Alternative Takeoffs for the Jet Age

One of the goals of this book, like all works in the field of global history, is to correct the Americentrism and Eurocentrism found in historians’ accounts of global events.⁶ Thus, while including the American vision for postwar aviation forged by Clare Boothe Luce and like-minded others, I also look at perspectives from Yugoslavia and Jamaica when chronicling aviation’s growth in the Cold War era and its impact on societies. By expanding the confines of the congresswoman’s cosmopolitan-yet-still-Americentric vision, these examples also serve as a corrective to previous histories of aviation’s postwar growth with their nearly exclusive focus on developments in the North Atlantic realm.⁷

Without necessarily sharing Boothe Luce’s political and economic aspirations for postwar aviation, young men and young women in Europe’s socialist East and in the Global South were also transfixed by the wonder of aviation. They too dreamt of using airplanes to traverse oceans in a matter of hours; to surmount borders, which were sadly more numerous and less penetrable during the Cold War; and to expand their limited exposure to other societies through travel. Thus, yearnings to “fly everywhere, period,” permeated the Iron Curtain and spread beyond the North-South divide that splintered the Cold War cosmos into three supposedly distinct “worlds.”⁸

In these less prosperous regions, aviation’s spread stimulated more than just certain individuals’ wanderlust. It also promoted two kinds of hope that serve as the dual focus of this book. First was a state-level aspiration: that aviation’s spread could spur economic development, allowing these poorer, often newly independent states to compete more credibly against the United States’ economic interests. Because of this, the American hegemony via aviation that Boothe Luce promoted and that Immerwahr chronicles would not go unchallenged. Second came personal aspirations that transpired on the social level once aviation was implanted in these regions and offered citizens of non-Western countries new opportunities to traverse the globe. Particularly important for this book are the ways aviation enabled women to undertake new forms of work and new types of travel. I examine these evolving women’s roles—and the hopes and anxieties that came with them—via the stewardesses who worked for new national airlines founded in Europe’s East and the Global South.

In 1943, the same year as Boothe Luce’s inaugural speech in Congress, a young boy growing up in the hills of what was then Nazi-occupied Serbia was mesmerized by what he saw in the sky. Kosta Bojović, a child of mixed Serbian and Montenegrin heritage, was born in a small mountain village to an illiterate mother and a handyman father, and his life prospects initially seemed confined to herding sheep in the pastures surrounding his native home. The first chance he had to see airplanes was when Allied bombers flew overhead on their way to attack Nazi oil fields in Romania, part of Operation Tidal Wave, initiated in August 1943. Even though these planes were playing out the gruesome rivalries of Europe’s great powers, young Kosta was starstruck. “I’ve always had a vast imagination,” he told me in 2018. “I started thinking only about flying. It became something guiding me; I saw people’s progress as bound to the sky, that it was there that a man could achieve bigger things.”⁹

Bojović’s childhood dream to escape into the skies eventually became reality. He benefited from the Communist Party’s ambitious plans for modernizing the newly reassembled Yugoslavia, which included founding a new national airline, JAT Airways (Jugoslovenski Aerotransport), in 1947. After finishing his schooling, Bojović was able to become a pilot, first for the Yugoslav military and then for JAT. This upward vector of national and personal development allowed Bojović to move from his boyhood home in the rural south to Yugoslavia’s more cosmopolitan capital city, Belgrade, where he raised a family of his own. There, he flourished in a thirty-year career that culminated in piloting JAT’s DC-10 jumbo jets, connecting the far-flung locales of New York, Belgrade, Singapore, and Sydney. Captain Bojović stands as a testament to the fact that cosmopolitan yearnings for freedom via aviation knew no ideological divides. Thanks to the Yugoslav government’s investment in its own airline, young men and women growing up there could aspire, like their peers in the West, to fly to distant places as pilots or flight attendants.

Similar yearnings took hold in the world’s vast colonized yet soon-to-be independent regions in the Global South. However, the persistence of colonialism into the postwar era delayed the attainment of such dreams by another generation. Sharon Brandt was not even ten years old when Jamaica finally secured independence from its British overlords on August 6, 1962. She still was in high school when the first Jamaican pilots and stewardesses began flying for the new national carrier, Air Jamaica, in 1969. “Growing up, I always wanted to be a flight attendant—or an actress,” recalled Brandt. Even though there was no Jamaican airline when she was a girl, she said, “I knew about flight attendants because British Overseas Airways [BOAC] was flying out of here. That was my dream, because I just thought it was fabulous, and I’m a people person, definitely a people person. So I thought that would be the right thing.”¹⁰

