Chapter 7
Mary Wells Lawrence
The Launch of America’s Jet Age Feminism
The legendary American crooner Frank Sinatra introduced his up-tempo ballad “Come Fly with Me” in 1958. Inviting his muse with the temptation, “Let’s fly, let’s fly away,” the song embeds air travel into a collage of elite adventures, from sipping “some exotic booze … in far Bombay,” to a journey to Peru, where “there’s a one-man band / And he’ll toot his flute for you!”1 That same October, Pan Am debuted its jet service from New York to Paris, while BOAC’s de Havilland Comet jets also reentered service. The year 1958 thereby marked the onset of the Jet Age in the North Atlantic region, and Sinatra’s “Come Fly with Me” became a theme song for the so-called jet set, an updated version of cosmopolitan elites: wealthy businessmen and their families, celebrities, and scions of aristocratic or robber-baron families. Their opulent globe-trotting lifestyles only accelerated with the taming of the jet engine.2
There was a multiyear lag before the cultural wave that arrived with the Jet Age hit the working women of the stewardess corps. Certainly, these women served on jets from the beginning, and not only on glamorous transatlantic routes. Jamaica greeted its first Pan Am jet in 1960, JAT had its own jets by 1963, intra-European carriers and US domestic airlines were converting to all-jet fleets in the early 1960s, and, before them all, Aeroflot boasted jet service as of 1956. Yet, the staid way stewardesses’ employers clad them in traditional and drab uniforms marked a failure to keep pace with the times. The stewardesses from BOAC and Air France, in the back row of the accompanying 1966 image, demonstrate the stubborn persistence of 1950s fashion norms well into the Jet Age.
Part III covers the moment when stewardesses finally caught up with the Jet Age, a feat attained when Texas-based Braniff Airways radically remade stewardess fashion in 1965. Through the years Braniff created several iterations of the dramatic outfit sported by stewardess Marne Davis above. Unlike the stewardesses in the background, Davis visually conformed to the optimism and pizazz of Jet Age feminism—a novel reality for women in the 1960s that combined new opportunities regarding work, style, travel, and sex, albeit within confines still dictated by very harsh sexism. Stewardesses, in turn, were not that different from other white middle-class women entering adulthood in the early Jet Age. For this generation, working outside the home was increasingly de rigueur, while being more sexual was now à la mode—whether that meant having sex outside of marriage or just wearing fashion with elevated hemlines and lower necklines. Jet Age stewardesses were visual models for these changes.
Importantly, this evolution toward a more sexually liberated womanhood also took root among more privileged women in the Global South and in more open socialist societies. While unique in attaining near-celebrity status, Jamaica’s Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick was far from alone in these regions when she embraced core traits of Jet Age feminism soon after high school. Her subsequent roles as a career woman, as a model and beauty queen, as a silver-screen sexualized femme fatale, and as a connoisseur of tighter and brighter fashion fulfilled yearnings that many women held across the globe. In Yugoslavia, no less than in Jamaica, Jet Age feminism’s sexualization and stylization found adherents. Yugoslav women’s lives were increasingly spent at beauty pageants, movie theaters showing glitzy domestic and Hollywood films focused on silver-screen divas, and department stores filled with more adventurous fashion choices. This more financially secure and more sexualized generation differed significantly from their pre–Jet Age mothers, even as the amount of sexism they endured remained constant.
This chapter situates Jet Age stewardesses within the larger cultural developments that forged Jet Age feminism in the United States. It focuses particularly on advertising executive Mary Wells, who was already one of the most acclaimed women working on Madison Avenue before her work for Braniff. When Wells’s firm placed her in charge of the Braniff account, she assembled a potent triumvirate of jet-setters, teaming up with Florentine fashion designer Emilio Pucci and US-based interior and graphic designer Alexander Girard. Braniff was an otherwise overlooked airline based in the then-obscure commercial center of Dallas, Texas. It needed what its CEO, Harding Lawrence, termed a “very big idea” to transition to the Jet Age.3 Lawrence wagered that a marketing makeover was the only way to draw in an influx of new passengers to pay off the debt he had accrued when transitioning Braniff to an all-jet fleet. As such, Wells’s bold stewardess makeover and the financial exigencies of the Jet Age were intimately intertwined.
Wells’s final product, a visual overhaul presented under the slogan “The End of the Plain Plane,” left no stone unturned.4 Girard provided a strikingly bold and contemporary logo, bright and stylish interiors for Braniff’s airport lounges, jelly-bean colored marketing placards, and vibrant plane interiors. Wells then made racy new ad materials, and—most important for the cultural questions tied to working women—she and Pucci crafted a novel way of presenting Braniff’s stewardesses. Aesthetically speaking, this stewardess makeover was playful and colorful, but also contemporary and expensive-looking, the equivalent of bringing Pucci’s runway creations, worn by jet-set elites like Jackie Kennedy and Sophia Loren, to provincial Dallas.
Braniff’s and Mary Wells’s creation—cosmopolitan, stylish, and sexually overt—became a fad in global aviation, not just in the United States. By 1970, Western European stewardesses’ staid uniforms had evolved. Beyond the North Atlantic region, too, such uniforms spurred on Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick’s 1967 redesign of her ground hostess uniform and later inspired her to create even bolder uniforms for Air Jamaica’s first stewardesses in 1969. By then, the airline was finally ready for uniforms that, as she regretted back in 1967, were at first “too flipped out for Jamaica.”5 Yugoslavia’s JAT opted for a more soft-core rendition of the sexy stewardess, but here too one finds a greater sexualization. In both film and popular music from Yugoslavia’s early Jet Age, JAT stewardesses were cast as heartthrobs who rivaled fashion models. The same happened in JAT advertising and in a bold uniform redesign from the mid-1970s. While not as colorful, formfitting, or whimsical as Pucci’s creations, the uniforms created by local designer Aleksandar Joksimović modernized JAT stewardesses for the Jet Age. With certain concessions to modesty, JAT helped bring Jet Age feminism to the threshold of Europe’s socialist East.
