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.