Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.
|
|||||||||
Better Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
Stewardess: Come Fly with Me! by Elissa Stein  (11)
|
Come Fly With Us!: A Global History of the Airline Hostess by Johanna Omelia  (12)
|
Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer by Marsha Marks (28)
$9.99
|
Flight Attendants by Brian Finke  (3)
$23.10
|
Airline Design (Designpockets) by Peter Delius  (2)
$16.47
|
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Barry’s feminist analysis is clever and somewhat poignant, for it sees that in the role of the air hostess a vision of female selfhood and freedom has been forced to rub, rather uncomfortably, against a rather ogling set of corporate requirements.”
--Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books
“This well-researched book traces the evolution of flight attendants from glamorous sky queens to cabin safety experts and members of trade unions.”
--Air & Space
“Soar through the pleasures and plights of females in flight with this highly informative read. . . . With a no nonsense writing style, well-documented evidence, and telling photos (marvel at the hot pants uniform on page 183), Barry demonstrates how flight attendants’ long history of organizing and fighting for their rights made them crusaders for all women and key contributors to second-wave feminism. After reading this you’ll step on a plane wanting to salute any veteran attendants for their journey as you embark on your own.”
--Paula Wehmeyer, Bust
“[Femininity in Flight] combines all the strengths of a scholarly monograph—extensive archival research, a solid historiographical framework—with the kind of stylish layout and eye-catching illustration more common in books for the general reader. And Barry writes with clarity and wit. She tells a complicated story, but engrossingly.”
--Joshua Zeitz , American Heritage
"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 stewardesses 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, Times Higher Education Supplement
“Barry shows how ‘pink-collar’ activists among the ranks of flight attendants worked to improve the status of their profession. . . . Barry argues that the struggle to win professional respect was made particularly difficult by the conflict between the effortless glamour that attendants were expected to project and the tedium and difficulty of their actual responsibilities.”
--The New Yorker
“Femininity in Flight tells a fascinating story of how technology and femininity appropriated each other’s glamour—and how aviation and its handmaidens eventually descended from the clouds to become an ordinary industry and an ordinary group of workers.”
--American Heritage of Invention and Technology
“[A] well-documented history. . . . 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.”
--Roz Kaveney, Times Literary Supplement
“Barry successfully relates a sympathetic portrait of flight attendants while tactfully maintaining an objective analysis of their particular position within aviation. Her comprehensive portrait of flight attendants as safety professionals taken for granted by abusive passengers, exploited by air carriers with an eye on the bottom line and subjected to standards of appearance (including weight control, former age caps and marriage bans) makes the reader care about them and their long history for recognition and change within the profession. . . .”
--Lacey Dunham, Feminist Review blog
“[A] history of how gracious stewardesses turned into sexy air hostesses and then into tough, grumpy flight attendants. . . . It is striking, and shameful, that women had to leave their jobs once they married, were often subject to snap underwear inspections and had to retire at 32. . . . Much more interesting is the way in which the status and reputation of cabin crews mirrored other social changes.”
--The Economist
“Readers get a comprehensive, scholarly look at an occupation originally based almost entirely on cultural expectations of early 20th-century white, middle-class femininity-beauty, charm, domesticity,
and concern for the comfort of others-yet requiring a great deal of courage, resourcefulness, and hard work mainly hidden from public view. . . . This thoroughly researched work will suit both academic and
lay readers. Recommended for all history and women's studies collections.”
--Library Journal
“[A] monograph that will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students, as well as general readers who will enjoy her accessible prose and well-organized chapters.”
--Vicki Howard, EH.Net
“[T]he era of the ‘glamour of the skies’ is gone for good. Barry does a good job of charting that final change, as she does overall in describing the massive changes an industry still less than a century old has undergone.”
--Natalie Bennett, Blogcritics Magazine
Product Description
“In her new chic outfit, she looks like anything but a stewardess working. But work she does. Hard, too. And you hardly know it.” So read the text of a 1969 newspaper advertisement for Delta Airlines featuring a picture of a brightly smiling blond stewardess striding confidently down the aisle of an airplane cabin to deliver a meal.
From the moment the first stewardesses took flight in 1930, flight attendants became glamorous icons of femininity. For decades, airlines hired only young, attractive, unmarried white women. They marketed passenger service aloft as an essentially feminine exercise in exuding charm, looking fabulous, and providing comfort. The actual work that flight attendants did—ensuring passenger safety, assuaging fears, serving food and drinks, all while conforming to airlines’ strict rules about appearance—was supposed to appear effortless; the better that stewardesses performed by airline standards, the more hidden were their skills and labor. Yet today flight attendants are acknowledged safety experts; they have their own unions. Gone are the no-marriage rules, the mandates to retire by thirty-two. In Femininity in Flight, Kathleen M. Barry tells the history of flight attendants, tracing the evolution of their glamorized image as ideal women and their activism as trade unionists and feminists.
Barry argues that largely because their glamour obscured their labor, flight attendants unionized in the late 1940s and 1950s to demand recognition and respect as workers and self-styled professionals. In the 1960s and 1970s, flight attendants were one of the first groups to take advantage of new laws prohibiting sex discrimination. Their challenges to airlines’ restrictive employment policies and exploitive marketing practices (involving skimpy uniforms and provocative slogans such as “fly me”) made them high-profile critics of the cultural mystification and economic devaluing of “women’s work.” Barry combines attention to the political economy and technology of the airline industry with perceptive readings of popular culture, newspapers, industry publications, and first-person accounts. In so doing, she provides a potent mix of social and cultural history and a major contribution to the history of women’s work and working women’s activism.