Importantly, women like Mary Wells, Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick, and indeed a vast majority of stewardesses in the early Jet Age saw themselves as more liberated women. They enjoyed increased economic, social, and sexual agency over previous generations and were therefore, in this limited sense, feminists. But these women were still, to use LeWars Kirkpatrick’s words, too flipped out for the more rigorous Second Wave feminists of the 1960s. In the United States by 1963, such feminists were already warning against the dangers facing women who allowed the sexist metrics of good looks, youth, stylish dress, and sexual availability to dictate their value to an employer. One of the leading voices of America’s Second Wave was Betty Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique attracted many women—especially younger, middle-class, white baby boomers—to the feminist movement by stressing how such beauty regimens undermined women’s freedom.
However, Jet Age feminism differed from Friedan and other more rigorous feminists on these points. This too-flipped-out iteration of empowerment also appealed to the same young, primarily middle-class white women coming of age in the 1960s. They instead followed a vision of womanhood espoused by another American, Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. To be a so-called “Cosmo girl,” as Brown fondly called her readers, was to be a working woman who confidently used her good looks and sexual agency to advance her career.6 Of course, as the pages of Brown’s magazine privileged young, white career women, this American version of Jet Age feminism had clear confines. They were the same classist and white supremacist reflexes that had historically been used to demarcate true womanhood in the United States and elsewhere in the Western world.
To be clear, Jet Age feminism was a highly skewed version of women’s liberation. It harmfully celebrated sexuality in the workplace, while also whitewashing the emancipatory demands of working-class women and women of color. Additionally, it failed to problematize how this libidinization of women was done, first and foremost, to gratify straight males’ desires. Nonetheless, Jet Age feminism was an effective marketing strategy for Madison Avenue and its global counterparts. In fact, the ethos found an ample number of adherents among women in America’s, Western Europe’s, Jamaica’s, and Yugoslavia’s middle classes.
Thus, Friedan’s Second Wave feminism and Jet Age feminism were sparring partners competing for prominence in the 1960s, with their most intense competition for the hearts and minds of liberation-minded, cosmopolitan young women. Indeed, Friedan’s Feminine Mystique and Helen Gurley Brown’s Jet Age feminist manifesto, a book titled Sex and the Single Girl, were released within months of each other in 1962–63, and both ascended to bestseller status.7 They thereby staked rival claims on the soul of cosmopolitan women (or “Cosmo girls”) inside and beyond America’s borders. To appreciate the magnetic appeal and repulsion of Jet Age feminism, one need only inspect the photo above. Here, the camera is transfixed by Braniff’s Davis, but so too are the other stewardesses. Perceptible in their gazes is a rich mixture of emotion: envy, perplexity, contempt, jealousy. These women, like young women around the globe, were engaged in an intense, though often internalized debate on the virtues of Jet Age feminism.
A Runway for Jet Age Feminism
Frequently in the Cold War years of massive aviation expansion, runways supplemented their utilitarian purpose with something more festive. Whether for christening new routes or unveiling new aircraft, they and their adjoining aprons hosted water cannons welcoming a landing plane, grandstands of dignitaries cheering a sparkling new livery, and rolling cameras capturing the takeoff of an inaugural flight. But in July 1965 aviation history marked a revolutionary moment on a different kind of runway, one that was indoors and in a grand Renaissance-era palace: the famous Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Italy.
On a fashion runway assembled in one of the lavish ballrooms, designer Emilio Pucci, a native son of Florence and a scion of one of the republic’s governing families, introduced his fall haute couture collection. Alongside his elegant evening gowns, he also debuted the fruit of his months-long work for Texas’s Braniff Airways. The new ensemble of stewardess uniforms he unveiled embodied, in the words of Vogue magazine, the geographical fluidity and extraterrestrial yearning of the Jet Age: “In look, a combination of Texas, Florence, and Mars, the clothes [Pucci] has worked out are meant to meet every possible exigency—including the future.”8 Braniff’s public relations team added a similar point, stressing that Pucci was “a decorated Italian pilot”—he flew a fighter plane over North Africa for the Italian Air Force in World War II—who now “is blazing a new space-age trail for erstwhile earth-bound fashions. His concept for in-flight hostess attire is completely new, completely contemporary, and completely in accord with his credo: ‘When I design, I think of a woman in motion.’”9
There was considerable gimmickry in this presentation, designed as it was to raise eyebrows and generate publicity for the airline. Cutting through the self-aggrandizing marketing copy, what really happened in July 1965 was that flight attendants at a rather obscure airline got an expensive makeover to sell more seats. Yet, scholars and social critics also see in this moment a rupture along important cultural fault lines in the 1960s.10 This rupture occurred right where Braniff’s public relations materials and media reports suggested: it was about the state of women in the Jet Age, about women’s identity for “the future.” In this future, women would participate in a cosmopolitan world—replete with airplanes, border crossings, more financial self-sufficiency, and bolder fashion. The Braniff stewardess was Pucci’s exemplar of this Jet Age “woman in motion.”
Emilio Pucci’s work was done at the behest of Mary Wells and her “End of the Plain Plane” campaign. It was a response to her research, which exposed a deep concern among travelers, one shared by many airline executives at the dawn of the Jet Age, that the jet, especially because its expanded seating capacity made air travel less exclusive, was spoiling customers’ enthusiasm for flying. Since flying was becoming “plain,” especially for frequent flyers, Wells devoted herself to renewing their excitement and driving more of them to Braniff. Pucci’s creations added a needed element of panache to enliven passengers’ experience.
