Such victories had lasting impact. “The stewardess rebellion changed the entire airline industry, one of the largest businesses in the United States,” Wulfhart writes. Wulfhart writes that these women were credited with playing a pioneering role against sex discrimination.
And yet reading the details feels like pouring salt in a very old wound that has yet to heal; it is dramatic, invigorating and instructive as a textbook example of the courage, ingenuity and persistence it takes to effect such progress — but it’s also incredibly painful.
The day I finished reading “The Great Stewardess Rebellion,” headlines described the Idaho legislation that criminalizes abortion after six weeks, including any termination of ectopic pregnancies, which can be fatal to women carrying them. The new law encourages vigilantes and medicalized persecution. Its sponsor states that if a woman is raped by ten of her siblings, they can each sue her for $20,000 to end any pregnancy that resulted from violent criminal assaults on her body. A $200,000 bonus for the rapist’s bounty-hunting relatives — your tax dollars at work!
Other headlines cover the current epidemic of “unruly passengers,” a euphemism for the rage-filled travelers who are punching, sexually assaulting, urinating on, knocking out the teeth of and verbally abusing flight attendants. To ensure that the plane landed safely, more than one offender had to be duct-taped. Today’s routine crises require a lot more than a pretty face from the nation’s beleaguered flight attendants.
But even though flight attendants can now get married, grow older and gain a few pounds without losing their jobs, women’s bodies everywhere are still being policed by bureaucracies that insist on the right to control their physical and sexual autonomy. The infrastructure of patriarchy isn’t something we dismantled a long time ago; it’s just as savagely implacable as it was when stewardesses got organized. Even if we’ve come a long way, baby, most of us don’t need a travel writer to tell us what a long, hard way we still have to go.
Wulfhart’s epilogue reminds us of the enduring truth that the stewardess rebellion bestowed as a key component of its legacy: “By standing up to an industry that preferred its women docile, pretty and young, they demonstrated to the world that power was available — you just had to reach out and grab it.”
Leslie Bennetts is a journalist and author of “The Feminine Mistake” and “Last Girl Before Freeway.” A frequent speaker on women’s economic security issues, she is working on a book about women in the second half of life.
Source: NY Times