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Diverging from the assertive qualities ascribed to Vicki Barr, later novels published  in the 1950s and early 1960s portrayed stewardesses as wholesome moral young women eager to marry, made more capable as potential wives as they demonstrate clearheaded thinking and confidence when mid-air tragedies strike. The development of these narratives comes at a time when women were grappling with their return to the home, after a decade of empowerment, financial independence, and career responsibility. The status of these stewardesses as airborne heroines begins to wane, trading true heroics for complacency. Margaret Hill writes the Beth Dean series: Goal in the Sky, Hostess in the Sky and Senior Hostess, offering a look into the feminine culture of stewardesses’ lives, focusing on the domestic details of training school. While Jeanne Judson writes about the complexities of stewardesses lives in Carol Trent: Air Stewardess, explaining that Carol lived between three worlds, the first was at home with her mother and father in San Francisco, the second was in Hawaii, and the third was on board the Universal Air Lines DC-7, which formed a bridge between the first and second worlds.70
In addition to exploring the culture and complexities that accompany an airborne life, is the reoccurring theme of a search for true self that could be discovered while working in the skies. Laura Kerr’s 1960 novel Julie with Wings opens with a perfect description of how young girls determined they wanted to become stewardesses:
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Long after the other girls were asleep, Julie lay staring at the ceiling. It was strange about wanting to be a stewardess. It had all begun on her 12th birthday, an exciting grown-up sort of day, she remembered, when she and her family had gone to the big city airport to have dinner in the new and beautiful sky room…What an exciting place! Uniformed red-caps had hurried to and fro, carrying suitcases from the yawning trunks of automobiles into the weighing counters…Two pretty girls in uniform, laughing and talking animatedly had hurried out to the transcontinental ship. Watching them climb the mobile steps, Julie had experienced an exciting sensation. It was as though had been going up those silver stairs, her blue uniform neatly pressed, her black curls tucked under a soft beret. Suddenly she had known what she wanted to be when she grew up-not a nurse, not a teacher, not even a dancer, but a stewardess flying off to discover the world!"71
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Julie’s ambition to be a stewardess is motivated by her desire to meet people, ‘find out what makes them tick,’ and to see new places.  While her friends marry, Julie remains single, always reflective on the engagement she passed up when she took her wings. Kerr writes, “Julie wonders whether she has made a mistake in her choice of a career. She loves the work; even the disagreeable passengers inspire her…Yet somewhere she has made the wrong decision. Will she ever find her real place in the scheme of things?”72 These feelings that are ascribed to Julie can be seen as cadences of the mindset of the 1950s child bearing, kitchen loving housewife before Betty Freidan’s articulation of wanting more crashed into her world.
After successfully surviving and dealing with a near-disaster in the air Julie achieves her goal of understanding. While hospitalized she confesses her love for Tug, and the two end the book with marriage, en route on their honeymoon Tug asks, “‘Will you miss all this, now that your wings are going to be clipped?’…Julie shook her head and slipped her right hand into his. As long as they were side by side, working and playing, worrying or laughing together, her heart would always have wings”73
70 Jeanne Judson, Carol Trent: Air Stewardess (New York: Avalon Books, 1956), 7.
71 Laura Kerr, Julie with Wings (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1960), 6-7.
72 Ibid., Cover
73 Ibid.,186.
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