Conclusion
In 1943 Clare Boothe Luce introduced an idealistic and cosmopolitan yearning that, she predicted, would disrupt world politics after World War II. It was a yearning she found among young Americans: “The post-war air policy of these hundreds of thousands of young air-minded Americans is quite simple. It is: ‘We want to fly everywhere. Period.’”1 Were her views a bit less confined by her nationalism—in other words, less tied to “keeping America on wings all over the world”—she would have recognized similar yearnings happening the world over, on both sides of the Iron Curtain and both sides of the gaping North-South divide.2 She also would have recognized that in the postwar moment more airlines than just those of Western Europe would strive to compete with American airlines.
Boothe Luce acknowledged that she had “every desire to see the British Overseas Airways Corporation shoving us so closely in many regions of the world” in a global competition for profits.3 Yet, it did not enter her calculus that airlines from Yugoslavia in Europe’s socialist East and from Jamaica in the Global South would eventually compete as well, at least in modest ways. After all, the perception, even in Belgrade and Kingston, was that the geopolitical realities of the Cold War disadvantaged smaller and poorer states. Thus, their new entrants into global aviation, JAT Airways and Air Jamaica, had a more pressing motive than profit for challenging Boothe Luce’s efforts to resuscitate the cartography of colonialism. For these airlines and the states that owned them, ideological commitments to nonalignment in the Cold War or to postcolonialism in the age of decolonization turned aviation into a sphere in which they could combat America’s market imperialism. As part I of this book details, each country’s aspirations to forge greater political and economic sovereignty were at stake. As Clare Boothe Luce well knew, this was a world where such benefits accrued disproportionately to larger and more powerful states and their essential allies. Neither Yugoslavia nor Jamaica was destined to be either powerful or essential.
Importantly, Clare Boothe Luce’s articulation of the desire to fly everywhere had its origins, though subtly obscured, in her commitment to women’s liberation. Her famous articulation from 1943 was in fact a loose reiteration of a feminist sentiment she composed for her 1936 play The Women, in which a main character optimistically asserts how women “do all the things men do,” not least of which is “fly[ing] aeroplanes across the ocean.”4 Thus, as this book traces in parts II and III, the spread of aviation after World War II corresponded with the spread of new roles for women—as workers, as travelers, as harbingers of modernity—that offered exhilarating potential for women’s liberation. With the global adoption of women into the flight attendant profession after World War II, stewardesses assumed a position on this fault line of potential progress for women and potential backlash against such changes. These were, after all, the only women allowed to work aboard the planes that now crisscrossed the globe. And yet, whether in the pre-jet era or in the Jet Age itself, none of the Cold War’s three worlds afforded these women an empowered experience as workers that would have put them on the same level as men. Full women’s liberation was seen more as a threat than as progress, even in places like Yugoslavia where there was both a legal commitment to women’s full equality and a wartime legacy in which women truly did “all the things that men do,” including soldiering for the country.
If this book were to continue its investigation beyond its rough conclusion point of the late 1970s, it would chronicle far more defeats than victories, whether for the geopolitical battle against the West’s cartography of colonialism or the West’s iterations of pseudo-liberation for women like the ethos of Jet Age feminism from the 1960s and ’70s.
In terms of part I’s focus on airlines as tools for pushing back against Western dominance, neither Air Jamaica nor JAT entered the 1980s (and especially not the 1990s) with the same potential as before to disrupt the cartography of colonialism. In the example of Air Jamaica, the airline’s debt burden became perilously high as the losses of the 1970s persisted. This did not, however, mean that the airline contracted its route network in the 1980s. In fact, as competitors like Pan Am also succumbed to financial pressures, Air Jamaica had even more incentive to maintain its connectivity with various cities beyond the obvious regional hubs that American market imperialists would have cited as desirable destinations. The airline became a cash-starved behemoth for Jamaican standards, a too-big-to-fail company that drained state coffers. However, even as the airline’s labor unrest increased, maintenance on aircraft was deferred, and overall reliability suffered, the country’s tourist resorts depended on Air Jamaica more than ever.
Air Jamaica failed to post profits as a government-run enterprise through the 1980s, then also as a private company after 1994, when hotelier Gordon “Butch” Stewart and a group of investors purchased the airline. Stewart’s group lost US$674 million over ten years. The airline was back in government hands after 2004, but this change only exacerbated its problems. Its annual debt tripled under government control, with losses totaling US$900 million over the next half decade.5 Finally, in 2011, the government acquiesced to IMF demands that it sell the airline, and Air Jamaica disappeared. The Jamaican government assumed a 16-percent share in Trinidad’s Caribbean Airlines (the former BWIA) as part of the transaction, mainly to protect a few essential nonstop routes between Jamaica and North America. It also secured assurances that some Jamaicans would continue working as pilots, technicians, and flight attendants. Caribbean Airlines is still flying today and still losing money, despite reducing its long-haul Jamaica routes to just New York, Toronto, and a few Florida cities.