For stewardesses themselves, Pucci’s and Wells’s new creation provided a novel makeover, but it also reinforced their workplace inferiority. Their value as beauty objects was accentuated, while their standing as safety professionals diminished further. At the same time, however, when clad in Pucci’s outfits and profiled in Wells’s racy ads, Braniff’s stewardesses became paragons of Jet Age feminism. Even while enduring more risks due to their increasing sexualization, these “women in motion” embodied a life freed from the constraints of home and the traditional mores that had previously governed women’s sexual practices.
Color and Sophistication for the Masses
For several months in 1964 and ’65, Mary Wells and her team researched the aviation industry in search of the “really big idea” that Braniff CEO Harding Lawrence needed for Braniff to attract more passengers and thereby pay down its jet-induced debt. Wells’s team was most struck by the monotony of air travel. In particular, she noted, “there was no color. This was the sixties, mind you, when color was a hot marketing tool.” Elsewhere in Wells’s jet-set lifestyle, color was everywhere: in the boldly patterned, Pucci-designed cocktail dresses she saw at Upper East Side parties and at the ultramodern, Alexander Girard–designed restaurant Fonda del Sol that she frequented in Midtown, which she described as “a high-octane color montage of Mexican and modern.”11 As the fashion historian Shirley Kennedy notes,
One could not help but notice color everywhere… . Colors vibrated and seemed to explode on the Pucci silks, as they did on the Pop Art canvases of Lichtenstein, Warhol, Wesselman, and Rosenquist, the ad art of Peter Max and Milton Glaser, psychedelic rock concert posters, and the Beatles’ cartoon movie, The Yellow Submarine. Color—hot, bright, and clear—and shapes—rounded and sensually curved—were key elements of 1960s furniture designs produced by Americans and Europeans.12
With color now foremost in her thinking, Wells returned to Lawrence with a pitch. As it turned out, “He liked thinking about color; he reminded me that Braniff would be flying to places associated with brilliant color, Mexico and South America,” thanks to these regions’ vibrant premodern artistic traditions that used bright colors in their textiles and architecture.13 As Wells put it, “Color was my idea, but not really. There’s no magic talent in advertising. Too many people don’t do their homework and find the obvious need.”14
Color would ultimately infuse everything that Wells remade in her pursuit to end the “Plain Plane”: the ticket counters, first class lounges, gate areas, and print materials that she outsourced to Alexander Girard, as well as the stewardess uniforms that she entrusted to Pucci. In the end, hardly a single Braniff space was left colorless. The original burst that led to this embrace was an idea for the planes themselves. As Wells notes, she and her staff considered painting the planes one bold color—perhaps a fleet all in yellow, or orange, or indigo. Her partner and art director, Stewart Greene, was drawing large renderings of planes in these individual colors, then placing them on the office floor for the staff to critique. “Then I asked him to do one with all different-colored planes,” recalled Wells. “When that sketch hit the floor,” she added, “it was a thunderbolt, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind … the sketch of the solid-colored planes in seven different colors was the hit show.” As she explained, “Seven colors looked like a big idea and wow and friendly and it would be big news. People would go out of their way to see them.” She again found that Lawrence was very receptive: “When he studied the sketches of his planes in seven different solid colors he was quiet for a minute. I don’t think I breathed. Then he laughed. He said, and I will never ever forget it, ‘That will do it!’”15
Thereafter Wells made her second vital move, one that tied the universally accessible inclination to embrace color to the more exclusivist impulses of elite cosmopolitan society. After all, Wells did not employ a childlike idea of color as one might find in a nursery school, or even the notionally “primitive” collage of colors from Incan or Aztec textiles. Instead, she delegated the implementation of Braniff’s color infusion to two of America’s and Europe’s top-name designers. By effectively purchasing their aesthetic for use at the airline, she guaranteed that Braniff’s colors had a patina of elitism.
Pucci’s explosively colorful cocktail dresses were famous primarily because of the celebrities who wore them. He had a large coterie of exceptionally rich patrons who would buy directly from his boutiques in Florence or the jet-set hideaway of Capri. By the mid-1960s, he was also exporting to major department stores in the United States. But, as Helen Gurley Brown recalled, Pucci’s price point was prohibitive: “I remember seeing my first Pucci dress in Burdine’s department store in Miami in 1963 when I was on a book promotion. ‘How long has this been going on?’ I asked myself and, though I didn’t think I could afford one—$190 for one little skimp of a dress—I tried on four in fifteen minutes for sheer pleasure.”16 That Brown, wealthy thanks to her best-selling book, decided she could not afford Pucci’s creations speaks to the designer’s exclusivity. Moreover, as a well-to-do celebrity in his own right, he already belonged to the jet set. Thus, Wells’s choice of Pucci meant that Jet Age stewardess fashion would be designed by a jet-set celebrity.17
Ironically, this deployment of a jet-set aesthetic was also Braniff’s tool for democratizing air travel. Braniff’s new customers would be drawn from two divergent income groups. The first was composed of those who were wealthy enough to partake in Girard’s and Pucci’s worlds as consumers. Since this wealthy group already flew quite frequently, Braniff’s embrace of jet-set glitz might help lure them from their competitors. Yet, more numerous were customers with considerably less spending power, many of them first-time flyers. In their case, too, there was real appeal in the Braniff aesthetic. In the strictly regulated US aviation market of the time, customers typically found only two airlines flying to any desired destination, both offering the same fares. For Braniff’s most lucrative routes linking Texas with Chicago and New York City, the main competitor was the well-heeled legacy carrier American Airlines. The only difference was American’s stronger reputation and its earlier adoption of jets—hence Braniff’s desire not only to match the competition with an all-jet fleet, but also to surpass it with a fashionable makeover that generated a media buzz.
