Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants

Author:   Kathleen Barry
Publisher:   Duke University Press
ISBN:  

9780822339342


Pages:   328
Publication Date:   28 February 2007
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Awaiting stock   Availability explained
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Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants


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Full Product Details

Author:   Kathleen Barry
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 16.00cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 24.10cm
Weight:   0.594kg
ISBN:  

9780822339342


ISBN 10:   082233934
Pages:   328
Publication Date:   28 February 2007
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Awaiting stock   Availability explained
The supplier is currently out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out for you.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 1. Psychological Punch : Nurse-Stewardesses in the 1930s 11 2. Glamour Girls of the Air : The Postwar Stewardess Mystique 36 3. Labor's Loveliest : Postwar Union Struggles 60 4. Nothing But an Airborne Waitress : The Jet Age 96 5. Do I Look Like an Old Bag? : Glamour and Women's Rights in the Mid-1960s 122 6. You're White, You're Free and You're 21-What Is It? : Title VII 144 7. Fly Me? Go Fly Yourself! : Stewardess Liberation in the 1970s 174 Epilogue: After Title VII and Deregulation 211 Notes 223 Bibliography 271 Index 293

Reviews

Femininity in Flight is outstanding. It is the most thoroughly presented book on femininity, work, and pink-collar activism to date. It expands the contours of the women's rights movement and complicates the grounds on which women make demands for better working conditions. Eileen Boris, author of Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States Femininity in Flight is the first book that tells the story of the flight attendant occupation as a whole and gives us the history of the occupation in so compelling and rich a fashion. Kathleen M. Barry offers us an entertaining and witty account of how flight attendants embodied changing notions of femininity, and then she boldly challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that it was those very cultural constraints that in part spurred flight attendant activism. Dorothy Sue Cobble, author of The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Justice in Modern America One of the great strengths of Femininity in Flight is the broad context within which Barry views flight attendants' struggles, in terms of women's work, union organisation and second-wave feminism. By contextualising her study so well and drawing out the parallels between stewardresses and other pink-collar workers, Barry has produced a book with wide appeal and relevance to many interested in labour history, the women's movement, and the growth of service work. --Rosie Cox, The Times Higher March 23 2007 In the early chapters of Kathleen M. Barry's excellent study, Feminity in FLight, she explains why airlines went with pretty young white women, many of them trained nurses, rather than, say, the middle-aged African American men who acted as stewards on Pullman cars; cutting-edge modernity in the 1930s colour-coded itself white... Barry's well-documented history spends more of its length on union charters and test cases than it does on hemlines One of its strengths is a demonstration that cultural history does not have to be impressionistic, and that economic imperatives and consciousness-raising can be as entertaining to read about as exploitation movies. --Times Literary Supplement, 2 April 2007 Kathleen Barry's history of how gracious stewardesses turned into sexy air hostesses and then into tough grumpy flight attendants tries hard to be dull, but thankfully does not succeed. --The Economist, 5 May 2007


Femininity in Flight is outstanding. It is the most thoroughly presented book on femininity, work, and pink-collar activism to date. It expands the contours of the women's rights movement and complicates the grounds on which women make demands for better working conditions. Eileen Boris, author of Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States Femininity in Flight is the first book that tells the story of the flight attendant occupation as a whole and gives us the history of the occupation in so compelling and rich a fashion. Kathleen M. Barry offers us an entertaining and witty account of how flight attendants embodied changing notions of femininity, and then she boldly challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that it was those very cultural constraints that in part spurred flight attendant activism. Dorothy Sue Cobble, author of The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Justice in Modern America One of the great strengths of Femininity in Flight is the broad context within which Barry views flight attendants' struggles, in terms of women's work, union organisation and second-wave feminism. By contextualising her study so well and drawing out the parallels between stewardresses and other pink-collar workers, Barry has produced a book with wide appeal and relevance to many interested in labour history, the women's movement, and the growth of service work. --Rosie Cox, The Times Higher March 23 2007 In the early chapters of Kathleen M. Barry's excellent study, Feminity in FLight, she explains why airlines went with pretty young white women, many of them trained nurses, rather than, say, the middle-aged African American men who acted as stewards on Pullman cars; cutting-edge modernity in the 1930s colour-coded itself white... Barry's well-documented history spends more of its length on union charters and test cases than it does on hemlines One of its strengths is a demonstration that cultural history does not have to be impressionistic, and that economic imperatives and consciousness-raising can be as entertaining to read about as exploitation movies. --Times Literary Supplement, 2 April 2007 Kathleen Barry's history of how gracious stewardesses turned into sexy air hostesses and then into tough grumpy flight attendants tries hard to be dull, but thankfully does not succeed. --The Economist, 5 May 2007


Author Information

Kathleen M. Barry has a doctorate in history from New York University. She has taught American history at NYU and the University of Cambridge.

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