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Abstract
This article examines 1930s aviation in the USA through an unconventional lens – the male flight attendant, a figure who served as a cultural touchstone for negotiating gender roles in the emerging business of commercial air transport. As aviation had broad resonance as a symbol of modern and cosmopolitan life, the male flight attendant, too, became bound to this larger context of technological development and the futuristic transformations of society it promised. My aim is to detail these connections between the flight attendant and technological innovation, but also to make a deeper claim: that the occupation of flight attendant, the place of gay men therein, and the cultural acceptance and resistance to this fact were constituent, not ancillary, to the history of the 1930s. In the process, I am arguing not only that gender serves as a fundamental category of historical analysis – via the assumptions and power relations through which historical actors make history – but also that issues of gay identity and homophobia are integral to such analysis
Notes
1. Barry, Femininity in Flight, 11.
2. ‘Feminists Aroused by Airline Plan,’ X8.
3. ‘Contact,’ 6. This article places the number of male flight attendants in 1937 at 105, and the number of females at 286. In all likelihood, 1937 was a bit of a nadir for stewards, since their percentages were probably much higher at the very beginning of the decade and even at the end of the decade. In 1930, for example, Pan Am’s male-only flight attendant corps was one of the largest contingents of flight attendants in the USA, outnumbering United’s ‘Original Eight’ stewardesses hired that same year. (These ‘Original Eight’ women were, in fact, the first stewardesses in aviation history.) Then, by 1938, Eastern’s expanding service on the East Coast, anchored by a male-only steward corps, would have increased the percentage of stewards vis-à-vis the figure from 1937. That said, I have no exact numbers for men and women working as flight attendants in any other year besides 1937.
4. Davies, Woman’s Place is at the Typewriter, 179, 183.
5. This fuller history is detailed in Tiemeyer, ‘Manhood Up in the Air.’
6. In addition to Barry, these works also discuss stewardesses’ contributions to the women’s equality movement: Nielsen, From Sky Girl to Flight Attendant; Kane, Sex Objects in the Sky; Dooley, ‘Battle in the Sky.’
7. I conducted seven formal interviews with flight attendants whose careers began between 1947 and 1955, and four further interviews with others whose careers began in the 1960s or 1970s. These numbers are therefore personal recollections, rather than statistical facts. Yet, they are consistent across interviews. A fictitious account of the prevalence of gay stewards based on his actual experiences as a Pan Am flight attendant in the 1950s is found in Orason, Plight of a Flight Attendant, 126, 141.
8. Tiemeyer, ‘Manhood Up in the Air.’
9. ‘Buddy passes’ enabled each employee to designate anyone, even same-sex lovers, as a beneficiary of discounted travel. Before Pan Am flight attendants won this privilege, only married spouses or blood relatives qualified for such discounts.
10. Key works that trace the rise of awareness of homosexuality to America’s scientific realm include Duggan, Sapphic Slashers, and Minton, Departing from Deviance. Works that trace the growth of homosexuality as a public phenomenon to Prohibition-era nightlife include Chauncey, Gay New York; Boyd, Wide Open Town; Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue.
11. Usually but not exclusively referring to homosexuality, the notion of ‘queer’ identity also posits fluidity in gender norms. Queer theorist Judith Butler has stressed that one’s gender is performative, i.e. completely constructed by actions without an underlying anchor in a hard-set biological sex or firm social notion of gender. One consequence of this insight is that one’s gender performance can be recast (whether by the person herself or by social expectations) to fill an itinerant space that is neither notionally ‘male’ nor ‘female,’ but rather ‘queer.’ Such is the case, I argue, with the 1930s steward. See Butler, Gender Trouble.