When ad executives for Pan Am researched travelers with limited budgets just a few years later, they found the following: “Once they [are committed to] pay full fare, they are prepared to shop among competitive airlines on the basis of the comfort, service, and enjoyment aspects of the trip.”18 With its new jets and Wells’s stylish overhaul, Braniff seemingly offered more for the money: upon paying what by all accounts were expensive fares, these customers were treated a bit more like the jet set themselves. They lounged in Girard-styled airports, boarded planes that boasted bold fabrics and even Latin American artwork on the walls, and were served by hostesses who sported the same sort of Pucci-designed outfits as movie stars. Overall, these middle- and working-class customers purchased a voyeuristic opportunity to partake in the cosmopolitan ambiance they saw in movies and read about on celebrity pages.
Braniff’s choice to turn their stewardesses into Pucci-clad hostesses also addressed—or at least diverted attention away from—a growing crisis tied to the democratization of jet travel. With larger and faster aircraft, customers feared that flying would become more like mass transit: utilitarian rather than exclusive, crowded and impersonal rather than enjoyable. In the parlance of Mary Wells, the fear was that air travel would occur increasingly on a “plain plane.” When the ad executives later working for Pan Am surveyed middle-income consumers, they heard concerns that jets were becoming too large: “The impression of mass travel also underlines their basic concern about de-humanization. They feel the individual passenger will be one of a mob and will not have the kind of personal attention they seek.”19 Braniff’s largest pre-jet plane, the DC-7, seated a maximum of 75 passengers, while its new Boeing 727s seated 154.20 Thus, passengers hoping for intimacy and a personal touch were more likely to be disappointed.
Unattainable expectations were now falling on the shoulders of stewardesses. As the Pan Am report summarized, consumers “desire to be treated as individuals. Some of them are even sensitive to ‘cookie cutter’ pleasantness on the part of the stewardesses. They don’t want a mechanical greeting no matter how pleasant. They want to really feel that someone cares about them as individuals.”21 However, providing this sort of individualized attention was increasingly difficult. Stewardesses now cared for more people and undertook the same list of tasks with reduced flying times. Braniff’s Pucci-designed stewardess outfits offered a potential remedy to this crunch. By turning the aisle into a fashion runway, passengers would think of themselves as spectators rather than guests in an intimate space. They would still take part in jet-set cosmopolitanism, but more passively, as befitted the financial exigencies of Jet Age travel.
Jet Age Feminism Takes Off
The early 1960s saw the first rumblings of a second wave of feminism in the United States. As Betty Friedan’s 1963 best-selling book The Feminine Mystique explained, many middle-class and working-class housewives were depressed, even as their families prospered economically. Being a loving wife and mother, Friedan noted, left some women incomplete: “Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’”22
This driving question from 1963 about whether American women could partake in a life outside the home converged with a political advancement in 1964: the Civil Rights Act, rather unexpectedly, passed while including workplace protections for women. This marked the first time in American history, at least legally, that companies could not discriminate against women when making choices to hire or fire personnel for almost any job.23 As a result, Second Wave activists increasingly pressed the federal government and companies to establish the Civil Rights Act in practice, founding the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 to undertake this work. Thus, the Second Wave’s first impetus was to place women in careers that were engaging and on par with men in terms of pay and responsibility. This goal was soon accompanied by additional efforts to secure reproductive rights, combat sexual violence, secure women’s healthcare, and promote consciousness-raising about sexism’s impact on women’s private lives.
Braniff’s revamped marketing was out of step with these feminist priorities, especially regarding workplace equality. Wells’s work did nothing to address the airline’s persistent policies that kept stewardess jobs short-term. Additionally, the airline maintained its beauty-based hiring standards. In 1962, Braniff hired only women who were no larger than “5’7” and 130 pounds” and possessed “an attractive, wholesome, well-groomed appearance.” It openly acknowledged its no-marriage policy and even promoted it as advantageous for stewardesses, noting that “the wealth of knowledge and experience gained from their enriching and challenging career as a Braniff hostess [will have] contributed immeasurably to their later success as a homemaker.”24
By 1968, despite the Civil Rights Act, these standards had changed only slightly, with women two inches taller and five pounds heavier now allowed to apply. Also, the no-marriage policy, while still in place, was loosened a bit, in that widows and divorcees were now invited to apply:
[A] young lady is qualified for employment as a Braniff hostess if she is 20 to 27 years old; from 5 feet, 2 inches to 5 feet, 9 inches tall with weight in proportion to her height and not over 135 pounds; single, or a childless widow or divorcee unmarried for one year or more; has 20/50 vision in each eye without glasses; has at least a high school education and good character, and is blessed with sound judgement, an attractive appearance with a clear complexion and an attractive smile, a pleasant disposition, even temperament and a pleasant sounding voice.25
Thus, rather than evolve with the Second Wave, Braniff’s marketers ultimately chose to mock the feminism of Betty Friedan and NOW. When it opened a new training academy for flight attendants in 1967, the airline described it as an “ultra-modern and beautiful edifice [that] has been artfully designed with the feminine mystique in mind.” Taking Friedan’s own term—which referenced women’s degradation due to harsh beauty norms—the airline sarcastically, but proudly professed to embody exactly what Friedan fought against.