Great Britain’s flag carrier at the time, BOAC (since renamed British Airways) did not hire Jamaicans or other Caribbean colonial subjects to be pilots or flight attendants.¹¹ The other long-serving airline in Kingston was Pan American Airways (Pan Am), which, as an American carrier, also hired locals only for their ground operations. Thus, befitting Jamaica’s history of colonial domination and racialized subjugation, the only opportunity open to women like Brandt—non-white and lacking British or US citizenship—was the Caribbean offshoot of BOAC, British West Indies Airways (BWIA). This small carrier based in Trinidad linked British-held Caribbean colonies with each other and to the nearest cosmopolitan metropoles of Miami and New York.

The fulfillment of Brandt’s dream came only when the newly sovereign government of Jamaica established its own airline. When Air Jamaica hired its first stewardesses, Brandt’s interest grew more intense. She applied for the position in 1972, soon after completing high school, as part of the carrier’s fourth overall stewardess class. She thereby joined a very small and select group: these were, with few exceptions, the only Jamaican women granted careers flying on airplanes. Her training at the airline’s flight attendant academy instilled in Brandt the patriotic dimensions of her work: “I remember Mrs. Marguerite Kirkpatrick, our trainer, always telling us that once you go out of here, you are an ambassador for your country, you’re representing your country. So, that was instilled in me … that when I go out there, fingers will be pointing that, ‘She is from Jamaica. She is an Air Jamaica flight attendant.’”¹²

Brandt realized for herself what had been an out-of-reach childhood fantasy as part of her new nation’s postcolonial aspirations for equal footing on the world stage. The ability to fly—for the country, and for the woman herself—meant ascendance into the rarified air of full citizenship in the global community, replete with full admission into the heavily policed confines of cosmopolitanism, which had been closed to all previous generations of non-white, colonial-era Jamaicans. By the time she retired at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Brandt held Air Jamaica’s coveted number one flight attendant position, marking her as the most senior stewardess—and possibly as Jamaica’s most-traveled woman in history.

Brandt’s chosen career of in-flight service quickly became female identified in the Cold War decades. For this study, it therefore matters more than the piloting career that Kosta Bojović chose, which remained a male-only domain for far longer. Indeed, stewardessing also matters for examining how women’s roles were evolving more broadly. After all, while its limited educational demands placed it on the border between a working-class and middle-class profession, the work was coded as ultramodern and enticingly cosmopolitan. Stewardesses thereby were harbingers of a future womanhood that was more tech savvy and mobile. They were an avant garde of sorts for women back on the ground.

The Global Jet Age

While there was a lag of a decade or more between 1945 and its onset, the Jet Age was still a by-product of World War II. The first promising prototypes of jet planes debuted during the war, resulting from engine and rocket programs that both the Allied and Axis powers pursued in the hopes of gaining air superiority. Jet technology was barely used in the war itself, but soon thereafter both Soviet and American design teams crafted more effective jet fighters and bombers for the military. Commercial jets still lagged, however, especially since the first British commercial jet, the de Havilland Comet, which debuted in 1952, was mothballed until late 1958 when structural defects begot fatal accidents. Thus, the Jet Age started in earnest for the world’s flying public only in the late 1950s. Vastly more powerful engines cut flying times in half and extended the range that planes could fly, while also supporting considerably larger cabins that at least doubled passenger capacity. Aviation’s mass transportation age had begun.

For some, jet technology rekindled a sense of wonder that paralleled the excitement of aviation’s earliest years a half century in the past, when the very sight of a machine flying in the air elicited awe. The most impressive feat, at least in the West, came with the debut of Pan Am’s first Boeing 707 route between New York and Paris on October 26, 1958. Replicating Charles Lindbergh’s famed 1927 nonstop solo flight, Pan Am’s jet aircraft now traced Lindbergh’s course with an impressive payload of 111 passengers and another 11 crew members, completing the flight in just 8 hours 41 minutes. Running almost at crosscurrents with the excitement of the pioneering Lindbergh moment, but exciting in its own way, the Jet Age promised a more democratic future. Thanks to their vast increase in seat capacity, Jet Age planes needed more customers, meaning more than just elites would be flying. Like Clare Boothe Luce’s promise that America’s youth could “fly everywhere, period,” the Jet Age seemingly delivered on the highest ideal for modernization projects in the Cold War: that more of the world’s peoples would benefit profoundly from the proliferation of new technologies.