12. I hope that readers, in addition to acknowledging the potential pitfalls of writing a history of stewards’ social context to link them to the ‘gay’ world of the time, also recognize the potential benefits of this historical endeavor. Such a project begins to explain how and why the homophobic accusations against stewards quickly gained traction and would persist throughout the twentieth century. Social and design historian Christina Cogdell undertook a related project in her recent work Eugenic Design. By linking, albeit more tenuously than historians might desire, the work of streamline designers and eugenic thought circulating at the time, Cogdell opened up a whole new paradigm for understanding the streamline movement and its key protagonists. See Cogdell, Eugenic Design.
13. Other gay male careers would include nursing, theater work, department store clerks, and hairdressers, among others. George Chauncey found that jobs ‘in the theater, hotel, or restaurant industries’ in New York had significant clusters of gay men in the 1930s. See Chauncey, Gay New York, 302. Historian Allen Berube researched the most significant previous study of a gay career in the earlier part of the twentieth century. His investigation of ship stewards based in San Francisco from 1900 until the 1950s also showed a preponderance of gay men, and a labor union that was racially integrated and welcoming to gays and straights alike. Unfortunately, Berube discontinued his research before publishing an article or book. His papers nonetheless are a testament to the rich potential of writing about such workplaces. See Allen Berube Papers, GLBT History Archives, San Francisco, CA.
14. On the clientele of 1930s air travel, see Courtwright, Sky as Frontier, 91–109.
15. I have more to say on my use of ‘gay’ later in the article. Note for now that the term was used in ways that were both sexual and more generic, illicit and more innocent, to describe the nightlife of the Prohibition era. For a fuller analysis of how the meanings of ‘gay’ as both ‘homosexual’ and more generally ‘enjoyable’ at times converged in the 1920s and 1930s urban life, see Chauncey, Gay New York.
16. ‘Pansy shows’ were burlesque shows emphasizing male performers in drag, and they most often were hosted by a master of ceremonies, also a man in drag. For a discussion of their immense popularity and rather rapid demise in New York City, see Chauncey, ‘“Pansies on Parade”: Prohibition and the Spectacle of the Pansy,’ in Gay New York, 301–30.
17. Cowan’s seminal work in the field of gender and technology is Cowan, ‘The “Industrial Revolution” in the Home.’ The term ‘mutual shaping’ is discussed in Lerman, Oldenziel, and Mohun, ‘Introduction: Interrogating Boundaries,’ 2.
18. Lerman , Oldenziel, and Mohun, ‘Introduction: Interrogating Boundaries,’ 4.
19. Courtwright discusses the growing feminization of the cabin, Sky as Frontier, 107.
20. A particularly useful description of the Prohibition-era culture of New York City is Douglas, Terrible Honesty.
21. Chauncey’s ‘Introduction’ in Gay New York offers a thorough history of the term ‘gay’ and other homosexual jargon from the time. See especially pp. 14–21.
22. Chauncey, Gay New York, 328.
23. Waugh, Out/Lines, 41.
24. Solberg, Conquest of the Skies, 111.
25. Klemesrud, ‘Stewardess, 1930-Style,’ 41.
26. Linn, ‘He Earned his Wings,’ 4B.
27. Air Hostess.
28. ‘Rodney,’ 3.
29. Tye, Rising from the Rails, 25.
30. Winn, ‘Cupid is Great Plane Hazard,’ 22.
31. ‘Actress Tells Way to Date,’ 10.
32. The various features of the Pan Am Clipper are featured in ‘Regular Air Route,’ B6.
33. Helen Stansbury, director of United’s women’s traffic division, 1937. Quoted in Courtwright, Sky as Frontier, 107.
34. By the end of the 1930s, women had gone from a very modest percentage of passengers to about 25% of the flying public. Clearly, however, they were still significantly outnumbered. Solberg, Conquest of the Skies, 275.
35. McCarthy, ‘Tom McCarthy Interviews,’ X9.
36. In the early 1930s, Eastern hired a handful of stewardesses to serve their routes. Thanks, however, to a legal and financial scandal in 1934, the airline was forced to reincorporate and laid off all of its flight attendants. For the few years before the debut of their stewards in late 1936, Eastern actually had no flight attendants, assigning the task of serving coffee or boxed lunches to the co-pilot. This was not an unusual practice at smaller, cash-strapped airlines. See Serling, From the Captain to the Colonel.