While Second Wave feminists encouraged women to see a university education as the foundation for a lifelong career, Braniff again ran in the opposite direction. Its new training facility was christened the “Hostess College,” which was a “Girl’s Dream World.” While noting that the five-story building possessed a meager five classrooms for training sessions, the airline’s marketing materials focused on the extensive facilities aimed at beautifying the stewardess-to-be: “The college has everything for the girl’s training, aesthetic, and physical needs.” There was a boutique where trainees would acquire their Pucci-designed outfits and the so-called “Powder Puff room—where girls learn the secrets of makeup and flawless complexions.” This supplanting of college learning with indoctrination into a beauty regime continued elsewhere: “Another few steps away are the rows of electric hair dryers where she may do some homework on jet aircraft passenger configurations while her hair dries.”26
Braniff’s flight attendants fit more closely with Helen Gurley Brown’s vision of feminism than with Friedan’s, especially in the ways that their workplace was increasingly sexualized. Despite the salacious title, Sex and the Single Girl had a core message that supported women entering careers and striving for financial independence. However, it also correctly recognized that workplaces were filled with unsolicited sexual advances from men. They were becoming, in her words, “sexier than Turkish harems, fraternity house weekends … or the Playboy centerfold.”27 Rather than decry this reality, Brown instead encouraged women to build long-term careers in these sexualized offices. She instructed them on how to dress, how to conduct themselves in meetings, how to manage money, how to vacation, how (and how not) to date office colleagues, and when (and when not) to have sex. Most importantly, Brown encouraged working women to hone a skill set with which they could playfully dismiss most men’s sexual advances, while assenting to the ones that could further their careers or financial well-being.
The historian Patricia Bradley notes the large audience for such advice: “When Brown published her book, women between ages twenty-five and fifty-four were on the cusp of exploding into the workforce, a group that increased 45 percent from 1962 to 1975.”28 This increasing audience ensured that Brown stayed in the public eye and was still promoting her version of feminism well after 1962. In 1965 she became the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and proceeded to revamp it as a standard-bearer for single career women. She remained in this position for the next thirty-two years, during which time she consistently encouraged readers to aspire to financial independence, while eschewing the Second Wave’s attacks on the feminine mystique. The so-called “Cosmo girl” or “single girl” (synonymous terms for Brown) was comfortable being sexy, dressing in conventionally feminine ways, and being sexually active. As long as they overlooked the fact that Braniff’s stewardesses were compelled to be short-term workers, Brown and her devotees could treat Emilio Pucci, Mary Wells, and Braniff stewardesses as model innovators of the “single girl” lifestyle, as fellow practitioners of Jet Age feminism.
Consistent with such views, Brown considered Emilio Pucci a liberator of women. She saw an almost political ferment in his fashions, likening his impact to the flapper look of the 1920s. “I think Emilio, some thirty years later, had somewhat the same effect on American women. No, we weren’t exactly constricted or restrained by fashion or society like those twenties women, but he did help us express ourselves … experience a new freedom, a sensuousness we hadn’t felt or shown before,” she noted. The key to enabling this result was that “the dresses were spare, sexy, and liberating!”29 In the 1950s, Pucci was already innovating fashion to empower women’s mobility. He is credited with streamlining undergarments by marketing a lightweight girdle that highlighted a woman’s natural curves. He also successfully blurred the line between sportswear’s casualness and high fashion’s formality.
By the 1960s Pucci had further refined his aesthetic for active women, often opting for either miniskirts or tights, or both in combination, as in his creations for Braniff. “Motion and movement are very important in our lives,” he noted, before adding more controversially, “A woman can run to get a taxi in a short skirt and still look elegant, but if she runs in a long skirt, she looks gauche.”30 This assertion betrays ambivalence about women’s liberation. On a positive note, Pucci embraced how women’s lives now included moving through cityscapes with the earnestness and speed that only men previously could. Less progressive, however, was his subjective assessment of what looks gauche. Here, he opened space to design for women still captive to the feminine mystique—to socially determined, sexist criteria of what is beautiful and what is gauche. Despite such contradictions, Pucci’s creations were nonetheless emblematic of the age. As the author Marilyn Bender stresses, they appeared at “the threshold of the Jet Age,” making “the Pucci dress … both symbol and passport of the new era. Fragile-looking but indestructible, chic and sexy, it was the capsule wardrobe for the mobile woman glorying in the body beautiful.”31
In media interviews, Pucci expounded on his ambivalence about women’s liberation, asserting that he strongly disagreed with central goals of the Second Wave. When interviewed by Life magazine, he started with a sentiment that progressive feminists might applaud, as he called for appreciating a subtler form of feminine beauty: “America has been left with the idea that a woman is sexy if her bust sticks out or if she has a thin waist.” Exalting the petite, androgynous Audrey Hepburn as a role model, Pucci insisted, “It’s not the inches of bust that make the difference, but what is inside.” As for Hepburn, Pucci added, “Everything she has is fire inside.”
Nonetheless, Pucci would have disappointed Hepburn when he dismissed women’s aspirations for parity with men. He continued, “What is natural to the American woman is to compete with the man in all fields. I think this makes her unhappy. If the end of man is work and creation, the end of woman is home, children, friends, and culture, things that man hasn’t time to pursue.” He readily perceived that “American women won’t accept” his views, which were steeped in the traditional ideology of separate spheres. Yet, he persisted in blaming women for their own unhappiness, especially deriding their efforts to enter men’s spheres and vacate their own. While Second-Wave feminists like Friedan encouraged housewives to attend to their yearning for something more when haunted by the question “Is this all?,” Pucci instead saw this sort of discontent as wrongheaded: “Something has been missed over there [in America].”32
This disregard for working women also informs an analysis of Pucci’s Braniff designs. His dismissal of Second Wave feminism helps make sense of his efforts to craft a Jet Age identity for stewardesses that was a separate sphere: a feminine realm in the plane cabin focused on nurturing, socializing, and sparking the potential for male-female eroticism. Yet, at the same time, as with Pucci’s other creations, his Braniff commissions allowed these active women to negotiate the public spaces of modern life with agility and elegance.
