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Abstract
In popular discourse, workers who travel as they work – including seafarers – have tended to not be seen as travelling in their own right. Focusing on oral narratives from interwar women seafarers, this article explores both the working conditions and the conditions of narration that could enable these women to configure themselves as ‘working‐vacationers’, women ‘travelling back’, travel consumers and travellers who engage with the world, that is, as people who are ‘really travelling’ not simply servicing ‘real travellers’. In particular it explores stewardesses' relationships with women passengers, aiming to add a new dimension to mobility studies and occupational history.
Notes
1. This article was originally a paper for the Gender, Emotion, Work and Travel: Women Transport Workers and Passengers, Past and Present conference, 22–23 June 2007, University of Greenwich, UK. I thank Drew Whitlegg and the participants at the Institute for Railway Studies and Transport History Seminar, October 2007, for their thoughts, which have further shaped this paper, as well as my anonymous referees.
2. See for example Valerie Burton (1999) ‘“Whoring, Drinking Sailors”: Reflections on Masculinity from the Labour History of Nineteenth‐century British Shipping’, in Margaret Walsh (ed.), Working Out Gender: Perspectives from Labour History, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 84–101; Eric W Sager (1989) Seafaring Labor: The Merchant Marine of Atlantic Canada, 1820‐1914, McGill‐Queens University Press, Kingston, Ontario.
3. For example T. Thea Sinclair and her contributors (Citation1997) explore gender in tourism, but not really in relation to tourism workers. Adkins (1992) has studied contemporary women tourism workers. The two key works on women's labour history (Baron, Citation1991; Walsh, Citation1999) do not deal with transport workers. However, Walsh (Citation2002) is invaluable for its contextualisation of women in all transport modes. Some useful histories of non‐British women hospitality workers exist, for example by Poling‐Kempes (Citation1991) and Cobble (Citation1991) but do not explore the idea of employees transcending the binary and being co‐diners, perhaps not least because so many of the diners were not female.
4. For example masseur John Dempsey (1992) I've Seen Them All Naked (Poole, Dorset: Waterfront Publications); Ken Attiwill (1932) Steward! (London: John Long Ltd); Robin King (1955), No Paradise (London: Arthur Barker); Dave Marlowe (1937) Coming, Sir! The Autobiography of a Waiter (London: George G Harrap).
5. Motile is defined as having a sense that one is capable of movement.
6. This is according to my studies of several hundred ships' crew agreements at the Maritime Archives at Memorial University, Newfoundland.
7. In 1930 the official ratio for Cunard's Berengaria was one stewardess to every 31 passengers in First Class; one stewardess to every 75 passengers in Second Class; and one stewardess to every 83 passengers in Tourist Class. This ratio appears in ‘Notes on the Berengaria and the planned new ship LWI’ (Memo from Cunard shipbuilding committee, D42 C3/287, Sidney Jones Library Special Collections, Liverpool).
8. Sheila Jemima, Chris Howard Bailey and Christine Tanner.
9. For example, in Frank Dawes (1973) Not in Front of the Servants: Domestic Service in England, 1850‐1939 (London: Wayland); and Leonora Davidoff & R. Hawthorn (1976) A Day in the Life of a Victorian Domestic Servant, 1873‐1901 (London: Allen and Unwin).
10. Marx discusses false consciousness in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) but the idea has been subsequently refined, expanded and challenged by writers such as Geörgy Lukács, David Lockwood (1992) in Solidarity and Schism (Oxford: Clarendon Press) and Stuart Hall, for example in Hall's Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (2006), Kuan‐Hsing Chen, David Morley, (eds) (London: Comedia).
11. See Aubert & Arner Citation(1958/59) for a discussion of the way ships can be seen as total institutions, and Gerstenberger's spirited rebuttal of that application (Citation1996).
12. Stewardesses didn't quite articulate this, but is seems likely, given Goffman's point that ‘Just as chemical plants may involve special work hazards for employees, there are (staffs believe, at least) special dangers in some kinds of people‐work. In mental hospitals, the staff believe patients may strike out “for no reason” and injure them’ (Goffman, Citation1968, p. 74). Travellers out of their usual safe place could express anxieties and frustrations towards easily available targets; people in confinement may ‘break out’. In both cases such risks to stewardesses were exacerbated by the availability of cheap alcohol; feelings of boredom caused by incarceration; frustration at the real voyage's failure to live up to promises; the structural snobbery which creates shame and thus brings attempts at retaliation; the stresses of travel sickness; and most crucially for stewardesses, the dominant classes' tendency to blame the lowly for ‘imperfect’ service.
13. There were strict rules about crew fraternisation with passengers, to keep the social divide intact and avoid the sackable offence of ‘broaching the cargo’ (having sex with a passenger). No stewardess mentioned having an affair with a women passenger, although some stewardesses had affairs with male passengers and crew, and a few had intimate relations with other stewardesses, or were offered female prostitutes in port. Some women settlers maintained a social relationship with crew after the voyage. Stewardesses went to tea or to stay with them when in that port.
14. For works on stewardesses' airborne equivalents see Whitelegg, Citation2007 and Kathleen M. Barry (2007) Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
15. On rail women see Helena Wojtczak (2005), Railwaywomen: Exploitation, Betrayal and triumph in the workplace (Hastings: Hastings Press).