37. ‘Hostesses Soon to Be Replaced,’ M6.
38. ‘Feminists Aroused by Airline Plan,’ X8.
39. ‘Mrs. Roosevelt Praises,’ 4.
40. Serling, From the Captain to the Colonel, 122.
41. Ibid., 170.
42. The guaranteed monthly minimum salaries for flight personnel, respectively, in 1933 was: $250 for pilots, $150 for copilots, $100 for stewards and stewardesses, and $80 for field mechanics or radio men. Each type of personnel could expect to double this wage, since they were also paid by the hour on top of this minimum. ‘Pilots Forecast Dispute,’ 3.
43. ‘Hostesses Soon to be Replaced,’ M6.
44. Serling, From the Captain to the Colonel, 122.
45. ‘Eastern Carries the Male!’ Married women actually encountered increased work restrictions during the Depression years. Historian Barbara Melosh writes about changing laws for state and federal government employees: ‘A number of state legislatures, and then the federal government, passed the so-called married person’s clause, mandating that the civil service could employ only one member of a family; many women were dismissed under the law.’ See Melosh, Engendering Culture, 1.
46. Miami-based National Airlines would eventually become Eastern’s strongest competition on this route, but as of 1938, it was still held a Florida-only route system. By the 1950s, National’s in-flight service and slick ad campaigns made it more formidable as a competitor. The CAB also awarded Delta the New York–Miami route in the early 1950s.
47. Daley, An American Saga.
48. A thorough discussion of streamline design and its importance to Depression-era culture is found in Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited .
49. ‘Gilbert Rohde Revolutionizes Future Men’s Clothes and Revives Long Beards,’ 138.
50. ‘Fashion Preview.’
51. ‘What We’ve Heard.’
52. On the history of fashion shows, see Fortini, ‘How the Runway Took Off.’
53. Chauncey, Gay New York, 349.
54. ‘EAL Invades Gotham P.M. Life,’ 3.
55. An intriguing account of how stewards became entwined in homophobic vigilantism of the 1950s is found in Sears, ‘Purging Perverts in Paradise.’
56. ‘Flight-Steward Reveals Drama,’ 10.
57. Savage, Comic Books and America, 5.
58. The term ‘screwball’ has gained most of its acceptance in the film genre, detailing anitheroes who embody irrational, often loony behavior but nonetheless are the film’s protagonists. Media critic Wes Gehring notes, however, that film screwballs have their antecedents in newspaper comic strips, among other comedy genres. Gehring, Screwball Comedy, especially 20–1.
59. Bugs Bunny did not debut under that name until 1940, but a rabbit character in the film Hare Hunt from April 1938 shared the Bugs’s trademark Brooklyn accent and witty sense of humor. Meanwhile, Elmer Fudd also did not crystallize as a character until around 1940, but his predecessor, Egghead, co-starred with Daffy Duck in the 1938 film Daffy Duck and Egghead. Both films were Warner Brothers productions under the direction of Tex Avery. See imdb.com
60. For greater detail on gender-based assumptions tied to war and the roles gay men and women played in the Second World War, see Berube, Coming Out Under Fire.
61. D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 24.
62. ‘Eastern Carries the Male!,’ 41.
63. Baker, ‘The Service that Leaves a Smile,’ 24.
64. Typical of such claims are this one, published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1954: ‘There have been, in all, about 40,000 girls on the lines since 1930, when Ellen Church, a nurse from Cresco, Iowa, first suggested the idea of having a capable woman aboard planes to provide service for passengers. Ellen … was hired by United to work their flight between two Western cities, and to recruit other girls for similar duty. She did so and a profession was started.’ (LaCossitt, ‘Adventures of the Air-Line Stewardesses,’ 96.)