From Runway Elegance to “Air Strip” Debauchery
Pucci’s first reflex was to feminize Braniff’s stewardess uniforms. He did so in part by erasing the military-like elements that had been fixtures of flight attendant uniforms from their earliest days. Gone were the drab colors and androgynous fits, as well as the stripes on the cuffs and wings on the lapel. These were introduced in the 1920s when only men served as flight attendants, with crew dressed in military-style uniforms and given ranks akin to sailors on naval ships. For Pucci, these symbols of male-oriented military status were undesirable. In justifying his radical overhaul to the press, however, he suggested merely that the uniforms were outdated: “Most airplane stewardesses are dressed as if they are traveling by bus in the year 1925.”33
Yet, Braniff’s copywriters pushed further on this point. They began by stating that the airline’s first hostess in 1937 was attired oddly, “looking as if she probably could fly the plane herself.” They then credited Pucci with replacing “the severe, mannish uniforms” with feminine touches of color and “culottes, leotards, wraparound skirts, scarf hats, derbies, serving dresses.”34 Pucci now attired stewardesses as though they were at social events, the environs where he felt women should focus their lives. Braniff executives further fortified this division of spheres between the cockpit and the cabin by jettisoning the term “stewardess,” with its origins in the navy, and opted for “hostess” instead. “Stewardess is a ‘hard’ word. Hostess is a warm, friendly word,” noted CEO Harding Lawrence, “We train our hostesses to be just that—hostesses, and to approach our passengers as friendly visitors in their home.”35
Pucci would add to this sentiment by eschewing the term “uniform.” Instead, his multi-piece creations comprised what he called a “couture collection.” After all, while each item of his 1965 creations included a hemline just above the knee, the collection allowed these women to sport four distinct looks on the same flight: an exterior layer anchored by a winter coat, a suit with a wraparound skirt and zippable blazer, then a lighter layer of culottes and a turtle-neck blouse. The fourth item, nicknamed the “Puccino,” was a colorful smock to don when serving food. Each of these items embodied the combination of elegance, casualness, and sophistication that made Pucci’s designs so desirable among jet set celebrities and the “single girl” set alike: formfitting, above-the-knee styles that supposedly made women attractive while in motion.
The multilayered nature of Pucci’s creations ultimately inspired the most controversy, though Pucci himself was not to blame for this. In his view, the layers reflected the wonder of jet travel, allowing stewardesses to stay stylish along their surprisingly quick half-day transition from the icy climate of the northern United States to the balmy beaches of Latin America. Furthermore, by employing formfitting but breathable and easily washable fabrics, he added further flexibility for stewardesses’ nomadic lives. He was proud that the entire ensemble fit into an overnight bag. “In the future,” he noted, “all an international traveler would need add to such an ensemble would be a dress or two and accessories for evening occasions.”36 Such visions enabled not only stewardesses’ mobility but also that of Jet Age passengers, including millions of women who were adherents of Brown’s “single girl” ethos. By 1964, there were thirteen million single women in the United States and another twenty-three million married women working outside the home. These women were more likely than ever before to have the financial means to fly, paying for this privilege without the support of a man.37
It was actually Mary Wells who devised an alternative use for the uniform’s layers, turning them into the basis for a burlesque attraction that she labeled the “Air Strip.” For Wells, the “Air Strip” served as a titillating opportunity to appeal to Braniff’s core customer base: the unaccompanied man flying for business. It was these frequent fliers, many of whom paid for full-fare first class tickets, who experienced the most fatigue with flying. If the “End of the Plain Plane” was to succeed, these men needed to buy in, shifting their travel to Braniff from its competitors as the airline invested in new jets. Thus, as stewardesses discarded each layer of clothing while in flight, they were told to do so in the aisles, in full view of gawking passengers.
Business Week, one of the most-read publications among businessmen, immediately voiced approval for the “Air Strip.” It first quoted Harding Lawrence, who articulated the motive for this innovation: “We are adding sheer pleasure to the experience of flight.” The author then added his own experience: “Indeed, a passenger might easily feel that he’s attending an airborne striptease show when, right after takeoff, the hostesses peel off their pink uniforms to reveal the blue ones underneath.”38 Correspondent Stan Mays of London’s Sunday Mirror linked the “Air Strip” with the recently released hit movie Boeing Boeing, in which actor Tony Curtis played a man secretly dating three stewardesses at once. “The things they get up to in the air these days!” Mays began. “There was I, minding my own business, 32,000 feet up on a flight from New York to Mexico when … Boeing-Boeing. She did it.” He continued, “The air hostess. She started to undress. Bang in the middle of the aisle. Fasten your seat belts. There’s more to this than meets the eye. Because four other hostesses were doing a similar air strip in other parts of the giant Boeing 720 jet.” Mays added a supportive comment from a stewardess: “It’s zip zip zip all the way. The passengers seem to love it, and we think many fly Braniff just to see our act.”39
Wells made sure the “Air Strip” received prominent play in the “End of the Plain Plane” advertising campaign. She devised a media plan with a two-step newspaper strategy: on the first weekend, at the end of November 1965, color ads boasting the “End of Plain Plane” would run in forty-one newspapers in thirty-three cities. Then, “A week later our second color newspaper ad will run in the same 41 newspapers headlined, ‘Introducing the Air Strip’ (It talks about the hostess quick change of course).” To maximize Braniff’s exposure to the core audience of businessmen for the “Air Strip,” Wells followed up with TV ads during football broadcasts over the winter holidays: “Braniff will be one of the sponsors of seven football bowl games, in fact all the major ones except the Orange Bowl and the Rose Bowl.”40
The television ad began with the sort of whistling music common to striptease acts from the burlesque era and then proceeded to show a stewardess, suggestively smiling at the camera, in the process of disrobing through her various layers of colorful Pucci designs. It concluded with a male voice-over—in the deep, slow tone of an MC at a stripper bar—intoning, “The Air Strip is brought to you by Braniff International, who believes that even an airline hostess should look like a girl.”41 The print ad attributes to Pucci himself the claim about hostesses looking like a girl, but it ends with a similarly suggestive statement, “If the flight seems all too short, that’s the whole idea.”42