The Jet Age was also more democratic, or at least more universal, in another way. These planes appeared at roughly the same time in all three Cold War worlds, despite Boothe Luce’s interest in keeping aviation under American control. After the grounding of Britain’s Comet in the early 1950s, the Soviet airline Aeroflot was the first to successfully introduce safer (though still accident-prone) jets in 1956, with the Tupolev-104. A year later, the USSR’s most important collaborator in civil aviation among its satellite states, Czechoslovak Airlines (ČSA), took possession of its first Tu-104s. This earlier inauguration of the Jet Age east of the Iron Curtain marked a Soviet propaganda victory in the Cold War, resulting in a sense of euphoria that would be amplified when Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth in 1961. Just as the Soviets beat the Americans to the Space Age, they also pioneered the civilian Jet Age.

The Global South was not left out of the Jet Age for long. In 1960 a handful of airlines in Asia and Africa joined their peers in Europe’s East and the North Atlantic states by securing jets, even though these countries did not produce such machinery domestically. Instead, they purchased aircraft from American, British, French, or Soviet manufacturers. Air India became Asia’s first jet airline, introducing the Boeing 707 in early 1960. To keep pace, its rival Pakistan International Airways began leasing a 707 from Pan Am later in 1960. In Africa, the airline now known as Egyptair, then called United Arab Airlines, inaugurated a fleet of three Comet jets in July 1960, while in the sub-Saharan region, Ghana Airways began flying Boeing 707s in 1961. Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, BWIA, which was now Trinidad and Tobago’s national airline, began flying Boeing 727 jets in 1964, while Cubana de Aviacion saw its jets delayed due to upheavals in the Cold War. The airline, privately held before Fidel Castro’s revolution, became one of the first Latin American carriers to order jets from Boeing in 1958. However, the Castro government nationalized Cubana in 1959 and terminated this order. Instead, Cubana waited until the late 1960s to receive its first jets, Ilyushin-62s from the Soviet Union.

Yugoslavia and Jamaica, the focus of my case studies, were by no means leaders in the Jet Age, but each kept pace with this transition. JAT Airways purchased its first jets, Caravelles, from the French manufacturer Sud Aviation in 1963, while Air Jamaica purchased jets from the US-based Douglas Corporation for its 1969 debut as a self-sufficient airline. While these countries, both relatively poor and relatively small, were not the fastest to enter the Jet Age in terms of machinery, their people were indeed early adopters of Jet Age travel. The fervor of Yugoslav citizens for jet travel was perhaps unexpected, given the country’s status as a communist-run dictatorship in Europe’s East. It was in fact the only one of these societies whose citizens were free to travel without politically motivated limitations. Moreover, thanks to Josip Broz Tito’s politics of nonalignment, which kept the country out of both the Eastern and Western blocs while also nurturing close ties to the Global South, the country’s passport in the 1960s offered visa-free entry into the largest number of countries of any in the world.¹³

With only poverty holding back Yugoslav and Jamaican citizens, both countries saw significant domestic growth for air travel in the Jet Age. These states each possessed not only their own small elite class of frequent-flying jet-setters (celebrities, business managers, and politicians whose clout rivaled Western elites), but also a growing middle class who flew occasionally for work or leisure. Far more numerous was a group of less frequent fliers: the countries’ working-class citizens. Their work and family lives had transpired in transoceanic settings for decades. Jamaicans were canal builders in Panama and migrants to Harlem and London, while members of Yugoslavia’s constituent nations worked in the steel mills of Pennsylvania and the mines of Australia. Such migrations continued unabated during the Cold War, though now aided by jets that helped retain ties to the faraway homeland.¹⁴

This social adaption to the Jet Age meshed neatly with another development that allowed aviation to grow quickly in these regions: Europe’s East and much of the Global South experienced strong economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s. Rosy predictions of continued growth led some smaller and poorer countries like Yugoslavia to expand their airlines even before the Jet Age took hold. Most impressively, JAT expanded to Paris, London, Cairo, and Beirut by 1954, at the dawn of the country’s commitment to nonalignment. These new routes were more than political, however. They reflected Yugoslavia’s economic progress, with its industrial goods and raw materials now finding growing export markets. By 1963, JAT had upgraded these routes to the West and South again, making them its first jet destinations.

