'Think of her as your mother': Airline advertising and the stewardess in America, 1930-1980

Journal of Transport History

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 1-21

  Lyth, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Advertising; Air Travel; Banding; Cabin Crew

Indexed keywords

ADVERTISING; AIR TRANSPORTATION; AIRLINE INDUSTRY; GENDER ROLE; SPATIOTEMPORAL ANALYSIS;

UNITED STATES;

EID: 79952884918     PISSN: 00225266     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.7227/tjth.30.1.3     Document Type: Article

References (102)

1. Charles Woodley, Golden Age: Commercial Aviation in Britain, 1945-1965 (London, 1994), 64.
2. See Peter Lyth, 'Experiencing turbulence: deregulation and the international air transport industry, 1930-1990', in James McConville (ed.), Transport Regulation Matters (London, 1997).
3. The use of the word 'feminisation' needs explanation. It is used here not so much in the sense of a rising number of women employed in the industry, as for example in the manner used by Carole Srole in ' "A blessing to mankind, and especially to womankind": the typewriter and the feminization of clerical work, Boston, 1860-1920', in Barbara Drygulski Wright et al. (eds), Women, Work and Technology (Ann Arbor MI, 1987), 84-100, but rather more in the sense of a gradual loss of what Cynthia Cockburn (in the context of engineering) ironically calls the 'manly virtues', i.e. '... everything that is defined as manly-the propensity to control and manipulate nature...'
4. Cockburn, 'Caught in the wheels: the high cost of being a female cog in the male machinery of engineering', in Douglas MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (eds), The Social Shaping of Technology: How the Refrigerator got its Hum (Milton Keynes, 1985), 57. Thus 'feminisation' here means a gradual elimination of the need for traditionally 'masculine' attributes in the development of operations within the industry, e.g. an intrepid and adventurous approach towards achievement in flying, reliance on valour where technology is primitive or unreliable, and the replacement of those attributes by the 'feminised' ones of service derived from human contact within the context of a more highly developed and dependable technology.
5. For example, J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Harmondsworth, 1970).
6. also The New Industrial State (Harmondsworth, 1968).
7. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (Harmondsworth, 1970).
8. For the former, Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (London, 1968).
9. for the latter, F. R. Leavis and D. Thompson, Culture and Environment (London, 1933), 3.
10. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (London, 1978), 72.
11. The American commentator Jean Kilbourne, for example, feels 'advertising creates a worldview that is based upon cynicism, dissatisfaction and craving'.
12. Can't Buy my Love: How Advertising changes the Way we Think and Feel (New York, 1999), 75.
13. The work of the critical theorist Jean Baudrillard is key here.
14. see for example 'Consumer society' or 'The system of objects', both in M. Poster (ed.), Selected Writings (Cambridge, 1988).
15. Also valuable are Zygmunt Bauman, 'Consuming life', Journal of Consumer Culture 1, 1 (2001), 9-29.
16. Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London, 1991).
17. Modern consumption theory rests on the change which is perceived to have taken place in the latter half of the twentieth century in the character of consumption from instrumental and utility-driven to 'needless' and symbolic. Thus contemporary and postmodern consumption is about the expression of identity, which advertising promotes by what Baudrillard calls the symbolic exchange of sign values. He argues that consumer commodities in late capitalism assume symbolic associations which overlie their initial user value. They become 'signs' of 'hyper-reality'. For Baudrillard the material world of commodities has been transformed into a symbolic world of ideological meanings attached to commodities. See Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (trans. C. Levin, St Louis MO, 1981).
18. Many who defend advertising are, not surprisingly, its practitioners.
19. see for example, David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (New York, 1985).
20. By the same token Marxist critics would argue that advertising is the means by which industrial capitalism ensures its markets, taking the decision over what products and services to produce and sell away from the consumer and giving it to a small elite of powerful producers and business interests.
