Thesis
By fighting back against the objectification they endured from their employers, female flight attendants of the 1960s and 1970s pushed our society to explore the idea of gender equality and established themselves as a workforce to be reckoned with. Through encounters in courtrooms and the halls of Congress, the flight attendants' fight against sexism in the air ultimately exchanged their previous objectification for the empowerment of women.
"Between 1960 and 1990, feminists achieved half a revolution. ...Probably, the movement's single greatest achievement was that it transformed most people's assumptions about what women were capable of and had a right to expect from life. The story of how airline stewardesses forced ... airlines to change unfair work rules is the ... introduction to the second wave [of feminism]." |
Barbara "Dusty" Roads, a former American Airlines flight attendant, on the regulations placed against flight attendants. (Makers, 2012)
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Flight attendants in uniform throughout the years. (Caroll, 2014)
"I was already a feminist when hired, but the fight for fairness in the face of such blatant sexism made me a hard core feminist." |
"When I saw the later flight attendant uniforms, I thought wow. What have we become. Now ... it has really gone the other way. You aren’t going to look like a professional woman, you are going to look like a “professional woman.” Now everything was sexual. They were using them as a sexual object to attract men." Various uniforms from the 70's (left), 60's (center), and 50's (right) showing hemlines soaring upward. (Kim, 1972-4)
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"It's shaping up as a giant battle of the sexes in the skies."
-Paula Kane, former American Airlines flight attendant