Similarly, many still-colonized entities in the Global South, including Jamaica, benefited from rapid economic growth and increasingly earnest promises from their European colonizers to grant them independence throughout the 1950s. From the moment Jamaicans voted for independence as their own state (rather than part of a West Indies Federation) in 1961, plans for Air Jamaica quickly took shape.¹⁵ This planning occurred in years of speedy development for the island’s tourism sector and high growth rates for the overall economy. Once the airline finally launched, it was able to press Pan Am and BOAC for market share on crucial routes to New York and Miami, while also engaging in impressive expansion to other cities across North America and Europe.

Such promising political and economic developments enabled the Jet Age to become a bit less Western dominated, as the Yugoslavias and Jamaicas of the world exploited modest openings in America’s and Western Europe’s aerial hegemony. These airlines saw their most promising moments at the dawn of the Jet Age, in the 1960s and early 1970s. Unfortunately, the oil shocks of 1973–74, which plunged the world into recession and exacerbated the debt crisis for countries like Yugoslavia and Jamaica, caused these airlines to become less competitive. Consequently, this book mainly covers events up through the 1970s and focuses more on the growth years of the 1950s and 1960s. These decades offer intriguing, even if short-lived and incomplete, visions of what a more democratic Jet Age might have become, one that certainly was not part of Clare Boothe Luce’s calculus in 1943.

Glocalizing Aviation and the Stewardess

Even in the years of greatest promise in Yugoslavia and Jamaica, power brokers in the West’s metropoles like Clare Boothe Luce determined far more of the Jet Age’s contours than actors like the Yugoslav or Jamaican governments, much less their common citizens like Kosta Bojović and Sharon Brandt. In conformity with Boothe Luce’s nationalist-globalist vision, the fleets of jet aircraft assembled by airlines in the United States dwarfed those of the rest of the world put together. Additionally, on the world’s most lucrative international routes, it was mainly other airlines from the North Atlantic region that competed with American carriers, though as rivals with far fewer advantages. Thus, even as the Jet Age democratized air travel, Western nations and their airlines predominated. These Western states, with America in the lead, also were the most prolific centers of aviation-related social innovations, including changes to stewardesses’ roles through the years.

Much of this American predominance came about via standard-setting. As Immerwahr notes, the United States frequently exercised power in the Cold War era by establishing universal standards, including in aviation, where “air traffic controllers and pilots must speak the same language, plane parts must be similar enough that repairs can be made in any country, and the world’s radio frequencies must be [synchronized].”¹⁶ That US aviation officials succeeded in standardizing global aviation by 1950 shows how “the United States took advantage of its position—as the undisputed economic and political superpower, with its wartime logistical network installed in more than a hundred countries—to push its standards beyond its borders… . This was standardization on the scale of the planet.”¹⁷

Confronted with this predominance, administrators in both Yugoslavia and Jamaica opted to integrate into this American aviation system. They adopted American tools and technologies, American-developed management practices, and American-derived safety protocols. Each airline also purchased only Western aircraft for the entirety of their existence—though JAT had one ill-fated exception in 1957, when it purchased Soviet aircraft that quickly had to be replaced.¹⁸ In this way, these airlines were always seeking to “walk in step” with Western aviation, in the words of a prominent Yugoslav planner.¹⁹ They wanted to rival Western competitors with both their hard product (the aircraft they flew) and their soft product (passengers’ on-board experiences). A core component of the airlines’ soft product was their stewardesses, whose grooming, comportment, and efficiency were often used by customers as criteria to judge the overall quality of the airline, and even the entire nation for which her airline flew. While domestic customers were vital, these airlines actively lured Western businesspeople who might invest in the local economy and Western tourists who would spend much-needed hard currency at each country’s beaches. Stewardesses were thereby trained to present as cosmopolitan (read: Western) when at work.

Of course, this adherence to the American system did not beget total subservience to American aviation goals, nor to its gender roles. Instead, just as JAT and Air Jamaica forged unique route networks and wrested market share from their Western rivals, so too did their stewardesses diverge from the American mold. Always, however, these airlines and their stewardesses operated from within the American system. Thus, Yugoslav and Jamaican officials simultaneously attended to two foci in their aviation choices: the realties and needs of their home country and, at the same time, developments in aviation arising out of the United States and Western Europe. In his study of the origins of reggae music, the Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson offers helpful language for the process of syncing global with local needs and norms: glocalization. He stresses the creative power of glocalization: “Far from homogenizing the local musics of the world, the diffusion of musical traditions from one part of the world to others has generated a vast amount of musical creativity, in which indigenous traditions are hybridized with foreign elements to produce wholly new and exciting creations.”²⁰ Patterson’s consideration of reggae—which Jamaican artists created by fusing local musical styles with global influences, before reexporting their new synthesis back around the globe—allows him to speak of glocalization with optimism, as a process that renders “exciting creations” and empowers smaller societies like Jamaica to exert a creative impact on the larger world.

