Unlike Vicki Barr, Beth, Carol and Julie all share a sticky-sweet happy-to-be-homebound ending typical of the 1950s and early 1960s, demonstrating a serious lack of character development and expression of female individuality. Julie’s lacking character development in particular, seems to exist in resistance to the developing feminist movement of the 1960s, as well as in conflict with the struggle that was in process for stewardesses who were attempting to dismantle the no-marriage ban. The trappings of feminine ideals of domesticity that had held the narrative together after WWII were fraying at the edges, and the life of a stewardess as an airborne heroine began its final descent. This transformation coincides with Betty Freidan’s personal lament over the disappearance of the strong heroine who existed in the pre-1950s decades. In The Feminine Mystique Freidan reflects on lost airborne heroines, commenting on a short story published in Ladies Home Journal, February 1949, called “Sarah and the Seaplane.” Freidan’s reflections are worth quoting at some length:

The important role that Freidan and The Feminine Mystique played in the feminist movement is undeniable, her choice in reflecting on the airborne heroine of the past as a model for the future demonstrates and reinforces the impact that this fictional hero had on women growing up during this period.

During the 1960s and 1970s, stewardesses made their final appearance in a new genre of popular fiction; romance reading, where their status as airborne heroines dissolved, replaced with the objectified image of a sex goddess. This new and more liberal narrative that grew throughout the 1960s and 1970s can be seen and read as a reflection of the loosened grip on 1950s morality encroaching sexual revolution and the dismantling of many of the employment practices that had distinguished the type of woman who could work as a stewardess. and the sexual revolution. Stewardesses became viewed as loose women who worked in the skies. Popular myth suggested that these women maintained lovers in the many different cities they worked in, had no intentions of settling down in marriage, and were unconcerned with professionalism or promoting their careers. Of some of the more notorious titles that characterize this genre, were Girl on a Wing, later renamed The Fly Girls and Coffee, Tea, or Me?
Turning the first page of The Fly Girls the reader arrives to a message titled “For Mothers Only.” The message reads on: “Some may be shocked. Others will believe this is just a wildly imaginative novel. But, Mothers, whatever you think, hold on to your long-haired, wide-eyed daughters until you’ve read this book! Mr. Glemser has obviously known a ‘stew’ or two, and-shocking, kooky, wild, or wicked-he tells it exactly like it is!” By 1969, the novel is published under the tag line, “The no-holds-barred novel of the stewardesses who swing in the sky and on the ground!” The actual story chronicles the life of five stewardesses as they are always seconds from disaster and never more than a strange city away from love. Everything from the book’s provocative artwork, marketing gimmicks, and narration initiates this final transition. Perhaps most well known of this new genre, are Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones’s “Uninhibited Memoirs” exposed in Coffee, Tea or Me? Published in 1968 this novel had perhaps the strongest impact ever on the stewardess image, stripping away any sense of stewardess as airborne heroine. The book was a best seller, and provocatively demonstrated that the lives of stewardesses continually bordered on excitement and immorality. One author states, “No matter how we feel about dating married men, each of us ends up with at least one in our careers.”⁷⁵ Other instances discuss sex explicitly, detailing every touch, sound and sensation.

Coffee, Tea or Me? illustrates the complete abandonment of the airborne heroine and provocatively re-envisioned figure of stewardesses as sex goddesses. Dozens more novels depicting the immoral lives of stewardesses emerged, including: The Crazy Ladies, by Joyce Elbert, which Cosmopolitan critiqued as “The first really great dirty book”⁷⁶ and The Airport People, by Norton Hughes Jonathan, sold under the tag line, “They live fast, the play fast, they love as if every night might be their last.” In response to the new publishing climate, stewardesses and flight attendants published their own, prescriptive and descriptive literature. Many stewardesses had previously published their own personal accounts, such as Lucy Chase’s Skirts Aloft, and Sherry Waterman’s, From Another Island. These narratives were often written to share information about the life of a stewardess, share gentle passenger humor, and offer final thoughts on the woman’s personal departure into her next career as wife and mother. Personal narratives published in the 1960s and early 1970s began to employ an aggressive rhetoric that suggests that they were written out of resistance. Prescriptive literature also emerged, published by retired stewardesses. In 1961, Patricia Rudolph wrote a book in a series titled: To help you choose the right career: Your Future as (insert occupation), in this case An Airline Stewardess . Rudolph includes a comprehensive 20-point self-evaluation test to help readers see if their candidates for the job and the life. In 1970, Elizabeth Rich, published, Flying High: Swinger or slave–or both? What it’s really like to be an Airline Stewardess. Former stewardess Rich recalls, “Some people think I have the most glamorous job in the world. Others tell me I’m a glorified waitress. A surprised Englishman I sat next to at a dinner party, gasped, ‘Why I’ve never met one socially before,’ while regarding me as if I were from outer space.”⁷⁷ Throughout the narrative, Rich reinforces the uniqueness that the public ascribed to stewardesses, titling chapters such as: “I Buy All My Shoes in Paris,” and “Wanted: An Octopus on Roller Skates Shaped Like Raquel Welch.” Rich also spends a great deal of time addressing the mechanics of the stewardess job, demonstrating that its serious nature and technical complexities, while presenting a more genuine image to the public, titling other chapters, “Why is an Intelligent Girl Like You and Airline Stewardess?” and “In Case of Emergency, Please Do Not Remove Cabin Attendants from the Aircraft.”