JAT, too, barely survived the awful decades of civil strife and eventually outright war from the mid-1980s onward. In its modest way, JAT exacerbated Yugoslavia’s debt crisis, as the government was forced to cover the airline’s consistent deficits that accrued through the 1970s and 1980s. Nonetheless, JAT continued to expand in these years and boasted an impressively global route network and growing passenger numbers. It reached its passenger peak in 1987, when it handled over 4.5 million passengers flying in various directions: to a large set of cities within Yugoslavia, dozens in Europe, several lucrative routes to the Middle East (especially to Iraq and Libya), and long-haul destinations stretching from Los Angeles to Sydney.6 All the same, it too, like Air Jamaica, was increasingly fragile in terms of its financial health, accruing ever more debt as the overall Yugoslav economy was roiled in the late 1980s by IMF-imposed shocks and growing political destabilization within the federation.
In the 1990s, JAT was hobbled by the fact that it was the airline for postwar Europe’s first failed state since World War II. When the Yugoslav state started to disintegrate in 1991, with particularly vicious wars flaring in now-independent Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, JAT barely stayed alive. As the national carrier for Yugoslavia, JAT’s raison d’etre diminished with each republic’s declaration of independence. It technically remained Yugoslavia’s carrier through the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century, even as Yugoslavia at the time consisted only of Serbia and Montenegro. When Montenegro left this union in 2006, the now very awkwardly named JAT (Yugoslav Aerotransport) served as the national airline of only one republic, Serbia. It finally rebranded as Air Serbia in 2013, with a new ownership structure comprised of the Serbian government as majority shareholder and Etihad Airways of Abu Dhabi as both the minority shareholder and the airline’s de facto operational manager. In 2023 the Serbian government completed its buyout from Etihad and now owns 100 percent of Air Serbia.7
Despite JAT’s afterlife as Air Serbia, aviation in the states of the former Yugoslavia and in Jamaica roughly mirror what America’s nationalist-globalists like Clare Boothe Luce envisioned back in 1943. In their view, American carriers would dominate Caribbean traffic, with routes to places like Jamaica determined by the flow of capital and people from the nearby economic hubs in North America. Likewise—especially if communism had not taken root after World War II—less economically powerful European regions like the Western Balkans would have also seen their air traffic dominated by Western European carriers linking the region to more economically prominent cities further west. Indeed, the lion’s share of flights into and out of Jamaica today are on American airlines, with Canadian carriers also having a robust presence. Meanwhile, in the former Yugoslavia, foreign-owned low-cost carriers rival the airlines of the German-based Lufthansa Group (Lufthansa, Austrian, Swiss) for top market share in almost every city, with most flights heading to cities in the European Union’s wealthier countries further west and north. Belgrade, as the hub of Air Serbia, and Zagreb, the hub of Croatia Airlines, are the only former Yugoslav cities where domestic capacity outstrips foreign capacity.
Just as Jamaican and socialist-era Yugoslav planners’ creative responses to the cartography of colonialism have been erased, similar backsliding is evident regarding flight attendants’ status. Of course, there have been some positive developments since Jet Age feminism took off in the mid-1960s. Most importantly, the worst abuses perpetuated against stewardesses in the West have been eradicated. These women can now marry, have children, weigh what they want (as long as they can pass through an emergency exit), and work until they are no longer able. The airlines’ pilot corps and management teams are also more open to women than ever before, affording women more prospects than the single dead-end, lower-paying, pink-collar job of stewardessing, into which all women were formerly corralled.
But what of aspiring women—or men, for that matter—from Jamaica or from the vast swaths of the former Yugoslavia who are now without national carriers? With no local airline to offer jobs, these work-seekers follow the pathways of the neoliberal economy into far less attractive positions. Many Jamaicans working as flight attendants or pilots do so with low-cost carriers like Spirit or JetBlue based in the United States. The same option exists for citizens of the former republics of Yugoslavia, who find positions at airlines like Wizz Air, Ryanair, and EasyJet. When they do, they typically surrender the most promising benefits of the golden years at Air Jamaica or JAT. Their pay is far lower, their time off is less, generous maternity leave options may not exist (especially at American-based carriers), and other perks like JAT’s all-expenses-paid vacations are gone as well.