When shifting from the realm of music to that of aviation I do retain some of this enthusiasm about the potential for smaller and poorer regions to forge “exciting creations” via glocalization. I therefore comment positively on some of the unique innovations that both JAT and Air Jamaica introduced in the Jet Age. Nonetheless, I am also more sanguine about the outcomes of glocalized aviation. Building out aviation infrastructure in Yugoslavia and in Jamaica was an extremely expensive investment that drew resources away from other pressing priorities. Moreover, running an airline is, even in the best of conditions, a fickle enterprise. Even Western carriers possessing far more resources struggle to make a profit over a sustained number of years. Thus, when these states sought to forge greater political and economic sovereignty via their airlines, they ran a sizable risk. If new routes or new airplane investments were not reliably profitable, these investments became something far different from an “exciting creation.” They led instead to further indebtedness that accrued on the state’s balance sheets and thereby further limited the potential for future investment in other new and exciting creations.

Similarly, my second area of interest in Jet Age aviation—the impact of the flight attendant position on women’s roles—is also not an unambiguously positive account of glocalization. I detail how societies in all three of the so-called “worlds” during the Cold War struggled to adapt to an exciting novelty: women now worked as flight attendants, which was wage-earning work in the modern space of airplanes that flew thousands of meters off the ground and took them thousands of kilometers from home, without a male chaperone. As such, stewardessing could have become an impressively liberating career for women all over the world. Instead, this liberatory potential was circumscribed everywhere with sexist strictures that kept these women nearly as subordinated as they were on the ground.

The United States’ iteration of this heavily compromised version of women’s liberation is something I call “Jet Age feminism.” This pastiche rendition of empowerment defused the liberatory potential of this job by keeping these women subjected to low wages, almost no potential for advancement, and what feminist Betty Friedan called the “feminine mystique”: an obsessive-compulsive regimen of grooming and style choices, since women acquired value only via their looks and their charming-but-passive demeanor.²¹ The Jet Age ultimately gave these women a fashionable makeover to make them look and feel even more in sync with modern life. Yet, the age-old tradition of women’s subordination remained.

As American stewardesses’ Jet Age feminist ethos circulated around the globe in the late 1960s, stewardesses at JAT and Air Jamaica confronted it as well. Their negotiation of glocalization was also more somber than Patterson articulates. These stewardesses needed to be both creative and subtly assertive, so that their hybrid fashioning of new stewardess norms—their glocalizing—might respect their local cultural values and stand as even remotely pro-woman. Like stewardesses in the North Atlantic region, they only partially succeeded in making their Jet Age workplace more responsive to their aspirations for greater dignity. Moreover, most of these struggles to make Jet Age feminist expectations less damaging were waged outside the public sphere, in women’s private lives.²²

Ultimately, then, this book provides a more cautionary history of glocalization. Whether regarding the proliferation of non-Western airlines or the entrenchment of stewardesses aboard them, the Jet Age certainly saw a creative mixing of Western technologies and Western norms with local needs and norms. In both cases, these glocalized results were more inspiring and equitable at some times than at others, when they were woefully inadequate in helping smaller and poorer states—and their women—attain greater sovereignty. Even as these airlines and their flight attendants stood as beacons of modernity taking root in Yugoslav and Jamaican societies, they were compromised standard-bearers.

Not-So-Idiosyncratic Case Studies

Readers may find my decision to research aviation and stewardesses in Yugoslavia and Jamaica unusual. Both states have fascinating Cold War–era histories, but neither boasts much historiography, at least not by historians from the North Atlantic region. I nonetheless profile them for several reasons: while one is simple practicality, the others are intertwined with the preceding discussion of glocalization. Indeed, Yugoslavia and Jamaica both matter in similar ways to the global history of aviation because, firstly, they opted to conform to the American-constructed aviation system that Clare Boothe Luce advocated for in 1943. Despite the immense costs, both countries updated their airports, radio communications, and ground systems to American-established standards, and their airlines competed for customers based on Western expectations of aircraft quality, safety, and customer service.

