Behind the Glamour

The first time I flew on an airplane, my parents made me wear a dress. Not a school dress, but the kind of dress that I had to wear to church, with the scratchy underskirt and patent leather shoes that pinched.

I was 7, and we were flying from Nashville to Philadelphia. That we were going for my mother’s business meeting and that she’d be working while my father and I saw the sights and went shopping (he loved to shop) seems incongruous, given the depiction of the era not too many years before that on ABC’s new show Pan Am, which premieres this fall.

The show is about the supposedly glamorous lives of “stewardesses,” as flight attendants were once called, in the early 1960s. All young, white, and female, they are depicted, as Caitlin Flanagan pointed out in a July 2, 2011 Wall Street Journal column, as “uniform in every sense of the word—young and pretty, thin and unmarried, well-groomed and white-gloved.” (See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304314404576413983035235742.html).

Despite dull story lines, she predicts the show may be popular because we’ve reached a “new cultural era” when we’re not horrified, as we might have been if the show had come out twenty years ago, by the obvious sexism of such depictions. She writes,

"Like millions of other women of their proximate age and social class in that era, the stewardesses of Pan Am move through a series of airtight compartments: the college education, the fun and adventurous career, the betrothal that ends in the transformation to homemaker. That this sequence is no longer regarded as a bullet train to what Ms. [Betty] Friedan called ‘the problem that has no name,’ but rather as the substance of dreamy, wish-fulfillment television, tells us just how far behind we've left the old battles and barricades. What once looked like oppression now seems heavenly."

Flanagan compares this world to that of Mad Men—a world “mesmerizing in its surfaces: the gleaming blond wood of the terminal's ticket counters, the shiny airplanes, the elegant passengers, dressed to the nines.”

But Mad Men offers cultural critique of sexism. Pan Am appears to glorify it.

Unfortunately, such depictions gloss over the years of effort that it took women to make the radical move from “stewardess” (or “sky girl”) to “flight attendant,” undoing decades of blatant discrimination that prescribed race, weight, marital status, and overall appearance—not to mention completely missing the point of the job, which has always been safety, not sex. As Kathleen M. Barry notes in Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Duke University Press, 2007), women used to be grounded (presumably without pay) if they weighed too much at unannounced inspections. That they had to be white and heterosexual went without saying. Marriage meant the end of the career, if turning the ripe old age of 32 (which meant mandatory “retirement”) didn’t end it first. Interestingly, back in the 1920s, the airlines considered employing African American men to do the job, modeling them after railroad porters, but young women were thought to be more reassuring to a public not yet comfortable with air travel.

Changing all this, as Barry shows, meant the hard work of changing people’s ideas, along with the help of the EEOC in changing policy.

That said, what is behind the current focus on the early 1960s? Mad Men is no doubt part of it. After all, the show’s image is making a lot of money, what with all the tie-ins like Banana Republic’s Mad Men clothing line. Admittedly, there is something tremendously appealing about all the accoutrements of that time. I love looking at my parents’ old stuff—my dad’s tie clasps and shoe-shine kit, my mom’s neat little box of what she called "earbobs" (the clip kind). They speak of a world that was simple, solid, and optimistic. And I think we miss looking nice. I’m all for elastic waistbands, but people go everywhere these days as if the word “unkempt” isn’t in the dictionary.

But we don’t want to return to the uniformity and rigidity of those times, not to mention the blatant discrimination. It was in many ways a world of façades in which women’s work was invisible and underpaid, when there was a fine line between pride in appearance and rigid social codes. I was lucky because knowing it would be my mother who brought home a steady income (however meager) and my father who took me shoe shopping meant I would grow up to question outward appearances. It’s a skill not to be forgotten.

