Preflight Turbulence for the “Rare Tropical Birds”

The new Air Jamaica was even more attuned to the proclivities of North American customers than its earlier version had been. Minority partner Air Canada brought expertise on penetrating the American and Canadian markets, while earlier media campaigns from the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) in these countries offered insights on how to successfully promote the island. In fact, the JTB’s experience using beauty queens like Carol Joan Crawford and Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick, who was the “face of Jamaica” on posters and billboards for several years, established the precedent for using stewardesses to similar ends. Of course, Braniff’s wild success in the United States at the time offered further encouragement for Air Jamaica’s team to highlight skin and seduction when promoting their stewardesses.

The first major media event along these lines took place a month before the new Air Jamaica’s first flight on April 1, 1969, just as the first fifty-six stewardesses finished their training at Air Canada facilities in Montreal. Ketchum had organized press conferences in both New York and Miami, to which “all the food and fashion [reporters] from America’s leading magazines (e.g. Vogue) have been invited.” The assembled journalists met with the company’s new executives and sampled Jamaican food. But the main attraction involved “Mrs. Kirkpatrick along with three of her stewardesses,” who presented, “a fashion show modelling high fashion creations from Jamaica’s top couturiers.”³ The former Miss Jamaica and Bond femme fatale herself donned the pajamas she had designed for pursers to wear in flight, explaining that the boldly colored and relaxed stylings “are designed to help bring the sunny, pleasurable atmosphere of our country to travellers the minute they step aboard an Air Jamaica jetliner.”⁴ Thus, in this seminal moment when the first Air Jamaica stewardesses were introduced to the American public, tropes for the future were already in place: the stewardesses, via Kirkpatrick, were inheriting Jamaica’s global beauty pageant fame, and they were also linked to exoticized and eroticized fantasies of “sunny” and “pleasurable” tropical escapes.

Consistent with this embrace of beauty pageant norms, Air Jamaica required its stewardesses to meet rigid physical criteria: they had to be between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, between five feet two and five feet eight, between 100 and 132 pounds, be unmarried (and, at least at first, had to remain so during their working tenure), and have perfect vision. The airline also shared that the sole criterion for the first cuts would be aesthetic: “At the first interview the girls will be requested to walk around a room in the presence of two members of the Air Jamaica staff, one of whom will be Mrs. Marguerite Kirkpatrick.”⁵ Only those who passed this beauty test would be welcomed back for a second interview to scrutinize the candidate’s personality and aptitude for flight attendant work. Compared to their global peers, these hiring criteria conformed quite closely to Braniff’s requirements and were more rigid than JAT’s in Yugoslavia.

To keep the stewardess corps young over the long-term, the airline devised an incentive structure to encourage them to leave the job in a timely fashion. According to the company’s directors’ meeting minutes from November 1968, “as a general rule [stewardesses] would not be employed for longer than five years.”⁶ When the company articulated this policy to the public, an executive stressed that “world research has revealed that stewardesses rarely want to fly five years.” He added that at the time of their termination, “the girls will be given a bonus which the Company feels might come in handy as a nest egg, or perhaps to finance training in some other field.”⁷ In reality, of course, this policy was designed to retain only the most promising women beyond their early adulthood—women like Marguerite Kirkpatrick, who by 1968 was a full decade into her aviation career, married, and around thirty years of age, yet still modeling and performing at an exceptionally high level.

These criteria also created Air Jamaica’s first public relations crisis, due to the divisive ways that racial identity and skin complexion continued to disadvantage dark-skinned women at Miss Jamaica and other beauty pageants. This discrimination persisted even after breakthrough moments for light-skinned Jamaicans such as Carol Joan Crawford’s victory at Miss World in 1963 and Marguerite LeWars’s role in Dr. No and as the “face of Jamaica.” When Air Jamaica’s first recruiting ad called not only for good posture and good teeth, but also “good complexion … [and] attractive hair,” many readers saw commonly used euphemisms that excluded darker-skinned candidates.⁸ The blowback was swift. A Garveyite-inspired leader on the island, Dr. M. B. Douglas, president of the Council for Afro-Jamaican Affairs, penned a sharply worded letter to the airline’s directors requiring “assurance that black girls with black hair would have a chance of being employed.”⁹ Even the government’s own powerful minister for communications and works, Cleve Lewis, whose portfolio included civil aviation, condemned the airline for their insinuations.¹⁰ In response, the airline quickly moved into damage control, with an executive reaching out to Douglas to assure him that “there would be no discrimination on the grounds of race, colour or creed.” The directors also dispatched the airline’s managing director to meet with a Gleaner newspaper reporter to stress the same.¹¹

Amid this tumult, the airline did indeed hire a handful of dark-skinned women, though by no means in proportion to their numbers in the population. Other hiring criteria that were supposedly color-blind already skewed the number of qualified applicants to overrepresent Kingston’s privileged light-skinned minority. These factors included passing O-level exams at the end of high school and possession of “good diction” in speaking, which were grounds to exclude those who spoke forms of Jamaican patwa (patois) from the countryside or impoverished urban areas.¹² As one longtime flight attendant noted, the job’s most effective language speakers were those who had been trained in families and schools to speak “what we called the ‘Queen’s English.’” She quickly added that another language skill was required, but less frequently, as stewardesses needed “to break down into patwa when you had the … odd Jamaican who, you know, was giving trouble.”¹³

In lieu of having a fully proportionate number of darker-skinned hires, Air Jamaica executives instead carefully drew attention to the few such women at press events. One reporter who covered a reception with new hires noted, “There was special attention to petite Lilla Bennett, whose ‘Afro’ hairdo was the perfect answer to those who had seen something sinister in the Air Jamaica advertisement’s reference to ‘attractive hair.’”¹⁴ In advance of Air Jamaica’s relaunch, its soon-to-be president, Guillermo Machado, also gradually fed the new stewardesses’ biographies and headshots to the press. He thought this tactic would keep the airline in the news and “help to dispel any previous doubts as to [the] number of dark girls being used.”¹⁵

