Introduction
Watch this video by Vox Media about the “stewardess rebellion” which saw flight attendants challenge and overturn the airline industry’s discriminatory, sexualised labour practices, helping transform the profession and advancing workplace rights for women in the United States.
Video Description
“The “stewardess rebellion” fought the industry and won.
When flight attendants, known as stewardesses at the time, first took flight in the 1930s, the profession became a token of glamor. Unlike other jobs open to women at the time, like teaching or secretarial work, stewardesses had a unique opportunity to travel the world and meet new people thousands of feet in the air.
While the position provided exciting opportunities for working women, it also capitalized on the bodies of these women to benefit the airline industry. For decades, airlines exclusively hired young, single, unmarried, white women and enforced strict policies — like weight and age requirements — to make sure their employees were up to the standard they were selling. Airlines relied on the glamorous reputation of the jet-setting stewardess to sell luxury air travel, and it worked. Along with imposing extreme qualifications for the job, airlines leaned into a “sexy stewardess” stereotype with advertising campaigns and new uniforms, like Southwest Airlines’ “hot pants” that painted stewardesses as sex objects. But in the 1960s and ’70s, stewardesses mounted an organized push against their employers’ discriminatory labor practices.” – Source
They became one of the first groups in the US to fight discrimination in the workplace. And they won. Their activism and legal battles, which used Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, became known as the “stewardess rebellion.” It changed the airline industry into what we know today and paved the way for working women nationwide. – Source
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- Building Movement Capacity and Structure: Ella Baker and the Civil Rights Movement
- Rebels In The Workforce: Women Worker’s Resistance in the Nineteenth Century
- Australia’s History of Workers’ Rights, Strikes and Campaigns
- Essential Elements for Turning a Cause into a Movement: Lessons from the Suffrage Struggle for Today’s Activists
Note: Title image is from Archives New Zealand, CC 2.0. Alterations were made to the image.