on the Old Continent.”⁹

Conveniently, En vol begins its narration in the midst of the action, with d’Unienville working the aforementioned flight to Rome during a storm. If she had begun with her application to Air France and the airline’s hiring criteria, her chronicle would have been less inspiring to young European women. As a reporter for the newspaper Le Figaro detailed in 1946, women who applied at Air France had to meet exacting standards:

What is required of [these women]? Simply all of the following: to be between the ages of 21 and 30; to measure between 1m 55 and 1m 65; to weigh between 45 and 65 kilos; to have no more than a 70cm waistline; to present all assurances of morality; to be single, widowed, or divorced without charges; to present a pleasant face, personality, and demeanor; to possess the first part of a bachelor’s degree, or lacking that, a certificate attesting to either: one’s initial higher-level studies, a state diploma in nursing, in social work, or in air rescue. And this is not all: one must finally speak, fluently, a foreign language, preferably English, as well as get by in the language of Goethe, Cervantes, or Dante.

He then adds with sarcastic understatement, “So do not be surprised that [the first] screening has left … only fifty of the initial applicants.”¹⁰ Note how few of these qualifications involved a woman’s ability to do the work required, which entailed keeping people safe, feeding them, acquainting them with flying, and reducing their stress levels when anxious.

Norwegian Nan Hartvedt, one of the first stewardesses at SAS, recalls that almost identical physical criteria were in effect when she, like d’Unienville, applied in 1946: “We could not be taller than 1.68 meters and not weigh more than 58 kilos.” She also recalls that this preoccupation with physical traits carried into the interviews: “We had to stand [in place], with our arms [fully] stretched out … and [while doing so] we had to cross one knee over the other. And then we had to touch our noses [with a finger].” Hartvedt laughed fifty years later when recalling this strange gymnastics that supposedly proved both her beauty and dexterity: “[Somehow] I passed through!”¹¹ At SAS, only once these physical demands were fulfilled would a candidate be assessed for her actual work-based qualifications, which included some education beyond high school and the ability to speak one foreign language—as at Air France, preferably English—with additional language knowledge also desired.

Air France’s focus on physical traits began with candidates’ applications, which required the submission of two photos of themselves. The interview then opened with a comparison of one’s in-person looks with their photos, with “a jury rating their general appearance with a score from 1 to 5.” Only those who scored highly could sit for the language exams and then potentially continue to the interview stage.¹² For children of Western Europe’s elites, including Alix d’Unienville, the educational criteria were easy enough to meet. Her schooling in the faraway island colony of Reunion, then later in Brittany, was along classical lines, and her family’s move to London in 1940 to flee the Nazi invasion provided her a command of English. However, for candidates drawn from the middle or working classes, these criteria were more difficult to meet.

For example, SAS’s Hartvedt, growing up middle class in Norway, had a solid education that allowed her to find office work before applying to SAS, but the airline’s language demands were an obstacle. “We should be able to converse in German and French. So, I learnt a couple phrases I could impress them with … that was all I knew.”¹³ Clearly, in the case of Hartvedt and numerous others at Western Europe’s less prestigious airlines, other criteria—most prominently, their looks and charm—outweighed the educational and language standards that favored elite women. Air France, however, had the luxury of rigidly applying these standards. Their first culling to fifty candidates was further whittled down to the eleven who finally were hired.

At least SAS’s and other carriers’ informal flexibility assured that Western Europe’s new stewardess corps would have at least some class diversity. While passengers were primarily elites well into the 1960s, some of the stewardesses serving them were not. They still had to speak and act like well-schooled patricians, and under no circumstances could their looks be plebian. Yet, beyond these criteria, they needed only to share the passion for travel that d’Unienville celebrates in her memoir.