Yet, secondly, both countries chafed against the neo-imperialist outcomes that this American-established global aviation system imposed. Both Yugoslav and Jamaican officials thereby resisted what I call the “cartography of colonialism” implicit in Boothe Luce’s vision. Her market-imperialist views would have consigned both Yugoslavia and Jamaica to the status of minor players in Cold War–era aviation—as simple fly-over states, refueling points, or, at best, short-haul destinations for Western airlines linking them to the nearest economically important metropoles. Under this “cartography of colonialism” Western airlines were to be the active crafters of the world’s aerial connectedness, with smaller and poorer states consigned to passive roles, awaiting their exploitation in whatever way these actors deemed expedient.

By embodying the tension of both conforming to the American system and resisting it, both Yugoslavia and Jamaica engaged in the process of glocalization. And herein lies a third point of importance for these case studies, as both states’ aviation systems and their stewardess cultures thereby became “in-between” hybrids of Western and local norms and priorities. Neither Yugoslavia nor Jamaica are pristine representatives of their respective Cold War worlds. Rather than being an unadulterated prototype of Second World communism, Yugoslavia instead was an “in-between” hybrid of Western and Eastern Europe, politically and culturally, as well as in the aviation sphere.²³ And rather than being a pristine example of a Third World state, the Jamaican government styled itself as both proudly postcolonial—and therefore similar to other states of the Global South—and, almost always, as a reliable partner of the United States in the Cold War. Culturally, too, even as more Jamaicans embraced Pan-Africanism in the 1960s and 1970s, the population also felt persistent pulls to Britain and the United States. Thus, Jamaica also was a political, cultural, and aviational “in-between” hybrid, though here as a mix of the West and the Global South.²⁴

“In-between” states from the Cold War era are important historical precedents for what came thereafter. Historical developments in the first couple of decades after 1990 resulted in the rise of a unipolar world—the era of globalization—in which states, companies, and cultural forces based in the United States and the West typically predominated in all areas: political, economic, and social. After 1990 there was no Soviet bloc (Second World) that could hope to cordon itself off from and rival the West. Likewise, by 1990, there were no Third World–inspired alternatives to Western predominance—no Non-Aligned Movement, no New International Economic Order—that might have allowed states in the Global South to inoculate themselves from Western hegemony. Thus, under globalization the entire non-Western world increasingly resembled the in-betweenness of Cold War–era Yugoslavia and Jamaica.

The final factor leading me to choose Yugoslavia and Jamaica is sheer practicality. It was essential that this book employ non-Western archives and oral histories as a counterbalance to the traditional overemphasis on the West in aviation history. Faced with this necessity, these two states became attractive candidates. I have lived in both places, and I have learned enough of the main language(s) of ex-Yugoslavia—Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian (BCS)—to know how to access and interpret materials from aviation archives there as efficiently as from the English-language holdings in Jamaica. I also knew that interviews with former JAT and Air Jamaica stewardesses would be possible, given the still-vibrant esprit de corps that exists among veteran flight attendants from these now-defunct airlines.

Although such sources were theoretically available, I still required significant help unlocking them. To this end, I am particularly grateful for the myriad archivists in Kingston, Belgrade, and points beyond who assisted me. I am especially indebted to the dozens of women in Kingston and Belgrade who sat with me to share their fascinating accounts of stewardessing in the Jet Age. Without their generosity, this global history of aviation and feminism would have gone unwritten. I should also note that, in exchange for their candor on sensitive issues, I promised each of them anonymity. Thus, although their charm and candor come across in this book, their names remain hidden behind nondescript titles like “Anonymous A.” Their contributions were important: these women deserve to be named. My hope is that having this chronicle of their accomplishments and struggles recorded for posterity’s sake is an acceptable tribute.

Flight Plan

Even while chronicling a brisk global exchange between West, East, and South regarding the political, economic, and social developments tied to aviation, this book follows a rather predictable structure. There are three parts, each of which are organized into three chapters that consistently follow the same geographic rotation. The first chronicles a seminal moment from Western aviation that established a new precedent with tremendous global appeal. The second covers developments in Yugoslavia, while the third covers Jamaican realities.

Part I continues the discussion that this introduction began by concentrating on the political and economic issues tied to aviation. Special emphasis is placed on the rival visions for postwar aviation that arose from the United States and from Yugoslavia and Jamaica. Chapter 1 returns to Clare Boothe Luce, examining in further detail how Western architects of postwar aviation sought to keep aerial resources in the West’s hands by resuscitating its prewar predominance in global aviation. It also continues to stress Boothe Luce’s gender comportment, found both in her political and personal biographies, as a cosmopolitan novelty arising out of the United States.