Overall, the collection of brown Jamaican and white Canadian men calling the shots at Air Jamaica were initially caught flat-footed, unaware that demands for greater racial equity had increased. Racial victories for light-skinned Jamaicans, like Carol Joan Crawford’s 1963 coronation as Miss World, no longer sufficed. The Gleaner’s profiles of the fifty-six women who made Air Jamaica’s final cut was, therefore, hollow reassurance for racial progressives. The article notes that the women included “two Caucasian types … and one of Oriental origin,” and, employing vague language, “the others run the Jamaican chromatic scale.” Seemingly of greater appeal than racial identity, at least to this reporter, was that “at least three were entrants in last year’s ‘Miss Jamaica’ contest.”¹⁶

Both Ambassadors and Neo-imperial Fantasy Objects

There clearly were divergent ways that the public evaluated Air Jamaica stewardesses upon their debut. On the one hand, both Air Jamaica and the women who worked as stewardesses were treated by many—certainly by the elites who ran media outlets like the Gleaner—as a source of national pride. For them, the stewardesses heroically represented their small country, and especially Jamaican women, on the sophisticated world stage of aviation. All the while, they delivered high-quality service with a unique gusto instilled in them by masterminds like Marguerite Kirkpatrick. Thus they were, in the words of the Air Jamaica executive team, “girls [who would] portray Jamaica to visitors and local passengers” and serve as “ambassadors of goodwill for Jamaica.”¹⁷ On the other hand, however, the airline openly encouraged potential customers to exoticize them. Thus, when these women appeared in a special supplement to the Gleaner celebrating the airline’s first flight, the stewardesses’ headshots and bios ran under the demeaning headline “Air Jamaica’s Rare Tropical ‘Birds.’”¹⁸ Not only were they labeled with the imperialist-era exotic designations of “rare” and “tropical,” but they were also reduced to subhuman “birds”—which, not coincidentally, was a trendy slang term in the 1960s for loose women.

This headline arose from intentional work at Ketchum, Air Jamaica’s New York–based marketing firm, which worked closely with Marguerite Kirkpatrick on her uniform designs and on other stewardess-related promotions. This predominantly American team was aware of Mary Wells Lawrence’s success in 1965 turning Braniff from an obscure airline into an effective upstart, and they felt that Air Jamaica’s status as a new arrival called for a similar formula. Ketchum also researched American customers’ preexisting knowledge of Jamaica and found an array of simplistic and exotic tropes: catchy calypso music (thanks to the likes of Harry Belafonte, who catapulted to fame in the calypso craze of the 1950s), intoxicating rum, an unusual dialect of spoken English, a tropical setting for the James Bond film Dr. No, and Carol Joan Crawford—the first “Negro” crowned Miss World. Rather than challenge the ways these elements had become stereotypical and derivative when circulating in America, Ketchum opted instead to indulge these simplifications. If challenged by customers who might see through this pastiche, they could pass off the simplistic portrayals as part of a tongue-in-cheek, fun vibe, akin to Mary Wells Lawrence’s bawdy “Air Strip.”

The overall in-flight experience at Air Jamaica was thereby scripted to play on many foreigners’ incomplete conceptions of Jamaica, with the purported goal of making passengers feel that “their Jamaican holiday [begins] the minute their flight stewardess says ‘welcome aboard’ in New York and Miami.”¹⁹ Ketchum’s first ad, placed in Life magazine, detailed elements of this exotic, playful experience on board: passengers are greeted with “soothing island music [which] … accompanies every Air Jamaica take-off and landing,” are served by “stewardesses so pretty and graceful, we call them Rare Tropical Birds,” are offered a special cocktail known as the “rum bamboozle … to warm the inner you,” and finally can sit back and enjoy the airline’s “flying fashion shows, a showing of the latest island creations.” The fashion show justified encouraging customers to “have your Travel Agent book you a seat on the aisle.” After all, as the text noted, “Modeled by our Rare Tropical Birds, it’s quite a sight.”²⁰

Like Mary Wells’s work, the in-flight experience at Air Jamaica was part of a larger branding strategy promoting a sexually flirtatious air, though with a tropical vibe. The jets were coated with stripes of orange and gold to complement Kirkpatrick’s multicolored minis, and the new logo—inspired by a doctor bird, a hummingbird species native to Jamaica—was painted on all plane tails. To maintain a sexy flair, the logo was christened the “love bird.” Such touches allowed Ketchum to double down on sex and exoticism in their 1972 ads: “Our Rare Tropical Birds model the latest resort wear to authentic island music. And then spare that little bit of extra time soothing and serving you in a special, Jamaican way.”²¹ By then, the airline’s main advertising slogan had become racier as well: “We make you feel good all over.”²²

Former stewardesses’ reactions to being marketed in such ways were complex. One employee from the first stewardess class, when speaking fifty years on, recalled this sort of sexual objectification with incredulity. When first asked for her reaction to the “rare tropical birds” moniker, she admitted that “it didn’t seem unusual to us at all… . We were excited and we were accepting of it.” There was, after all, esteem to be gained from the beauty queen aspect of the job, and folding these elements into a cheeky marketing campaign was common in Jamaican entertainment venues catering to foreigners. She added that the marketing scheme elicited some unusual conversations:

You know, I remember there was just, uhm, not controversy, but a lot of talk about flight attendants and what they should be called. The airline itself was called, oh god what was it now? “The love bird.” But we were the “rare tropical birds” (laughter) … And it was, like, passengers would come on, and they want to say that [we were the “love birds”]. And [we corrected them]. No, we were the “rare tropical birds,” we’re not the “love birds” (laughter).²³

This woman’s ability to laugh while discussing her situation is, on the one hand, consistent with a key tenet of Jet Age feminism circa 1970: that sex, especially sexual innuendo, can be fun, playful, and free from dire consequences, even when it occurs in a workplace. Yet, there was another motivation for her laughter. Fifty years on, she saw this sexualization as an anachronism, one inconsistent with the more progressive feminist norms to which she now ascribes.

