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Female fliers in popular fiction existed as airborne heroines for a significant period of the twentieth century and have been immortalized in a changing narrative. Their exploits are reminiscent of expressions of independence for American girlhood and womanhood; their values are representative of changes and trends in American culture. The twentieth century and technical innovation offered far more opportunities for women to move beyond the conventional path of marriage and motherhood that had existed in earlier generations. It was during this time, that flight empowered women to experiment with and leave a lasting impression on a developing industry. Airborne heroines were not literary figures imagined by writers for an eager public; they were created out of a likeness to real female fliers, including both aviators and stewardesses.
The transition of airborne heroines from girl aviators to stewardesses is obvious in popular fiction, as female pilots enter the reading scene in 1911 disappearing by WWII, when they are replaced with demure service minded and sleuthing stewardesses, who are then replaced in 1960 with sex goddesses. It’s important to note that as the stewardess narrative matured, the ambitions of the female pilot were often cautiously revived. Stewardesses occasionally learned how to pilot planes on the sly, demonstrating their bootlegged skills in extreme situations, when pilots became ill or incapacitated during a mid-air disaster. The changing image of the airborne heroine speaks to the feminine appeal of stewardesses, over the more masculine associations with girl aviators, which demonstrates the need by members of the industry and the public to couch women in aviation into limited roles.
As the golden age of aviation changed with the advancement of the jumbo jet in the 1950s, and on into the 1960s and 1970s stewardesses as a unionized group of workingwomen renamed themselves flight attendants. As a result of their efforts to dismantle discriminating employment policies and practices, flight attendants were seen as frontrunners in the revolt against sexist employment policies at the forefront of women’s rights movements. Flight Attendants, unlike their stewardess counterparts, no longer conformed to traditional ideals of femininity or womanhood, and with their new aggressiveness and a change in the professional climate, it was apparent that their heyday as heroes was over. Popularity gone, and image demoralized with sex and scandal, their story as airborne heroines was shelved away. As dramatic changes continued to occur in the flight attendant profession throughout the 1970s, the public’s perception of the flight attendant image changed too. Aviation writer Robert Serling, mourned this transformation, and spoke to stewardesses in 1971:
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“It seems to me there’s been a change in the past five years—and not a change for the better….You have a perfect right to resent the “Coffee, Tea, or Me’ image. I resent it, it. But in some cases, you’re contributing to that very image…Those of us who defend the image of the stewardess, almost with blind loyalty, are the ones most hurt when a stewardess herself spoils the image.”78
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Nearly ten years after these remarks were delivered, when the stewardess workforce had officially become the more heterogeneous flight attendant group, Serling published a nostalgic novel titled, Stewardess. Beginning the story in 1955, a golden era for Serling, Stewardess as a final narrative captures what it meant to be an airborne heroine through the lens of Danni’s life as her career rises and as the airline itself grows. The story is problematic because of its nostalgia; in some ways it minimizes the impact of strides that had been made by the flight attendant group, yet it demonstrates the impact of the airborne heroine on memory. For Serling and others, the memory of the stewardess as heroine was powerful enough to be called upon again during a time when the once coveted and glamorous stewardess image had been traded for increased rights in the workplace, which to many was an unfair and unwanted sacrifice.
Throughout this essay you’ve seen the changes that affected the airborne heroine, and are aware that she herself was a reflection of the dramatic challenges that women and women in aviation faced. There is a quote about heroic figures that helped to inspire this study, from Amelia Earhart, who said:
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“There are no heroines following the shining paths of romantic adventure, as do the heroes of boys’ books….Of course girls have been reading so-called ‘boys’ books’ ever since there were such. But consider what it means to do so. Instead of closing the covers with shining eyes and the happy thought, ‘That might happen to me some day!’ the girl, turning the final page, can only sigh regretfully. ‘Oh, dear, that can never happen to me–because I’m not a boy!’”
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This study of popular fiction disagrees with Earhart’s observations because of the ways in which dreams and aspirations of women were actualized and articulated time and again in the changing narrative of the airborne heroine where women were pilots and stewardesses, and in each story a unique expression of freedom existed. After Serling’s novel, flight attendants disappear from popular narrative; they became figures of inflight service. Today the airlines and the people who work in the sky aren’t special anymore, and yet when considering the recent events of September 11, 2001 and the real life heroic efforts made by flight attendants and recognized by Americans; it seems possible that there might be a time in the once again future when flight attendants will return to fiction, as airborne heroines reborn
78 Robert Serling. “My Image of a Stewardess,” Flight Log (November 1971), 3, 7.
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