See all Editorial Reviews
“Barry’s feminist analysis is clever and somewhat poignant, for it sees that in the role of the air hostess a vision of female selfhood and freedom has been forced to rub, rather uncomfortably, against a rather ogling set of corporate requirements.”
--Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books
“This well-researched book traces the evolution of flight attendants from glamorous sky queens to cabin safety experts and members of trade unions.”
--Air & Space
“Soar through the pleasures and plights of females in flight with this highly informative read. . . . With a no nonsense writing style, well-documented evidence, and telling photos (marvel at the hot pants uniform on page 183), Barry demonstrates how flight attendants’ long history of organizing and fighting for their rights made them crusaders for all women and key contributors to second-wave feminism. After reading this you’ll step on a plane wanting to salute any veteran attendants for their journey as you embark on your own.”
--Paula Wehmeyer, Bust
“[Femininity in Flight] combines all the strengths of a scholarly monograph—extensive archival research, a solid historiographical framework—with the kind of stylish layout and eye-catching illustration more common in books for the general reader. And Barry writes with clarity and wit. She tells a complicated story, but engrossingly.”
--Joshua Zeitz , American Heritage
"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 stewardesses 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, Times Higher Education Supplement
“Barry shows how ‘pink-collar’ activists among the ranks of flight attendants worked to improve the status of their profession. . . . Barry argues that the struggle to win professional respect was made particularly difficult by the conflict between the effortless glamour that attendants were expected to project and the tedium and difficulty of their actual responsibilities.”
--The New Yorker
“Femininity in Flight tells a fascinating story of how technology and femininity appropriated each other’s glamour—and how aviation and its handmaidens eventually descended from the clouds to become an ordinary industry and an ordinary group of workers.”
--American Heritage of Invention and Technology
“[A] well-documented history. . . . 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.”
--Roz Kaveney, Times Literary Supplement
“Barry successfully relates a sympathetic portrait of flight attendants while tactfully maintaining an objective analysis of their particular position within aviation. Her comprehensive portrait of flight attendants as safety professionals taken for granted by abusive passengers, exploited by air carriers with an eye on the bottom line and subjected to standards of appearance (including weight control, former age caps and marriage bans) makes the reader care about them and their long history for recognition and change within the profession. . . .”
--Lacey Dunham, Feminist Review blog
“[A] history of how gracious stewardesses turned into sexy air hostesses and then into tough, grumpy flight attendants. . . . It is striking, and shameful, that women had to leave their jobs once they married, were often subject to snap underwear inspections and had to retire at 32. . . . Much more interesting is the way in which the status and reputation of cabin crews mirrored other social changes.”
--The Economist
“Readers get a comprehensive, scholarly look at an occupation originally based almost entirely on cultural expectations of early 20th-century white, middle-class femininity-beauty, charm, domesticity,
and concern for the comfort of others-yet requiring a great deal of courage, resourcefulness, and hard work mainly hidden from public view. . . . This thoroughly researched work will suit both academic and
lay readers. Recommended for all history and women's studies collections.”
--Library Journal
“[A] monograph that will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students, as well as general readers who will enjoy her accessible prose and well-organized chapters.”
--Vicki Howard, EH.Net
“[T]he era of the ‘glamour of the skies’ is gone for good. Barry does a good job of charting that final change, as she does overall in describing the massive changes an industry still less than a century old has undergone.”
--Natalie Bennett, Blogcritics Magazine
Product Description
“In her new chic outfit, she looks like anything but a stewardess working. But work she does. Hard, too. And you hardly know it.” So read the text of a 1969 newspaper advertisement for Delta Airlines featuring a picture of a brightly smiling blond stewardess striding confidently down the aisle of an airplane cabin to deliver a meal.
From the moment the first stewardesses took flight in 1930, flight attendants became glamorous icons of femininity. For decades, airlines hired only young, attractive, unmarried white women. They marketed passenger service aloft as an essentially feminine exercise in exuding charm, looking fabulous, and providing comfort. The actual work that flight attendants did—ensuring passenger safety, assuaging fears, serving food and drinks, all while conforming to airlines’ strict rules about appearance—was supposed to appear effortless; the better that stewardesses performed by airline standards, the more hidden were their skills and labor. Yet today flight attendants are acknowledged safety experts; they have their own unions. Gone are the no-marriage rules, the mandates to retire by thirty-two. In Femininity in Flight, Kathleen M. Barry tells the history of flight attendants, tracing the evolution of their glamorized image as ideal women and their activism as trade unionists and feminists.
Barry argues that largely because their glamour obscured their labor, flight attendants unionized in the late 1940s and 1950s to demand recognition and respect as workers and self-styled professionals. In the 1960s and 1970s, flight attendants were one of the first groups to take advantage of new laws prohibiting sex discrimination. Their challenges to airlines’ restrictive employment policies and exploitive marketing practices (involving skimpy uniforms and provocative slogans such as “fly me”) made them high-profile critics of the cultural mystification and economic devaluing of “women’s work.” Barry combines attention to the political economy and technology of the airline industry with perceptive readings of popular culture, newspapers, industry publications, and first-person accounts. In so doing, she provides a potent mix of social and cultural history and a major contribution to the history of women’s work and working women’s activism.
See all Editorial Reviews