For other Jamaicans or citizens of the Western Balkans, the pathway to a job in aviation leads them even further afield, to the Gulf States of the Arabian Peninsula. Airlines like Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar offer tax-free salaries and free living quarters at their home bases, in return for the massive sacrifice of leaving families and friends back home. Wahhabist-inspired social strictures, enforced at least partly on foreign workers, also jeopardize one’s personal freedoms, especially when living as women and/or as queers in these base cities. Moreover, these airlines’ oversight of flight attendants leaves employees vulnerable to Braniff-style discrimination: weight restrictions, grooming regimens, and uniform requirements are all enforced with the vigor of American carriers a half century ago.
Meanwhile, the global decline of states’ safety-net benefits under neoliberalism has left all women—certainly including flight attendants—more vulnerable to concerns about income stability and caring for their families. The interviews shared in chapter 10 from Air Jamaica and JAT flight attendants coping with these pressures under Jet Age feminism revealed a crucial insight: even women living in states ostensibly committed to social welfare had to cope with these struggles privately. Income instability led many of these women to become entrepreneurial even in the 1970s, as though they were the precursors of workers in today’s neoliberal gig economy. Meanwhile, obligations for childcare were similarly shouldered by stewardesses themselves, in tandem with husbands and concerned grandparents and neighbors. Neither the state nor the employer assumed responsibility for alleviating such family burdens.
As feminist scholar Nancy Fraser argues when addressing caregiving under neoliberalism, this same privatization of women’s burdens transpires today.8 Fraser presses for feminists to engage with other activist groups in order to push back against neoliberalism’s attack on state-based or otherwise communal solutions for social ills like poverty, racism, and sexism. Catherine Rottenberg, in her critique of what she calls “neoliberal feminism,” adds to this point, expressing alarm about “the increasing compatibility of mainstream feminism with the market values of neoliberalism. What does it mean, many longtime feminists are asking, that a movement once dedicated, however problematically at times, to women’s liberation is now being framed in extremely individualistic terms.”9
Fraser and Rottenberg are particularly critical of neoliberal feminists like former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg. In her 2015 best-selling book Lean In, Sandberg affirms the long-held feminist aspiration that women will attain all the access to work and wealth that men do.10 It is not difficult to hear the echoes of Clare Boothe Luce from 1936 in Sandberg’s yearning: “These days … ladies do all the things men do,” or at least so they should. Yet, consistent with a neoliberal framing that privatizes efforts to gain equality, Sandberg promotes a self-help credo, encouraging women to fix their own perceived inadequacies that are holding them back. At no point does she support a broader effort to root sexism out of the underlying social system.
This work on Jet Age feminism in the 1960s and ’70s adds two important contributions to the field that scholars like Fraser and Rottenberg have opened. First, it globalizes their critique of feminisms that privatize women’s struggles for equality. As chapter 10 details, the very same privatization of protests against Jet Age feminism that feminist scholars now see happening under neoliberalism were happening in socialist-era Yugoslavia and postindependence Jamaica as well. Yet, even more importantly, this work deepens the historical context of these feminist scholars’ claims regarding neoliberalism and feminism.
While Fraser and Rottenberg trace the rise of imposter feminisms to the decades since 1990, a very similar dynamic was already at play in the 1960s. The perpetrators were women in the United States, positioned similarly to Sheryl Sandberg, who succeeded as corporate executives in fields of social influence like advertising and publishing. Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl in 1962 to stress that young women could now have it all: career work, steady income, sexual freedom, groovy fashion, and ample travel. And when Mary Wells Lawrence applied this ethos in her makeover of stewardesses in 1965, she promoted the lie that these lower-middle-class working women could have it all as well. Never did either Brown or Wells Lawrence attack the underlying sexist culture that kept women economically vulnerable and socially disempowered. Instead, books like Sex and the Single Girl offered a how-to manual for young women to remake themselves as Jet Age feminists.
This formula worked impressively well for Brown and Wells Lawrence, who, like Sandberg, enjoyed abundant financial resources. They could spend their way to beauty and pay a nanny to resolve the time dilemma posed by childcare demands. Yet, for stewardesses—indeed, for all non-elite women aspiring to live out the Jet Age feminist ethos promoted in Cosmo and at Braniff—there were too few options to circumvent the contradictions of Jet Age feminism. For these women, solutions to income instability, sexual harassment, and especially childcare were already privatized in the 1960s. When faced with the saccharine vision of women’s liberation offered by Jet Age feminism, these working women had to shut up, dress the part, and smile invitingly at the next set of passengers who boarded their airlines’ jets heading far away.