Another former stewardess from the class of 1970 shared mixed memories of the in-flight fashion shows. Her account was also filled with laughter, both at the anachronism of the premise and at the comically challenging work demands it placed on stewardesses. She noted that each flight’s crew had a limited number of women scheduled for the show: “When they were making up the roster, you would have several people who were scheduled to ‘do fashion,’ as they called it.” The first stress point when scheduled to “do fashion” was changing into the clothes: “Now, we changed in the first-class washroom (laughter), and it was very tricky. I mean, we were kind of contortionists, because (laughter) there we were, all of us in this little tiny washroom trying to change. Well, one at a time, of course. And then you would maybe bring out your uniform and push it somewhere, then you would go back in, you know. It was kind of weird (laughter).” More laughter arose when this former stewardess recalled the chaos that sometimes resulted:

I remember once coming out after a fashion show, this young lady she was—I mean, I still am a small person—and she was much bigger than I am. And I put on my uniform quickly because, of course, by this time the flight is getting ready to land, and you have to be in your assigned seats for landing. And I come out of this washroom, and I am feeling, “Mmhmm … this doesn’t feel right on me.”

And I look down, and I have on this dress that is so big for me! (laughter) And I turn around and look at her, and she is squashed into my little tiny uniform (laughter). We just took one look at each other, and then we had to bolt and dash back into the tiny little washroom (laughter) to change out … and swap clothes.²⁴

Regarding the fashion show, stewardesses were divided about their value, even at the time: “Let’s put it this way, some people liked the fashion show. It took the passengers’ minds off the flight. But I, for one, [that was] the main reason why I applied to be a purser as soon as I could, after two years.” Pursers, the flight attendant in charge of supervising all other stewardesses’ work, “did the commentary and not the actual fashions.”²⁵ While laughing may have been a temporary coping strategy for women like this interviewee, it was not a long-term solution. Moreover, the vulnerability of stewardesses during the fashion show to sexual harassment in the form of both verbal abuse and unwanted touching was keenly felt.

The frivolity of these parts of their job made it more difficult for stewardesses to serve as dignified ambassadors for their country. Nonetheless, even some Jamaican elites involved in the country’s civil rights struggles, including the journalist Evon Blake, were eager to compliment them as such. Blake is remembered for his protest in 1948 to dismantle the unofficial segregation practiced under British officials and local brown elites. As a dark-skinned, but well-off Jamaican, he held precarious access to places like the Myrtle Bank Hotel, the most elite address in Kingston. He secured a day pass to the pool from the front desk, but he then created a disturbance by diving into the water. Guests gasped and staff members cursed at him while trying to extract him from the pool. Blake stayed put and defiantly screamed, “Call the police! Call the army! Call the owner! Call God! And let’s have one helluva big story.”²⁶

Firmly established by 1970 as both a member of Jamaica’s elite and an advocate for Black Jamaicans, Blake expressed enthusiasm for the Air Jamaica stewardesses working his flights between Montego Bay and Miami. “Being a critic by nature and profession,” Blake’s review began, “I went aboard each flight deliberately looking for faults to criticize and later complain about.” But the stewardesses more than passed Blake’s examination: “Believe me, … your stewardesses are, as we Jamaicans say, ‘class.’ I watched them perform with a feeling of pride.” First and foremost in his compliments came the issue of race: in terms of their selection, “they are a true cross-section of the finest of our people, and each is a beauty.” Beyond that, he added, “they are obviously superbly trained: beautiful of speech, without any ‘put-on,’ smooth and graceful of movement, solicitous and friendly without being familiar, patient, pleasant-mannered and alert.” Blake tied these women’s performance not only to a general sense of national pride, but particularly to Black nationalist pride: “If you had been saying out loud as long as I have, that given an equal break and proper training, the Jamaican, especially the non-white Jamaican, can be as good as any worker of any nationality anywhere, and then had the opportunity of watching coloured Jamaican girls handle a planeload of nervous homebound white American tourists with such éclat, you would know why I am writing this letter.”²⁷

One of the culminating moments for stewardesses’ recognition as ambassadors of the nation came in 1972, when the Jamaica Post Office honored them with a stamp. Yet, even with this honor, a tension was readily apparent between stewardesses’ eroticized work personae and their more reputable role as ambassadors. The creators of the stamp conspicuously desexualized the stewardess.²⁸ While the uniform was depicted in a somewhat more muted but still correct bold color, the stamp portrayed the model in a dress with far more fabric than the actual uniform—enough to hide her curves. The stewardess also now held a pen and paper, so that she could be confused as a schoolteacher or a minister’s wife, not someone serving “rum bamboozles” and changing into beachwear aboard the plane. That stewardesses had to be classed-up when embodying national pride for a domestic audience betrays how wide the gap remained between local standards of reputable womanhood and the airline’s rendition of Jet Age feminism, one that was especially exoticized and sexualized to attract foreign tourists.

