March 22, 2007
Stewardesses Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST I read with interest Josh Zeitz’s new piece on this website, “Where Did All the Stewardesses Go?”. The astonishing commercial eroticization of stewardesses seems to me to raise the question of why this happened to stewardesses and not to other sectors of the female labor force, at least to a comparable degree. If marketers wanted to simply imply that women in a given place of employment were available to the customers, why didn’t it occur to anyone to hysterically eroticize, say, bank tellers? I have the impression that some other employers have paid (and pay) a premium for sexually appealing workers, who were sometimes encouraged to be flirtatious—restaurants and, I think, sales workers in some parts of some department stores, as well as, proverbially, auction houses, etc., but merchandizing a product via a fantasy of sexual gratification by the female staff seems to have been most conspicuous in the airlines. My guess is that stewardesses were the most promising portion of the labor force for such a strategy because they were so mobile, meaning that they were away from the imagined (and to some degree real) sexual supervision of their families. A bank teller may be imagined to live at home; a stewardess, by the nature of her job, spends time very far from home. In the old days, when the powers of a community to police the sexuality of its young women were at least imagined to be a lot greater than is now the case, stewardesses were in a genuinely different situation and could provoke more fantasies. The thought that women on their own were on the loose was not unique to stewardesses, for moral panics about unsupervised sexuality could attend any group of young women earning enough to support themselves and live away from home. Once upon a time this happened with mill workers, and later and more temporarily with munitions workers, but my guess is that the situation of stewardesses was almost unique. So I’ll guess that ad men saw their opportunity and they took it. My wild guess is that the process ran out of steam not only because of second-wave feminism but because the sexual revolution made the customers less pessimistic about their chances with other young women. Once stewardesses were no longer imagined to be peculiarly free of inhibition bred of observation by ones friends and family, it made less sense to advertise them as the courtesans of the skies.
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