“The girl I fell in love with and married was an airline stewardess.  An airline stewardess, Marie!  Have you forgotten what that once meant to you?” reads a caption to a cartoon, depicting a worn looking woman, casually dressed in a robe, lounging on a sofa, while reading a magazine with a pile of burned cigarettes close at hand.¹   In a poignant exaggeration, Marie’s husband laments the image of the woman she once was as a stewardess; the woman she was when he married her.  With humor, this cartoon represents an important and serious transformation that had occurred within the airline industry during the 1960s and 1970s.  At the time this comic was copied and published in a 1972 edition of Capitol News, a newsletter sponsored by United Airlines Management, stewardesses had changed their public and personal image, reclaimed their identity as flight attendants, and changed the destiny of their short-term occupation to one of a long term career.  Marie’s disappointed husband represents the thwarted face of management, looking out at the flight attendant workforce that was no longer comprised of all beautiful, all thin, all single women.  By the 1970s the “stewardess job” had been challenged and changed. 

The “stewardess job” from the 1930s-1960s was an occupation distinctly out of the “norm.”  Born from a seemingly risky idea, stewardesses had emerged out of the airline workforce instantly charming American culture, as “working girls with wings.”  The Original Eight stewardesses and those who followed in their footsteps were women who had dared to do something out of the traditional bounds of their gender and were looked upon by many with admiration.  In the early decades of commercial air travel, flight was a privilege and a rare experience.  Airports became popular destinations for non-travelers; crowds gathered to watch fanfare on the runway, captivated by the people who worked in the sky.  One stewardess remembered the reaction from people who had never seen a plane before, “[They] wanted to touch it and to touch me. One of them called me ‘The angel from the sky’.”² Reflecting on the first time she saw a stewardess, dressed in a smart and fashionable uniform, walking across the runway, young Laura Brandell, a future stewardess, remembered, “She looked amazing. Being a stewardess was a far more interesting choice than becoming a secretary, nurse, teacher or librarian.” ³UAL stewardess, Helen Schmidt Carson recalled a similar experience, “I was in absolute awe – I had never seen anyone so glamorous!…I was hooked!  From then on it was my dream to someday be a United stewardess.”⁴  As American culture portrayed them, stewardesses belonged to an elite class of women who had unparalleled access to an “adventurous” life, but beneath the acclaimed glamour existed a second less acclaimed experience.