Air Jamaica Confronts the Nation’s Postcolonial Turn

In the February 1972 national elections, Michael Manley of the People’s National Party (PNP) scored a decisive political victory over Alexander Bustamante’s successor as prime minister, Hugh Shearer of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Seventeen seats of the fifty-three comprising Jamaica’s House of Representatives changed hands, as Manley garnered what was at the time the most lopsided victory in Jamaican political history. While still retaining a share of elite and middle-class voters, Manley employed his personal charisma, ideological openness to more radical ideas, and commitment to improving conditions for the country’s poor Black majority to draw poorer voters to his side. His campaign slogan “Better Mus’ Come,” borrowed from the lyrics of reggae artist Delroy Wilson’s 1968 classic, captured many Jamaicans’ impatience. Ten years on from independence, society remained polarized along both class and color lines, and poverty was intractable for the nation’s large underclass.²⁹

“Better Mus’ Come” was also a social slogan in 1972, as director Perry Henzell released his collaboration with reggae artist Jimmy Cliff, the Jamaican film classic The Harder They Come. Set largely in West Kingston neighborhoods, the film showed a side of Jamaica drastically different from the one where elites like Carol Joan Crawford and Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick lived. This was a place of shanty towns, guns, drug deals, organized crime, corrupt police, rampant illiteracy, negligent social services, and seemingly inescapable poverty. The other person who made 1972 a monumental cultural year was Beverley Anderson, a young, dark-skinned model and popular broadcaster who also played a small role in The Harder They Come, albeit as a decidedly middle-class housewife. In June 1972, Anderson married her boyfriend, the same Michael Manley who was now prime minister. The marriage of the most prominent politician to his celebrity wife was a star-studded affair that effectively saw the thirty-year-old Anderson supplant the much lighter-skinned Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick and Carol Joan Crawford as Jamaica’s foremost image of womanly beauty.

Anderson’s ascension to first lady was therefore the next step in the evolution of Jamaica’s racialized beauty norms. But this was a political evolution as well, as she used her position to project a far different voice than her predecessors, one that was decidedly political and feminist. She was highly supportive of redistributive justice for darker-skinned Jamaicans and sympathetic of her husband’s eventual embrace of democratic socialism and improved relations with Castro’s Cuba. Most importantly, she enjoyed her husband’s support in engaging in feminist politics, and she soon became the head of the PNP’s women’s movement. Anderson Manley used this position and her platform as first lady to press for various reforms to support women, including passage of a law providing for paid maternity leave in 1979.³⁰

At Air Jamaica in 1972, however, it was business as usual. The company kept its stewardesses in miniskirts that had changed only slightly from the ones Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick had designed in 1969, it continued to use them in seductive fashion shows, and it still employed the sexist “we make you feel good all over” ad campaign. Yet, each of these marketing ploys was increasingly out of step with the more energized postcolonial voices influencing Manley’s government.

Thus, over the course of Manley’s initial tenure as prime minister, which lasted from 1972 to 1980 (he returned as prime minister for a second time in 1989, though with a less progressive political plan), Air Jamaica officials struggled to recalibrate their marketing techniques to adjust to this new environment. Stewardesses, too, though never as full-throated as Anderson Manley or the new feminist groups that arose in the 1970s, pressed for their own renegotiations of harsh workplace rules. They first took aim at the airline’s marriage and maternity bans and, by the end of the decade, at the in-flight fashion shows as well.

Jamaican tourism slumped in the mid-1970s. Even before Manley and the PNP gained power in 1972, the exponential growth in tourism that had persisted through the 1950s and 1960s started to slow. As Air Jamaica’s chairman G. Arthur Brown confided to officials in 1970, 1969 brought a larger loss for the airline than anticipated. With the start-up costs and purchase plans for new jets, the airline was projected to lose JA$1.33 million, but the losses ended up totaling $1.52 million. While technical issues explained some of these overruns, a larger concern was the decline in tourism growth. As Brown detailed, “It is a fact … that the travel market to Jamaica did not increase by more than 7% for the year when it had originally been estimated that the total travel market would have increased by 15%.”³¹ Later, when the oil shocks of 1973–74 exacerbated this cooling off, the Manley government sounded the alarm.

Committees worked throughout 1974 and 1975 to generate a report for parliament with recommendations for the future of tourism, and the results cautioned leaders to expect a further slowing. It also called for a reckoning with the historical “lack of planning of Jamaica’s tourism development, resulting in haphazard construction of visitor accommodation.”³² In addition to the damaging economic consequences of overbuilding, including decreased occupancy rates and increased debt, the final report added a new cultural dimension. It lamented that “the presence of huge numbers of foreigners on the local society and culture must result in a certain amount of social deculturation.”³³ This newfound concern for cultural loss then led to embracing a new priority for the future: “promotion of indigenous values in the [tourism] industry.”³⁴

As though directly countering Air Jamaica’s marketing, the report was particularly damning when describing choices that play into neo-imperialist stereotypes. As it articulated, “Much of the development of the Tourist Industry in the past has been determined by external influences. This has been reinforced in some instances by an excessive willingness to provide what it was imagined the visitor wanted.” Rather than catering to these false expectations, it counseled, “The raison d’etre of a vacation in a foreign country is precisely its foreignness—the climate, physical configuration, and culture which are native to the destination. Jamaica must preserve a distinctive Jamaican aesthetic.”³⁵ While this parliamentary investigation focused primarily on Jamaica’s land-based assets like resort areas, the priority placed on “indigenous values” over “what it was imagined the visitor wanted” also pertained to Air Jamaica.

The earliest and most notable evolution in this direction came when the airline sought to rectify an entertainment gap in its in-flight service: not until Manley won election in 1972 did Air Jamaica develop its own in-flight magazine. In the age before passengers enjoyed various media alternatives, other airlines turned to in-flight magazines to assuage passengers’ boredom. The first goal for such magazines was to offer a diverse array of articles that would entertain a broad swath of people, but they also introduced an airline’s destinations to flyers, often providing in-depth coverage of sights to visit. When finally filling this gap, Air Jamaica’s management made a very different choice than it had in 1969. Rather than turn to its marketing team at Ketchum, it instead hired a Kingston-based firm to produce the new SkyWritings magazine. This firm, Carter Gambrill Robinson, then formed a subsidiary called Creative Communications Incorporated (CCI), which published SkyWritings over the ensuing decades, with Jamaican ad executive Anthony Gambrill at the helm.