Chapter 2 turns to the founding and expansion of JAT Airways in socialist Yugoslavia. JAT found a unique and productive niche within the global aviation system by building routes based on Yugoslavia’s commitment to nonalignment, which entailed cordial relations (both political and economic) with Eastern and Western Europe and especially close ties with certain countries in the Global South. JAT thereby differed from its Western competitors in its polydirectionalism. Its route expansion followed Tito’s diplomatic work and Yugoslavia’s growing trade flows from its hub in Belgrade to points in all three Cold War worlds.

Chapter 3 turns to Air Jamaica, chronicling the work of its founder and longtime chairman, Sir G. Arthur Brown. Brown created an intriguing financial model for this postcolonial airline that would have insulated it from significant economic risk if his plan had not been foiled by American aviation authorities. When finally allowed to fly, Air Jamaica, like its American and British rivals, was dependent on Western customers, especially North American vacationers. However, unlike in the preindependence landscape, Air Jamaica competed effectively against Pan Am and BOAC in the early 1970s on existing routes, while also pressing to open new routes and run fuller schedules than its competitors. These moves converted Jamaica from an afterthought, a way station on Western airlines’ long-range routes into South America or Mexico, into an aviation hub of its own—a model of what the cartography of postcolonialism could look like.

Parts II and III turn to women’s issues and how they were reflected in stewardesses’ experiences from the 1950s to the 1970s. Both parts trace the glocalization occurring among stewardesses, particularly emphasizing Yugoslav and Jamaican women who balanced American or Western European stewardess standards with local norms and aspirations. Part II examines stewardesses in the pre-jet era from 1945 to the early 1960s. These women were the first generation of women to take this job, at least outside the United States. Even though the job was indeed cosmopolitan (permitting travel far and wide while interacting with the world’s elites) and it involved its share of arduous work, its designation as women’s work enabled supervisors to treat these employees in profoundly discriminatory ways. There were, however, differing aspects of this gender-based discrimination depending on where women were located, and part II reflects this, making it the most diverse, and perhaps the least cohesive, section of the book.

Chapter 4 introduces the most famous woman among Air France’s first stewardess class of 1946, Alix d’Unienville. When she composed a best-selling memoir of her work in 1949, d’Unienville drew even more young women across Western Europe into this new profession. Meanwhile, left unstated in her book, En vol: Journal d’une hôtesse d’aire, was how stewardesses at Air France and across the Western world endured extreme discrimination. Their employers prohibited stewardesses from marrying or getting pregnant, enforced rigorous weight limits, and often fired women in their mid-thirties. D’Unienville herself grew disillusioned and bored by her work, so she resigned after a few years, even as her book continued to draw Western European women into the job.

Chapter 5 covers Yugoslavia’s first flight attendant, Dragica Pavlović, and her colleagues in JAT’s first generation of stewardesses. Working women in socialist Yugoslavia enjoyed greater legal protections than in the West, meaning JAT’s stewardesses were free from most of the harsh restrictions that d’Unienville encountered. Nonetheless, Pavlović’s generation still faced rampant sexism. Most troublingly, they endured a growing emphasis on elevating their physical appearance and maintaining a demeanor of servile docility through the 1950s, as JAT began to attract Western European customers for their flights between London, Paris, and the Middle East. Pavlović herself publicly likened her work to that of a housewife, even though she experienced far more personal freedom than domestic caregivers. Stewardesses in Yugoslavia saw their employer increasingly prioritize their beauty and servility, while providing few promotion opportunities—typical features of “women’s work” in the West as well.

Chapter 6 has the peculiar task of chronicling Jamaican stewardesses in the pre-jet age, when neither Air Jamaica nor Jamaican stewardesses existed. Instead, it covers the island’s popular beauty pageant culture, which served as an important precedent for Air Jamaica’s stewardesses corps. A key figure linking these two entities was Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick, who in her youth won the title of Miss Jamaica 1961 and then proceeded to become Air Jamaica’s first director of stewardesses in 1969. In this role, she educated her trainees—the first cohort of Air Jamaica flight attendants—in the same techniques of dress, cosmetic application, bodily comportment, and behavioral charm that she learned from the pageants. Importantly, in LeWars’ pageant-competing years of the late 1950s and early 1960s, beauty queens, like so many Jamaican women, chafed against society’s harsh racial barriers. In the earliest postwar years, non-white African-descended women were rarely seen as beautiful, especially by society’s elites. Thus, only with the expansion of racial equality in these decades did notions of beauty begin to broaden, first to include women with light brown skin like LeWars, then later those with darker brown complexions. As such, racial prejudice was another confine of cosmopolitanism confronting prospective Jamaican stewardesses before the Jet Age. Ironically, these non-white women had to wait for anti-racist progress before they could become stewardesses, though their job’s conflation of workplace roles with beauty pageant roles—which women like Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick helped to instill—exposed them to a variety of sexism that was no less harsh.