Gonna Be an Engineer

Former student (and really cool person) Michelle Willard posted this Peggy Seeger song "Gonna Be an Engineer" on my Facebook wall: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCRRe72mwwY&feature=youtu.be. It made me think of an article from the old magazine Literary Digest that I talk about in my book. "A Girl Engineer in Kansas City," published in 1923, tells the story of Miss Clare Nicolet, whose four and a half years of college "left the native feminine qualities undisturbed in their development" so that she is at home among "big turbines" and "uses waste as deftly as a powder puff" ("A Girl Engineer in Kansas City," Literary Digest, 7 July 1923, p. 29).

I talk about the article as an example of the "exception" pattern in media representation of women's employment. In this pattern, women who do jobs considered "masculine" such as engineering are described in terms that make them seem odd for their sex, even if the article praises their accomplishments. Readers are reassured of the woman's femininity, despite her "odd" choice of employment. Since most of us don't want to be seen as odd, the overall effect is to reinforce status quo gender norms. It's like tokenism, but the "exception" pattern crosses class boundaries (female doctors and female plumbers have both been portrayed as "exceptions") and it always carries the reassurance of femininity.

I'd like to think we're past all this (sometimes I wonder what's really in my younger female students' heads about gender and careers). After all, Peggy Seeger isn't young, and in some ways her lyrics about having a profession being the opposite of motherhood (and being a "lady") seem dated. But the thing is, I hadn't heard of her until Michelle posted this YouTube clip. It's kind of like Virginia Woolf's essay in A Room of One's Own about Judith Shakespeare, William's hypothetical sister, who was his intellectual equal and "as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was," but who wasn't sent to school and had no chance to write her plays. Peggy Seeger is Pete's sister, and clearly she has had a chance to write and sing, but without the media fanfare of her famous brother (too bad; I like her voice). I think that's how it is with a lot of women's accomplishments. If they haven't even been held up as "exceptions" (read "oddities") they're invisible. And if they're invisible, it's hard for them to be role models for the next generation and we have this constant sense of starting over.

After all, Peggy Seeger was born a decade after Miss Clare Nicolet earned her engineering degree, yet this song was written in the 1970s--as if women in engineering was a new idea.

Mad Men and Working Women

This next Wednesday morning (Aug. 10) I'll be on a panel titled "Mad Men, Working Women, and History" at the AEJMC convention in St. Louis--an annual conference for journalism and media educators. Joining me will be Erika Engstrom from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Tracy Lucht from Simpson College, and Kimberly Wilmot Voss from the University of Central Florida. The panel was my idea. I love Mad Men, and wanted to think about ways that it ties to my historical research on women's employment.

(Despite my previous post about "Working Women" being a problematic term, I used it anyway. It sounded good. It went with "Mad Men." And because it's in common use, people understand it, which is what makes language hard to change.)

Anyway, my part of the talk will focus on secretaries in Mad Men, specifically on how images of the secretary's body evolved over the decades preceding the 1960s. Some of this relates directly to my research in my book, Business Girls and Two-Job Wives. A job primarily for men until the mid-19th century, secretarial work was gendered female with the invention of the typewriter after the Civil War. After that, women (who had been machine operators in the textile industry) were hired as low-paid "typewriters" (the word for both the machine and the women who worked on them) beginning in the 1870s. Gradually the job became overtly sexualized. By the 1920s, women were "office wives" and "business debutantes." Women's magazines told readers that secretarial work was a way to use their brains and take initiative. Men's magazines, meanwhile, advised readers to choose women they didn't mind looking at. (This is, of course, no surprise.)

These stereotypes are pretty obvious on Mad Men. In the talk, I will argue that it is the women at Sterling-Cooper that make "Don Draper" possible. Draper is, I think, both a producer and a product of advertising; selling "Don Draper" is the main project of Dick Whitman--a man who lives by his wit and his wits. He is also the typical 20th-century businessman, emblematic of modern masculinity that relied on constructing women as "Other," reinforcing the domestic social structure of the "office wife."

I have a lot more to say. I'll probably run over my allotted time, which I seem to always do.