In the early 1970s, when I was at primary school, an aura of glamour and excitement still clung, at least in childish minds, and the school library books that we read, to the "profession" of "air hostess". It meant flying around the world, meeting lots of people, and always looking like they did in the airline adverts. Our parents, however, already knew better - "trolley dollies" were merely "flying waitresses", they told their girls (for it was of course the girls who recited this dream - boys wanted to fly far higher, to be astronauts).
In this case mother did know best, for as Kathleen M. Barry writes in Feminity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants, there had been a transition in the sixties, with the arrival of the jet age. She begins, however, at the beginning, with the interesting comparison of rail and air travel in America at the dawning of the age of the latter. (This book is entirely US in focus, but it was America that seems to have set the model for much of the airline industry.)
The early commercial flights were competing with luxury rail travel, where travelers, mostly men, could expect attentive service from black Pullman porters (and some maids, who served female travelers).
Racist custom and the Pullman Company's own advertising, though eager to portray attendants' competence, invited white rail passengers to expect racial dominance as part of the service they purchased. Yet ... the commercial basis of this unequal relationship was explicit: passengers were expected to tip and had to pay for meals, drinks and the use of pillows. In fact, part of the "George" stereotype was his shameless pursuit of tips...The airlines distinguished themselves from this by making flying an entirely "white" experience. (Barry says they tried to even stop black passengers buying tickets.) Initially it was young white professional men, forbidden from taking tips, who acted as stewards, but then on February 12, 1930 Ellen Church, a nurse and trained pilot (who of course had no hope of employment as such) approached Boeing Air Transport (a predecessor of United), which was considering using young Filipino men for stewarding, and persuaded a manager that nurses would make ideal cabin crew. He was convinced, seeing the public relations potential, plus "the value they would be to us not only in the neater and nicer method of serving food and looking out for the passengers' welfare, but also in an emergency". (Although the airlines shouldn't advertise they were trained nurses, since that would suggest danger.)
Article comments