It says much about the preponderance of straight male sexual privilege that the debut of the “Air Strip” found no opposition in the mainstream media. When the topic was covered, there was often mention of buy-in from stewardesses. For example, one stewardess stressed a newfound freedom in Pucci’s clothes, noting, “We love the new outfit. It makes you feel like a real female and not a busboy.”43 Most importantly for Braniff, the “Air Strip” was a commercial success, playing a key role in selling more seats on the new jets. By June 1966, the airline’s passenger traffic was up 48.7 percent over the previous year, while its revenue in the first full year of the campaign rose by 42 percent.44
Mary Wells Lawrence and the Turbulent Legacy of Jet Age Feminism
In a passage reminiscent of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, Mary Wells confesses in her autobiography that her work with Braniff inspired romance. She traces the spark of the affair to the very moment in mid-1965 when Harding Lawrence agreed to paint Braniff’s jets in a jelly-bean bowl of colors. “That had to be the moment I fell in love with him,” she notes,
I knew I looked perfectly calm, he told me later I was discouragingly professional, but I was keeping a lid on emotions that seemed extremely dangerous to me. I felt powerful undercurrents zinging back and forth between us that could mess up my life, his life, a lot of lives… . I didn’t want trouble, I wanted to build the best advertising agency in the world, I didn’t have time for life-altering love.45
Disregarding these warning signs, Harding Lawrence and Mary Wells over the next two years engaged in one of America’s most high-profile office romances. As both worked their way through divorces to their first spouses, they also worked together to mold Braniff into one of America’s fastest-growing airlines. When they wed in November 1967, Harding and Mary Wells Lawrence (she adopted her husband’s last name as an addendum) became—like Henry and Clare Boothe Luce a generation before—one of America’s most prominent power couples. Each kept their careers that pulled in respective salaries of over $100,000 per year, near the peak of executive pay at the time.
Mary Wells Lawrence thereby served as a corporate-class expression of Jet Age feminism, which is both similar to and different from the working-class variety embodied by Braniff’s stewardesses. Because she was married even before meeting Harding Lawrence, she was not exactly a bona fide “single girl” like stewardesses were, but in 1965 she was still relatively young (aged thirty-seven) and very much a working woman. Indeed, she had succeeded quite spectacularly in the otherwise male-dominated field of advertising.46 She also exercised a sexual agency that would endear her to Helen Gurley Brown, as she managed the minefield of come-ons from powerful men in the office and strove with her first husband to make marriage work in a dual-career household. Wells and her first husband also tried an unorthodox form of child-rearing for the time, raising two adopted girls with the aid of a live-in nanny. All the while, Wells maintained her financial independence and built her career.
As with Pucci and his work for Braniff, Wells Lawrence was a polarizing figure in Second Wave feminist circles. On the one hand, she built a wildly successful career in a male-dominated world and also boldly reworked marriage norms to accommodate her profession. Yet, she also problematically built her own success by promoting sexism in various marketing campaigns, especially those for Braniff and other airlines. Among Second Wave feminists, even her marriage to Harding Lawrence constituted grounds for attack. Author and activist Gloria Steinem quipped, “Oh, well, Mary Wells Uncle Tommed it to the top,” thereby attributing her formidable career successes to her cozy relationships with men like Lawrence and her willingness to perpetuate sexism against other women.47 Furthermore, in her studied assessment of Wells Lawrence’s career, the historian Patricia Bradley finds that she “took no position on feminism, took no particular interest (judging by her memoir) in promoting professional women’s careers at her agency, and was not involved in the push to change women’s images in advertising.”48
Fundamentally, however, Wells Lawrence shared much in common with her working-class counterparts at Braniff, despite enjoying far more class privilege. She too experienced unwelcome come-ons from men, including when she landed her first job on Madison Avenue, where she was hired in part because her boss found her attractive. As she recalled, during the job interview the man “watched me cross his office without expression, but then I saw him think ‘Huzzah!’ and I knew he was going to be a fan.” While unnerved, she also sensed his attraction could work to her advantage, just as Helen Gurley Brown counseled in Sex and the Single Girl: “He was wildly flirtatious but in that safe, careful, old-fashioned way.”49 This sort of wagering about the risks and benefits of men’s workplace attractions was all too familiar to her working-class counterparts in the stewardess corps. Those who were savviest could artfully negotiate flirtations from pilots, managers, and passengers. But, if the man’s unreciprocated interest escalated, stewardesses, like women who were business executives, were forced to manage an unwelcome and potentially dangerous workplace situation.50
In at least one instance, Wells Lawrence became painfully aware of another commonality with stewardesses: because she was a woman, she was overlooked for advancement. Stewardesses were ghettoized into a pink-collar career that was devoid of promotion opportunities. Marriage to a wealthier man was the only vehicle for their economic ascendance. Wells Lawrence’s case was quite different in its contours. Just as her work for Braniff came to fruition in late 1965, she left the firm where she was working, Jack Tinker and Partners. The split was not amicable, as the company had reneged on its original offer to make her president: “I joined Tinker because I’d been promised I’d be president and run it,” she noted. In her first year with them, however, “They became so successful they didn’t want to rock the boat,” fearing that having a woman in charge would deter future clients from signing on. Wells’s ambition could not be satisfied if she were stuck under corporate America’s glass ceiling: “I had a terrible need to put together my ideas and run my own company, ideas that would go out the window if I [stayed]. Instead I resigned.”51
In her case, however, resigning resulted in more opportunity, quite a difference from Braniff’s stewardesses. She cobbled together partners for a totally new firm—Wells Rich Greene—with her at the helm as president. Crucially for the new firm, Harding Lawrence felt a strong personal loyalty to Wells (whether coincidental or not, their courtship had already begun by this time). He agreed to move Braniff’s business, supplying Wells Rich Greene with their first client in 1966, just as it opened its doors. The $6 million in billings was enough to float them until their success with Braniff begot other clients.