This separation from Ketchum allowed the production team to have a wholly different premise for the magazine. Stated one longtime CCI employee, “It read really like it wasn’t pushing the marketing [aspect]; it was just pushing a great story.”³⁶ Moreover, the content also was more indigenous than Ketchum’s work, which replicated American cultural stereotypes. As Odette Dixon Neath, a longtime editor, explained, “SkyWritings was conceived with two guiding principles: that Jamaica is a symphony of vibrant textures, and that there are so many ways to tell a story.” She added that the magazine’s very first issues came out when Jamaica was deeply engaged in “the national pursuit of self-definition.”³⁷ CCI’s local leadership, which was well connected with Jamaica’s literary, artistic, and political community, eagerly participated in this process, as was evident in the first two issues produced in late 1972.

When Gambrill and his associates pitched their ideas to Air Jamaica executives, they offered something unique. Said one collaborator, “Of all the agencies … trying to do marketing, we wanted [our work] to look like it was indigenous. We weren’t doing just the cookie-cutter, copying of British- or American-type advertising and just calling it Jamaican.”³⁸ Instead, the materials they developed for their pitch, which ultimately were published in SkyWritings’ inaugural issue, challenged Air Jamaica’s customers to acquaint themselves with the island’s complexities—not only its beaches, nightlife, and beautiful women, but also the vibrant but impoverished village life and even the harsh legacy of slavery.

The first issue boasted an unexpected cover photo: a stylized painting of a mountain village, a part of Jamaica that the vast majority of beach-seeking tourists never visited. A description of the painting noted its provenance from the artist Kapo, who was a “self-taught ‘primitive’ painter” and “spiritual leader of a flock of highly religious cultists.” Kapo’s embrace of African dress and religion was just one way in which “his work has done much to bring prestige and acceptance in Jamaica for the Black poor.” This description in turn aptly introduced the accompanying article from the accomplished Jamaican novelist John Hearne, who profiled Jamaica’s hill regions and their role in promoting Black Jamaicans’ autonomy, both during slavery and after emancipation.³⁹

Hearne stressed that Jamaica’s mountains forged a fierce independence in its citizens, whose Maroon ancestors fought off white encroachment and whose later ancestors, when freed from slavery, escaped the seaside plantations to engage in farming for themselves: “Within thirty years a slave people were metamorphosed into a hard-edged, responsible and sceptical [sic] peasantry,” Hearne explained, before asserting that the resulting “quirky, independent personalities” of the hill country “are what we play from now.” With more than a tinge of regret, Hearne added that in today’s Jamaica, “Kingston, Montego Bay, and the tourist complexes have begun to re-attract the best of our young.” These more modern locales are “refashion[ing] them into either a lumpenproletariat or rootless metropolitans.”⁴⁰ It is not difficult to imagine the average tourist’s response to this claim. Those not perplexed by the Marxist terminology might have felt either shame or resentment that their choice of a beach vacation was subtly implicated in the degradation of Jamaicans’ independence.

The second issue of SkyWritings turned its focus to Jamaican women, offering a very different vision from the beauty queen narratives that otherwise attracted media attention. On the cover was Beverley Anderson Manley, with the ensuing profile and interview focusing on her commitment to feminism and the way she “personifies the new mood of Jamaican women.” At this early moment, Anderson Manley walked a fine political line on feminist ideas. The author noted, “Although she declines to be categorized as a women’s liberationist, she is concerned about and actively involved in issues that should ‘liberate’ Jamaican womanhood from traditional economic and social prejudice.” The first lady then mentioned a series of changes she supported, all of which were feminist staples: “Family planning. Early childhood education programmes. Legal discrimination. Job equality. These are well-defined targets. More difficult to confront, she says, are the ‘unwritten laws.’” Also noteworthy was how the magazine characterized Anderson Manley’s marriage. Rather than conforming to traditional modes, the couple was instead a “team, the two of them working together,” a sentiment that Jet Age feminists like Mary Wells Lawrence, and even Clare Boothe Luce a generation earlier, would have applauded. Yet, the report also clarified that this partnership still had Anderson Manley “in a supporting role.”⁴¹

The remainder of issue 2 profiled working women in various careers, from the arts to the business world. It culminated with a profile of Air Jamaica stewardesses that provided small elements of a feminist counternarrative to the airline’s other marketing materials. That said, the profile was still quite sexist in places. Its introduction could have come from Ketchum’s New York–based copywriters: “Like women everywhere, the stewardesses on Air Jamaica’s Love Birds are attracted to the male of the species.” Mention of the on-board fashion shows followed, with the claim that they gave men permission to “safely concentrate on shapely Love Bird curves” and offered moments “when most male passengers on the Love Birds are really glad to travel in a ‘woman’s world.’” A few paragraphs later, however, the author shared one disadvantage of these working conditions. He frankly stated that men are “the source of most of [stewardesses’] extra work on board,” adding a quote from a stewardess who said that “men are very nice, but very demanding and prone to be a bit troublesome after a few drinks.” The airline’s in-flight services manager then shared how she monitored the boarding process on flights very closely: “More men than women and most stewardesses begin to worry a little bit.”⁴²

In sum, both of the first two issues of SkyWritings as well as subsequent issues beyond 1972 offered a far richer, more nuanced and politically engaged perspective of Jamaica than the airline’s reductive marketing schemes. The airline was now more equitably straddling the cultural divides in its home country, which in the Manley years were widening. Challenges to sexism were now mainstreamed, with women’s liberation finding a powerful advocate in the first lady. The magazine’s more complex presentation not only of gender inequality, but also of Jamaica’s struggles with racism, classism, colonialism, and its legacy of slavery challenged the racist and imperialist mentalities that some American and European customers brought on board with them. A former CCI employee, when asked about why they opted to make SkyWritings so political in the early years, responded, “Well, it [i.e., political change] was in the water, it was in the air. You have to understand too that … the People’s National Party was now in control… . And they were very progressive, and there was a left wing of that party as well that was for democratic socialism. So, there was a lot going on.”⁴³