D’Unienville’s Dual Acts of Subterfuge

D’Unienville had to erase more than coverage of sexist work rules to make En vol an uncontroversial, un-feminist, and yet exceedingly popular account of stewardesses’ work. She was also silent about her unconventional personal history. After all, she was a highly decorated war hero due to her service as a spy on behalf of the French Resistance. Soon after she fled to London at age eighteen, she began working in the headquarters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces, initially writing propaganda leaflets to drop over occupied France. As she gained experience, however, she began training in espionage and was sent first to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and then the Special Operations Executive.

Once trained, d’Unienville was air-dropped into occupied France with 40 million francs and a series of orders, all of which she delivered to Resistance officers. She then served as a courier over the next three months before being arrested and sent to Paris’s notorious Gestapo-run prison. On August 15, 1944, in the last days of their occupation of Paris, the Nazis packed her on a train in a mass transfer of prisoners out of France and into Germany. A series of cattle cars carried 665 women and 1650 men, first stopping at Buchenwald before continuing to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück. D’Unienville was slated for the latter, where she would have endured forced labor, starvation, and, most likely, death. Of the Resistance fighters on these infamous “trains of death,” only twenty-seven survived until the conclusion of the war, not even a year later.

However, d’Unienville never made it to Germany. Instead, she executed a perilous escape along the train route not far from Paris. When the prisoners were briefly removed from the train to cross a damaged railroad bridge on foot, she seized her chance:

While the prisoners surged round a drinking fountain at Mery-sur-Marne, she noticed the guards not watching so she slipped into an open door. She recalled only hearing blood pounding in her temples while the guards were rounding up the prisoners outside. [She was] [h]idden by the family [who occupied the home she entered, and] they arranged for her to be treated by a doctor. A local policeman … then looked after her until American troops arrived.

A comrade in the Resistance recalled that d’Unienville was “placid, efficient, punctual, [and] was blessed with such composure that allowed her, almost the only one amongst the deportees on the trains of horror … to carry off a miraculous escape.”¹⁴ For her espionage activities and her escape, d’Unienville was made a military member of the Order of the British Empire and received the French distinctions Chevalier du Légion d’honneur and the Croix de Guerre.¹⁵ Not yet finished with adventure as the war concluded, d’Unienville accepted a job with the US military in Southeast Asia, as the Americans oversaw the transfer of Indochina from Japanese occupation back to their prewar French overlords.

It was only after these adrenaline-filled years that d’Unienville—still young, husbandless, and craving adventure—discovered that her options were greatly reduced in peacetime. National security positions returned to being almost exclusively male-only. In fact, almost any jobs requiring travel, especially across borders, also reverted to men. It was this foreclosure of opportunities, even for a decorated spy, that effectively forced d’Unienville into stewardessing. Thus, En vol’s rosy claims heralding a “heroic era” of women’s liberation rings strikingly hollow. This assertion could only be rendered plausible by concealing that the author was a former spy who escaped near-certain death at Ravensbrück. Only later, decades after her time at Air France, did d’Unienville admit to being unhappy with this phase of her life. Recalling her spy training, she wryly noted, “Specialist instructors came to teach us how to make false keys, to break locks, break into properties, poison dogs, survive in hostile conditions, in thick forests, and to find our way without a compass. I have often thought that if afterwards I had put these skills to work, my life would have been more amusing and profitable.”¹⁶

This tension between Alix d’Unienville’s actual life and her self-presentation in En vol reveals an important fact about the flight attendant role in the pre-jet era—namely, that the “collar” in pink-collar labor was very restrictive. For stewardesses, the freedom to fly everywhere was a geographical reality (they truly did traverse the globe), but it came with a myriad of indignities. The author’s personal sequel to En vol, even though not written down, was cautionary. D’Unienville grew less energized by her work and then readily gave it up after just a few years. Thereafter, she fell back on her book royalties and family wealth to finance a life of leisure in the south of France, dabbling in novel writing. This woman, immensely talented and addicted to adventure in her twenties, was retired—and bored—by her early thirties. Her first acts of espionage, serving as a spy and undertaking a heroic escape, were complemented by another when writing En vol: she concealed these past feats to make her narrative of stewardessing more appealing to Europe’s next generation of women.