Wells Lawrence stayed on as Braniff’s account executive for about a year after her marriage. During this time, the couple moved her children to Dallas to live with Harding and attend school, while she maintained her home and office in New York. She flew back to Dallas most Fridays, often meeting the family at the airport, so they could all continue on Braniff’s evening flight to Acapulco. Between homes in Dallas, New York, Acapulco, Arizona, and the Cote d’Azur, the family led a decidedly nontraditional life: “Harding and I are both naturally nomadic and our timing was good,” she summarized. “The jet was cutting the world in half, in fact the world was fast becoming small.”52 The Jet Age stimulated social forces that unleashed not only new iterations of feminism, but also new constellations of marriage and family, including the so-called long-distance marriage.
Meanwhile, executives at Braniff publicly maintained that the Lawrence-Wells marriage created no conflict of interest. “Anybody who thinks like she’s acting like the boss’s wife in there is wrong,” said one. “She gets a little loud at times. As for us, and that includes Harding, it’s no holds barred.” It was, however, harder to manage voices concerned with the potential conflict of interest that arose from outside the company. As Fortune magazine stated, “The legion of Mary Wells watchers was immediately fascinated by the comic possibilities arising out of a situation in which the client was married to the president of his agency.”53
With the writing on the wall, Wells Lawrence orchestrated an exit from Braniff, though here again this was very lucrative. She resourcefully lured a rival airline, TWA, to sign on with Wells Rich Greene before canceling the Braniff account. As TWA was a larger airline with a larger advertising budget, the payout for this exchange was impressive: “In economic terms, the agency would give up about $7.5 million in billings (its share of Braniff’s $9 million in advertising expenditures) and take on $22 million.”54 The deal elicited jealous and misogynistic venom from competitors. The day the deal was announced, Wells wrote, “was the day some of Madison Avenue’s old guard decided women were dangerous to the advertising community and that I was not only an arriviste but the queen of black widow spiders. I don’t think I am overstating it.”55
For Wells Lawrence—the Jet Age feminist in Braniff’s boardroom—marriage was an effective business tool, enhancing her exposure to the aviation industry by combining her already impressive connections with her husband’s. Rather than an off-ramp into a life as a full-time wife and mother, as was the expectation for stewardesses, Wells Lawrence’s marriage propelled her career ever higher. All the while, she maintained her financial and social independence. As Wells Lawrence explains, “In 1967 when Harding and I married it never entered his mind or mine that I would leave Wells Rich Greene, that we would have a traditional marriage living and working in the same town.” This reality, for her, was vitally important to the cause of feminism, even to the Second Wave activists with whom she often clashed:
Betty Friedan established NOW in 1966 and although she was already focusing on the ERA and the right of women to control their reproductive lives, the psychological shift that the women’s movement brought to society had not yet changed it. Long-distance marriage was major news, and we were forever being interviewed about the details of ours. There was just enough awareness about what Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name,” the growing sense that motherhood and housework were not enough for some women, that our marriage was examined with respect, if not awe.56
What is missing from Wells Lawrence’s own assessment of her contributions to feminism is a sense of cross-class solidarity. She was quite proud that both her trailblazing career and unconventional marriage pushed the boundaries of feminist-inspired changes and enabled her to become a model for other women entering high-powered careers in the ensuing decades. Yet, her work for Braniff, especially the “Air Strip” campaign that further objectified stewardesses, only reinforced an already sexist culture in aviation. Working-class women at Braniff had no opportunity to emulate Wells Lawrence’s successes, whether on the job or in her marriage. As such, Jet Age feminism disproportionately favored women in the corporate class.
Others were left to press for equality for Braniff’s stewardesses. More progressive feminist groups, including NOW, took up stewardesses’ growing number of grievances against their sexist treatment. In the late 1960s, a homegrown feminist group named Stewardesses for Women’s Rights (SFWR) built up a network of stewardesses from across the industry to protest and to initiate legal challenges against the overt sexism in their workplace. Their fight boiled down to one central claim: that flight attendants were, first and foremost, safety professionals conducting a job that required authority and responsibility, both of which were compromised by the sexist treatment of stewardesses. Over the next decade, this feminist vision gradually prevailed in American aviation, leading airlines like Braniff to jettison the colorful, sexy uniforms of the Jet Age feminist era and replace them with admittedly drabber, but also more professional attire appropriate for a serious workplace.
Second Wave feminism’s rise in aviation also meant that all airlines, including Braniff, would stop forcing stewardesses to retire upon marriage or pregnancy by the mid-1970s. Wells’s efforts in 1965 to stimulate profit by deploying sexual arousal were ultimately replaced by more serious commitments to women workers’ equality. Yet, for the better part of a decade, her marketing creations were one of the hottest trends in American and global aviation, spreading the deeply compromised notion of Jet Age feminism well beyond American shores. What follows is a chronicle of how Jet Age feminism hit stewardesses in more distant parts of the globe, including in socialist Yugoslavia and in Jamaica.