Stewardesses and the Postcolonial Turn: Confronting Sexism

Many early stewardesses were enthralled to be entering a workplace replete with beauty queen–caliber hiring criteria and in-flight fashion shows. There was a sense of pride among the rare women who met these exacting standards. As one woman who began work after competing in the 1971 Miss Jamaica contest noted, her uniform looked exquisite and gave her confidence: “You know, the green [dress] would be tied with pink, or yellow with green, or pink with green. And we [also] had gloves when we were greeting the passengers and when the passengers were leaving. And [then] we had handbags and tote bags, [plus] shoes—everybody had the same shoes.” Sporting a wide smile, she added, “That was what I loved about [the job].”⁴⁴

Yet, when this stewardess matured in the job, she and her peers confronted some drastic downsides, including the extra labor involved in doing the fashion shows, bans on marrying and having children, an early policy forbidding sexual relationships between pilots and stewardesses, and, most glaringly, the airline’s policy of pushing stewardesses out after five years. Even the most glamorous beauty pageant veterans looked upon this artificial expiration date with consternation. After all, being a stewardess was their livelihood, not a one-and-done beauty pageant. Such concerns took root at the same time as the election of Michael Manley in 1972, creating a political climate that was now more sympathetic to treating stewardesses, both as workers and as women, with greater dignity.

In the early 1970s, the stewardesses’ National Workers Union local was able to press these concerns with Air Jamaica’s management. What was not won via negotiation was pursued in two other ways: via arbitration at Jamaica’s Industrial Disputes Tribunal and through women’s own challenges on the job. On this latter point, one stewardess described what she termed a “classic case” of asserting herself more aggressively at work:

I wore glasses, and [Air Jamaica management] insisted that we had to wear contact lenses. But the pilots who wore glasses could wear their glasses and carry a spare pair… . [So] the chief pilot at the time saw me one day, and I had been wearing my glasses for a while… . [He] said to me, “Have you been flying in your glasses?” And I said, “Yes.” He said, “And who gave you permission to do that?” So I said, “I do believe that the pilots are allowed to wear theirs and carry a spare pair, so I have a spare pair in my bag.”⁴⁵

Within the first five years of the new Air Jamaica, this combination of personal assertiveness, collective bargaining, and national political change brought an end to three of the major tension points: the restrictions on marriage and pregnancy were jettisoned, the policy prohibiting fraternization with pilots ended, and, most importantly, women were now permitted to stay in the job for as long as they were qualified. This same flight attendant recalls that each of these reforms happened, “relatively quickly, because it wasn’t worth it” for the company to resist them. She added, “You have to understand that Air Jamaica was not a [well-]funded airline. They couldn’t afford a long strike.” She also described a “press” to keep Air Jamaica flying “because the only other airline [in the Caribbean] was [BWIA],” which she dismissively referred to by its nickname: “Be Waiting In Agony.”

From this worker’s perspective, the changes stewardesses most wanted came about with plenty of union pressure but no overt labor action: “usually, when there were negotiation times, there were things going on behind closed doors” between the union and the company, “and eventually things just changed.”⁴⁶ There appears to be no available internal corporate documentation or press accounts about the end of the marriage and pregnancy bans nor about the end of forced retirement for stewardesses after five years. As such, it does seem plausible that these changes were adopted quickly and with consensus between management and the union, as this former stewardess describes.

Finding a way to end the in-flight fashion shows took longer—until the final year of Michael Manley’s first tenure as prime minister in 1980. It also required a more involved intervention from the flight attendants’ new labor union, the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, which pursued the issue at the country’s Industrial Disputes Tribunal (IDT). Yet, the impetus for this change was, once again, a choice by an individual flight attendant to confront her employer. On a November 1979 flight between London and Jamaica, stewardess Christa Wilson was selected to participate in the fashion show. Insisting she was too tired, Wilson refused the purser’s orders. Upon landing at Montego Bay, the disagreement escalated, such that Wilson was pulled off the plane before it continued to Kingston.

In its findings, the IDT tribunal ultimately sided with Wilson and the union, ruling that Wilson’s ouster from the plane “was unnecessary and unjustifiable and could only have served to humiliate and embarrass her.” When a meeting between Wilson and her managers a few days later descended into cursing and door-slamming, the airline made the choice to dismiss Wilson for her intransigence. However, the IDT’s decision to reinstate Wilson with all but one month’s back pay (a penalty for her actions at the follow-up meeting) signaled to Air Jamaica’s management that stewardesses’ displeasure with the fashion shows could not be contained. Wilson’s precedent could now be emulated without penalty.⁴⁷ Soon thereafter, with the same unpublicized swiftness as previous reversals on age and marriage policies, managers ended the fashion shows.

Stewardesses and the Postcolonial Turn: Confronting Racism

A majority of my interviewees from Air Jamaica’s flight attendant corps shared the class status and also the light-skinned racial standing of Carol Joan Crawford and Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick. They grew up learning Jamaica’s intricate codes tied to race and class, typically from within the country’s better-off neighborhoods and schools. Then, when they traveled abroad and interacted with Americans and Europeans, they also became conversant in the United States’ Jim Crow–inflected racism as well as the more subtle but equally pernicious racisms operating in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. At the same time, however, attitudes on race were changing throughout the Western world, as when one of the judges of Miss World in 1963 described the light-skinned, African-descended Carol Joan Crawford as a desirable wife and daughter for any man.⁴⁸ Thus, when Air Jamaica’s stewardesses started flying in 1969, it was unclear whether these beauty queen–marketed women would be treated like Crawford, or whether their mixed-race status would expose them to various forms of discriminatory treatment.