21. see C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, 1956).
22. For its role in introducing Americans to new consumer goods in the first half of the twentieth century see Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley CA, 1986).
23. Ronald Berman, Advertising and Social Change (Beverley Hills CA and London, 1981), 16.
24. Torben Vestergaard and Kim Schroder, The Language of Advertising (Oxford, 1985), 5-6.
25. Daniel Boorstin, The Image (Harmondsworth, 1963).
26. Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London, 1978), 25.
27. Safety and Accommodation in European Passenger Planes, No. 3 (New York, 1928).
28. They had literary titles such as 'Across the fenceless sky' (1928), 'First time up!' (1928), 'Lift up your eyes!' (1928), 'When women fly' (1929) and 'When fledglings fly' (1929). The copy was written by William Ashley Anderson of the N. W. Ayer agency, helped by the Tri-motor's designer, William Stout.
29. Kenneth Hudson, Air Travel: a Social History (Bath, 1972), 73.
30. Quoted in Roger E. Bilstein, 'Travel by air: the American context', Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 33 (1993), 277-8.
31. John H. Frederick, Commercial Air Transportation (Chicago, 1942), 325.
32. Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America's Romance with Aviation (Baltimore MD, 2002), 72.
33. American Airlines began hiring stewardesses in 1933, TWA in 1935.
34. Suzanne L. Kolm, 'Who says it's a man's world? Women's work and travel in the first decades of flight', in Dominick A. Pisano (ed.), The Airplane in American Culture (Ann Arbor MI, 2003), 149.
35. For the role of the 'nurse-stewardesses of the 1930s' see Kathleen M. Barry, Femininity in Flight: a History of Flight Attendants (Durham NC and London, 2007), 11-35.
36. Kolm, 'Who says it's a man's world?', 147-50.
37. See also Deborah G. Douglas, American Women and Flight since 1940 (Lexington KY, 2004), 30-6.
38. Corn, Winged Gospel, 89.
39. Memo from Steve Stimpson, manager of United Air Lines' San Francisco office, to Pat Patterson, assistant to the United president, suggesting the hiring of female stewardesses, 1930, quoted in Charles Solberg, Conquest of the Skies (Boston MA, 1979), 211.
40. Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton NJ and Oxford, 2004), 75.
41. Kolm, 'Who says it's a man's world?', 149.
42. Kolm, 'Who says it's a man's world?', 153.
43. Bilstein, Travel by Air, 281.
44. See also William Fielding Ogburn, The Social Effects of Aviation (Boston MA, 1946).
45. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 1.
46. See also Drew Whitelegg, 'Cabin pressure: the dialectics of emotional labour in the airline industry', Journal of Transport History, 3rd ser., 23, 1 (March 2002), 73-86.
47. Quoted in Deborah G. Douglas, United States Women in Aviation, 1940-1985, Smithsonian Studies in Air and Space 7 (Washington DC, 1990), 61.
48. Arlie Hochschild, 'Smile wars', Mother Jones 8 (1983), 36. The author is indebted to Drew Whitelegg for this reference.
49. See Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley CA, 1983).
50. Erving Goffman has shown that women smile more frequently than men, both in reality and in commercially contrived settings.
51. Goffman, Gender Advertisements (New York, 1976), 69.
52. Hochschild, Managed Heart, 127-9.
53. As Kathleen Barry points out, another reason why the hostess had become so important to airline marketing was that 'other avenues of competition had narrowed' drastically under the tight regulation imposed on the industry in the 1940s.
54. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 39.
55. Paradoxically the 'perfect hostess' image was diametrically at odds with the universal practice among US airlines of hiring only unmarried women.
56. Hostesses who married were fired.
57. Cobble, The Other Women's Movement, 76
58. Semiotics treats language as a system of signs which have meaning because of their relationship to one another. Each sign comprises a signifier (a word or any kind of visual material) and a signified (the meaning to which the signifier refers, a mental concept which is communicated), and has meaning only by virtue of its place in the system and the fact that the system is known and shared by its users. This rooting of semiotics in social convention is the source of its value to the analysis of advertisements, indeed semiotics was described by one of its founders as the study 'of the life of signs within society'.
59. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1915, trans. London, 1974).
60. The viewer brings to this 'meaning production' his or her knowledge and education. Advertisements not only describe a product's qualities, they also explain why those qualities are important to the consumer. And the viewer 'interprets' them according to the cultural codes at her or his disposal. These codes may be images, ideas, conventions, myths or even other advertisements, all of which are already present in society.
61. Williamson, Decoding Advertisements, 13.
62. Drew Whitelegg, Working the Skies: the Fast-paced, Disorienting World of the Flight Attendant (New York and London, 2007), 42.
63. also Kolm, 'Who says it's a man's world?', 155.
64. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 46-7.
65. Georgia Nielsen, From Sky Girl to Flight Attendant: Women and the Making of a Union (Ithaca NY, 1982), 24.
66. According to Whitelegg, girdles were mandatory for hostesses up to the 1970s. Working the Skies, 43. Hochschild's Delta Air Lines study shows that hostesses were also subject to a rigorous set of recruitment criteria relating to their appearance and they had to conform to strict standards of weight, height, figure, complexion and facial regularity before they were even given an interview.
67. Hochschild, Managed Heart, 96. Claire Williams has shown that the same physical standards were demanded by Australian airlines.
68. see Blue, White and Pink collar Workers in Australia: Technicians, Bank Employees and Flight Attendants (London, 1988), 95-6.
69. Quoted in Nielsen, From Sky Girl to Flight Attendant, 30.
70. Whitelegg, Working the Skies, 40.
71. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 58.
72. Jeannette Hyde, 'Gloomy skies ahead', The Observer, 16 September 2001.
73. Of all the 'codifying discourses' of advertising, that of sexuality goes deepest. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality I (Harmondsworth, 1985).
74. Frieda Rozen, 'Technological advances and increasing militance: flight attendant unions in the Jet Age', in Drygulski Wright et al., Women, Work and Technology, 225.
75. also Barry, Femininity in Flight, 99-100.
76. See Paula Kane, Sex Objects in the Sky: a Personal Account of the Stewardess Rebellion (Chicago, 1974).
77. also Cobble, The Other Women's Movement, 209.
78. Ironically, the fear that flying is boring seems to have returned to worry twenty-firstcentury airline managements, only now attempts to relieve it have more to do with the need to distract passengers from their concerns about 'post-9/11' terrorism.
79. Whitelegg, Working the Skies, 7.
80. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 99
81. Kolm, 'Who says it's a man's world?', 158.
82. also Linda Grant, Sexing the Millennium: Women and the Sexual Revolution (New York, 1994), 154.
83. Whitelegg, Working the Skies, 46.
84. Rozen, Flight Attendant Unions in the Jet Age, 226.
85. Juliann Sivulka, Soap, Sex and Cigarettes: a Cultural History of American Advertising (Belmont CA, 1998), 313. Braniff 's infamous 'air strip', portrayed in television commercials literally as a striptease, was launched in 1965.
86. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 180.
87. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 177-8.
88. Kolm, 'Who says it's a man's world?', 159.
89. Whitelegg, Working the Skies, 49.
90. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 175.
91. Cobble, The Other Women's Movement, 209-11.
92. Gillian Dyer, Advertising as Communication (London, 1999), 117.
93. Guy Cook, The Discourse of Advertising (London, 1992), 222.
94. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 179.
95. Rozen, Flight Attendant Unions in the Jet Age, 230.
96. also Cobble, The Other Women's Movement, 207-8.
97. Whitelegg, Working the Skies, 134.
98. Firestone famously complained that 'from every magazine cover, film screen, TV tube, subway sign, jump breasts, legs, shoulders, thighs. Men walk about in a state of constant sexual excitement'.
99. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution (London, 1972), 146.
100. Wide-bodied jets meant that far more flight attendants were needed on board, and their numbers rose from about 15,000 in 1965 to 40,000 in 1974.
101. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 197.
102. In addition to Hochschild see S. Taylor and M. Tyler, 'Emotional labour and sexual difference in the airline industry', Work, Employment and Society 14, 1 (2000), 87.