Part III examines stewardesses in the Jet Age, especially starting in 1965, when the United States’ Braniff Airways became the first airline in the world to reconceptualize the image of stewardesses. This transition embodied the ethos of “Jet Age feminism,” which arose when profound changes to women’s social roles were in the air. Both feminism and the sexual revolution were at this time prominent issues, not only in the West, but also in Yugoslavia and Jamaica. Thus, the ways that Braniff, JAT, and Air Jamaica molded their stewardesses for the Jet Age offers a complex mixture of women’s liberation and regression, including updated ways to trap these women in the beauty-based rigors of the “feminine mystique.” Even as each society was on the cusp of feminist progress, stewardesses in the Jet Age were more eroticized, with hemlines hiking upward, dresses hugging more tightly, and stewardess-based advertising becoming bawdier.

Chapter 7 focuses on the mastermind behind Braniff Airways’ embrace of Jet Age feminism, the Madison Avenue advertising executive Mary Wells Lawrence. I trace how she borrowed heavily from other social voices who were promoting an ethos for modern, supposedly liberated women that encouraged them to work and assert greater autonomy over their sexual choices, while also pressing them to dress and groom themselves in sexualized ways. Cosmopolitan magazine’s Helen Gurley Brown was a leading proponent of this ethos through her best-selling 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl. Even the fashion designer who Wells Lawrence chose to design Braniff’s new stewardess uniforms, the Florentine designer to the stars Emilio Pucci, was an advocate for keeping women exceptionally stylish, and unequal, as they negotiated their newfound freedom to move around urban landscapes as aspiring jet-setters.

Chapter 8 examines developments among JAT stewardesses as the Jet Age also coincided with the sexual revolution in Yugoslavia. While these women were not as eroticized as their peers at Braniff or Air Jamaica, their roles in popular culture as sex objects grew, the sexual suggestiveness of JAT ads featuring stewardesses increased, and their fashion makeover from a top Yugoslav designer, Aleksandar Joksimović, made them increasingly bold style icons. Joksimović’s work was as modern and trendsetting as Pucci’s creations for Braniff, though less colorful. In these ways, Jet Age feminism came to JAT, albeit in more muted tones.

Chapter 9 turns to Air Jamaica’s first stewardesses from 1969, a group whose employers completely bought into Braniff’s sexualized aesthetic. These women debuted to the world wearing exceptionally tight and high-cut minis in bold tropical colors, with Air Jamaica’s advertisers lustily christening them “rare tropical birds.” To complete the orgiastic fantasy for the local Jamaicans and, especially, the North American tourists aboard, the airline served a boozy cocktail named the “rum bamboozle.” It also instituted fashion shows that involved stewardesses changing clothes in flight to complete all phases of a beauty pageant, right down to the swimwear. The danger these stewardesses faced was acute, as passengers and coworkers frequently objectified them to the point of sexual harassment and abuse.

Chapter 10, the fourth chapter on Jet Age stewardesses, blends interview materials from former JAT and Air Jamaica employees. It focuses primarily on their efforts, usually through private subversive acts, to resist the most demeaning threats of Jet Age feminism. It also offers the closest side-by-side analysis of these two non-Western case studies. When viewing JAT and Air Jamaica stewardesses together—despite the vast geographical, cultural, and racial differences between them—the overall perception is that their commonalities, especially their struggles against the increasingly bald sexism of the Jet Age, were much more numerous than their differences.

The main actors in this aviation history are more than white men from the North Atlantic region and more than airline CEOs, engineers, or pilot-heroes—the most common subjects of traditional aviation histories. Here, the actors that matter most are American women in politics like Clare Boothe Luce; socialist aviation planners in Belgrade; non-white Jamaican aviation planners like G. Arthur Brown; the first generation of stewardesses in France, Yugoslavia, and Jamaica; American women creating iterations of Jet Age feminism on Madison Avenue; socialist-era Yugoslav fashion designers; and Jamaican beauty pageant queens. Such actors matter because aviation’s history during the Cold War is about more than planes, companies, and route networks. It is ultimately about whether postwar aviation and its cultural heritage would “[keep] America on wings all over the world” or whether an aviation industry—and an aviation-supported culture of feminism—that was more cosmopolitan and more diverse would find a way to flourish.