Meanwhile, at home in Jamaica, the Walter Rodney riots gave rise to a similar process whereby many Jamaicans were reexamining their attitudes on race. That said, for some lighter-skinned women growing up in more conservative families, the riots were barely noticed. One future stewardess was studying at the University of the West Indies when the protests and police actions temporarily disrupted life on campus. She, however, stayed away from the turmoil: “I was kind of one of those shy little withdrawn persons, and I remember now … in my history class, I remember this young lady who was very vocal and very out there. And as a matter of fact she was heavily involved in … the Rodney stuff.” Yet, this fellow student was an outlier, in her experience: “I think all of the people that were doing political science and sociology were heavily into that, [whereas] my history focus was on European history … I don’t know.” In explaining how she was unaffected by the unrest, she surmised, “I guess I just had my head down like a little turtle or something.”⁴⁹

Further enabling the ability to ignore Jamaica’s racial tensions was another common strategy detailed by another stewardess who hailed from a light-skinned, middle-class family. “Jamaica”—here, she invoked the whole nation, even though the claim pertains more to the higher social strata—“Jamaica has this false sense of, ‘we’re classist, not racist.’ And I think that is true for the most part. We are [actually] more classist than racist.”⁵⁰ However much it reflects an individual’s personal experiences, this claim obscures how racism has played a central role in constituting Jamaica’s social classes and in generating such strong antagonism against lower-class Black Jamaicans. It nonetheless helps clarify how some stewardesses were unmoved by the overt discussions of racism that Walter Rodney and others encouraged as Air Jamaica was taking off.

Whatever sense of race was cultivated by Jamaican flight attendants’ experiences in Jamaica, they found themselves perceived differently when they traveled abroad. Some were already exposed to the Global North and its racial systems in their childhoods when their families followed the paths of previous generations of Jamaicans by migrating off-island. One stewardess recalls that “my first exposure [to racism] was when I was ten years old,” in 1960, when “my parents were in Washington [DC]. My father—the government had sent him to do a course—[and] my mother was working at the World Bank.” What stood out to her was that “never in my entire life [had I been] told I was Black.” On a bus ride through the tony Dupont Circle neighborhood, “this little old lady, white old lady, white hair, got on the bus. So my brother got up and offered her the seat,” adding that such was expected of children in Kingston. In this case, however, “she looked him up and down and … pushed past him… . And he turned to my mother and said, ‘What did I do wrong?’ And she said, ‘I’ll tell you when we get home.’”⁵¹

Stewardesses also encountered racism when they served the airline’s American passengers. Yet, consistent with their racial and class affiliations, some of them at first failed to apprehend that this small minority of passengers was acting out of race-based animus. As one interviewee detailed, there were various moments in retrospect that she found passengers “would look at us as if we were a different species,” further explaining that these passengers found Air Jamaica’s stewardesses and pilots to be “curiosities—that’s the word I want to use.” There was quite a bit of “curiosity of seeing, ‘Oh hey, these guys can really fly a plane!’ or ‘They had the best landing!’” She added that the racism behind such attitudes was not immediately clear. “I think what happens with Jamaicans … is that there are a lot of times when the racism just slides off our shoulder,” she noted. “So, many times if these people were rude to us because we were Black, we would just say, ‘What a facety [i.e., rude] person.’ And [we would] not think that it was because of race … Unless they came right out and say, ‘You Black-whatever’… we would never pick up on it and say it’s because of racism.”⁵²

If some stewardesses were initially ill-equipped to handle American racism, some passengers were equally ill-equipped to deal with Jamaicans’ diversity of skin tones. One flight attendant described the confusion of a customer flying on a 747 jumbo jet that Air Jamaica had temporarily leased. The passenger asked her, “ ‘Can you put me upstairs, because I don’t want to sit next to this Black person.’ And they would actually say it just like that!” Hailing from a mixed-race background, the flight attendant wasn’t perceived as Black, so “I [said], ‘And [what do you think] I am?!’ … And they wouldn’t understand that I was saying that I’m Black. So, then we’d have to say, ‘Look here, I am Black, I am serving your food, I’m making your drink. You’re going to depend on me to get off the plane. So, at least for three and a half hours, deal with a Black man sitting beside you.’”⁵³

The same chromatic confusion sometimes led passengers to misunderstand flight attendants’ seniority. As a different flight attendant detailed, the fact that a handful of Air Jamaica stewardesses were white was one basis for this confusion:

That particular day there were eight of us [stewardesses] on the airplane. I was the one in charge. I had another girl like me [mixed-race] up at the front and an Indian girl in the cabin. In the back [a white flight attendant] was down there. There was another Indian girl, there was a half-Chinese one, and then there were two other Black girls. There was a problem down in the back, [and] somebody asked to see the purser and I went down … [The passenger then said] “I want to talk to the person in charge,” and I said, “Well, I’m the person in charge.”

She looked me up and down and she looked around her, and I think maybe if nobody had laughed… . But somebody else laughed. There were Jamaicans on the flight, and a Jamaican person laughed because they realized that she wasn’t comfortable… . And [the white attendant] was going by, and she said, “How can you be in charge? I choose the white girl,” whereupon the white girl turned around and looked at her and said, “No, I am not in charge here,” and kept going. She [finally] demanded to speak to somebody from the cockpit, but I don’t think she realized the pilots were all Black. So, that was very interesting when the second officer came.

As if providing a point of consolation, the stewardess ended her account with the claim, “I must admit, it was a rare occasion” to have passengers so outspoken.⁵⁴

As women not used to attributing the social inequalities surrounding them to racism, some stewardesses found themselves confused, even judgmental, when working with other members of the African diaspora, in particular African Americans. Recognizing African Americans as a vital secondary tourist market, Air Jamaica marketed heavily in Black publications in the 1970s and found a very receptive audience. That said, the cultural differences and alternative experiences of racism in their respective societies created misunderstandings. One stewardess described such encounters as “another whole dynamic” than working with white Americans, as she lamented that some African Americans “didn’t know how to react to us.” The language differences between the two diasporas caused some disconnect: “One of them actually asked me, ‘Where does that accent come from? Did you go to school in England?’”⁵⁵

Another stewardess admitted to having negative preconceptions of African Americans due to her middle-class Jamaican upbringing. Initially she found African Americans too inclined toward confrontation: “As a matter of fact, I did ask a passenger once, I said, ‘Why are you … Black Americans so angry?’” The way she saw the US’s race problems, “everything … it’s about race-race-race and [African Americans are] getting angry.” Thanks to one particularly understanding passenger, however, her views evolved:

You know, he said to me: “Let me see if I can put it to you in one way. You’re going home,”—it was on a flight going home to Jamaica—“You’re going to Jamaica, right?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “It’s your country, right? You’re going to be home?” I said, “Yeah, I’m going home to Jamaica.” He said, “Well, imagine if the country that you thought was yours, people acted as if it wasn’t yours … People telling us to go home and whatever.” He said, “We don’t know any other country. This is our country, yet it’s like we have no home, and so we’re … angry. We have this anger. We have a tree on our shoulders, not just a chip.”

The stewardess was left far more empathetic: “Oh, I can see that,” she responded, reflecting for the first time on how statehood and statelessness impacted Africa’s diaspora in different ways.⁵⁶

There were moments when postcolonial yearnings for racial progress jelled in some stewardesses. This woman, for example, expanded her political and social horizons and found some solidarity across the colonial-era divides between Jamaicans and the African diaspora elsewhere. Meanwhile, other colleagues subtly, and sometimes more directly, challenged the racist mentalities of various white passengers. In these ways, Air Jamaica’s stewardesses sometimes asserted racial equality in impactful ways, even in the course of their mundane work activities. Despite some women’s personal preferences to remain apolitical and avoid racial introspection, Air Jamaica’s primarily brown stewardesses were increasingly aware of the racism all around them, both in the North Atlantic countries they visited and back home.

Even in its white, middle-class American cultural context, Jet Age feminism was deeply problematic. After all, younger middle-class women in the United States were torn between supporting aspects of Helen Gurley Brown’s Single Girl feminism and Second Wave activists who saw this sort of sexualization as demeaning. Some such women were also deeply troubled by the classist bias of Brown’s formula for women’s social inclusion, as it disproportionately sexualized working-class women like stewardesses. However, when Jet Age feminism took root in Jamaica, it exposed an additional problem: the fraught ways in which colonial-era norms of racial inequality were grafted onto notions of feminine beauty. Cultural theorists from Edward Said to Ann McClintock have eloquently established that white Westerners’ erotic desires were employed in colonized societies to differentiate supposedly civilized white Europeans from their allegedly more primitive—and, sexually speaking, more libidinous—non-white colonial subjects.

When imperialists’ sexual gaze was cast toward tropical climates like the Caribbean, this tendency to both exoticize and eroticize women impacted Jamaicans. In the 1950s, in the dying days of colonialism, perhaps the island’s most alluring image in Western popular culture was the calypso music craze that launched the careers of Jamaicans and Jamaican-Americans like Harry Belafonte. Their musical performances, in nightclubs or on the Hollywood screen, included women and men dancing to the up-tempo music in stripped-down outfits exposing their skin, gleaming with sweat. Jamaica, like the whole of the Caribbean, was an exotic land of enchantment.

This legacy complicates the history of Air Jamaica’s first stewardesses. On the one hand, there was something mildly egalitarian about these non-white women who hailed from a small postcolonial nation embodying the same sort of Jet Age feminism that influenced cultures around the globe. By adorning stewardesses in bright, sexy, but still elegant leisure wear, Air Jamaica allowed them to partake in a cosmopolitan style that was very much in vogue. Of course, these women were also the first generation of Jamaicans to ever engage in this highly mobile work that included overnights in New York, Toronto, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, and London.

While still a working-class endeavor, stewardessing was quite distinguished, at least in comparison to the harsh treatment endured by other traveling working-class countrywomen. This includes women in the so-called “Windrush generation” who migrated to the United Kingdom soon after the war and found conditions so harsh—in terms of discrimination by police, landlords, and school officials—that Britain’s first full-fledged race riots flared up in the West Indian neighborhood of Notting Hill, London, in 1958.⁵⁷ Rather than toil as despised migrants, these stewardesses were instead vetted for their looks and sized for Pucci-inspired uniforms. The Jet Age, it seemed, was offering progress to certain Jamaican woman, at least those who could conform to the rigors of being thin, young, curvy, well-spoken, and clear-complexioned.

At the same time, however, the airline’s advertising campaigns and its uniform choices, not to mention its novel in-flight fashion shows, reflected the same fetishizing impulses inflicted on women in the Global South during the peak of colonialism. As though lubricating a sexual transactional process, the “rare tropical birds” served their American and European passengers a specialty cocktail upon boarding. They then did clothing changes, sometimes into bikinis, while promising to make passengers “feel good all over.” Yet, importantly, the economic relationship undergirding this display of exotic, non-white, female skin was different than under colonialism: this was a Jamaican company, run mainly by Jamaican executives, for the sake of developing Jamaica’s economy. This was an independence-era take on imperialist tropes.

Air Jamaica’s Jet Age stewardesses were not completely disempowered in this process. They used their labor union and their own acts of disobedience to push back against objectification and ultimately attained more workplace protections more quickly than their peers in the United States and Western Europe. This reality made their public personae a complicated mixture of neo-imperial fantasies and postcolonial aspirations. Just as Air Jamaica’s founding and growth aimed to dismantle the cartography of colonialism, stewardesses worked to undermine white supremacist erotic fantasies that dated back to the colonial era, even if their employers did not.

The various oral histories in the next chapter highlight in greater depth how these individual women negotiated this neo-imperial and yet postcolonial tension. Even as their sexualization diminished their agency and exposed them to personal harm through sexual harassment and abuse, they also experienced growing economic independence, growing (though still imperfect) racial self-awareness, and growing self-confidence won through their work and travel. These oral histories, then, add an important narrative of Jet Age feminism that further complicates the whitewashed versions coming from Mary Wells, Cosmopolitan magazine, and the West’s stewardess corps.