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Labor unrest swept across the airline industry during the long days of the summer of 1976. Flight attendants for the major carriers were demanding double-digit pay increases and shorter hours, threatening to strike during the peak vacation season if managers failed to comply. Though flight attendant contract talks brought unprecedented acrimony that summer, workplace activism was not new to the trade. A decade earlier, flight attendants—whom most airlines still called “stewardesses”—had joined forces with an increasingly vocal and well-organized women’s liberation movement to demand an end to overtly sexist employment practices. The coalition prevailed on many of its demands, and by 1975 most companies had been forced to drop earlier requirements that all stewardesses be young, single, childless white women.1 But rather than placate the workforce, activists’ advances stoked deeper grievances among the flight attendant ranks. By the mid-1970s, discontent had spread from its original roots among a relatively narrow group of committed feminists, lesbians, and union militants to a wide swath of workforce. Front-line American Airlines flight attendants, for example, rejected two contract proposals from management in 1975 and 1976, voting to strike in pursuit of large wage increases rather than compromise with the company’s executives. During the American standoff, National Airlines flight attendants shuttered their employer with a four-month work stoppage.2 Six months later, flight attendants for TWA made headlines as they came within hours of a walkout during the travel rush on Bicentennial Weekend, 1976.
Front-line activists embraced militant new strategies as they turned their attention to the vast economic inequities in their workplace. Flight attendants recognized that even after the successful pushback against overt sex discrimination in the early 1970s, workers at some carriers were still paid 20 percent less than the next-lowest-paid group of airline employees.3 Retirement benefits widened the compensation gap, as flight attendants were denied the lucrative pensions guaranteed to pilots, machinists, and ground crews. Thus, despite management’s decision to grant activists some concessions around age limits and marriage restrictions, the airlines remained firmly committed to the gendered disparities in wages, benefits, and work rules that had defined the labor economics of the industry since its fledgling days.
Although the picket line and the bargaining table had become the primary venues for struggle between activists and the airlines, the roots of the flight attendant pay gap lay far beyond the airline industry. Inequitable compensation was a consequence of a set of ideas about gender—in particular, about domesticity—that have organized industrial society for two centuries. With the rise of economies based on wage labor, the cultural value of domesticity became a mechanism to mark the workingman as the primary breadwinner for the family and to frame women as dependent on their husbands for economic sustenance. In her study of the rise of the British labor movement in the first half of the nineteenth century, historian Anna Clark argues that the elevation of domesticity was not a natural consequence of industrialization. Instead, it was the result of the strategic efforts of male trade unionists who hoped to benefit from the emerging bourgeois values of the era.4 Demanding pay increases that would allow workingmen to support wives and children, labor activists strove to make domesticity both a reward for men’s long days in the factory and a mechanism to prove that the working class shared the middle class’s commitment to family values such as marriage and monogamy.5 As domesticity became a payback for hard work and a tool for sexual regulation, working-class women, who could have been imagined as political agents and active participants in the labor movement, were reimagined as passive, dependent wives.
The ideology of domesticity that Clark describes would haunt the U.S. airline industry as workers unionized a hundred years later. In the two decades after 1930, unions made rapid gains in the trades that management had restricted to men: pilots, machinists, ramp service work, and at some carriers, ticket agents. Skill levels varied greatly between those job classifications; most pilots joined major carriers with years of military flying experience, while many baggage handlers were hired straight out of high school with no advanced training. The ideology of domesticity would help union activists win robust wages for airline men on both sides of the skill divide.6 Leveraging the argument that all men deserved the economic resources to be responsible breadwinners for their families, airline unions secured regular raises, free insurance, and pension benefits for both elite and working-class airline men in the years after World War II.
As domesticity helped activists justify high wages for workingmen, it allowed labor leaders and managers to excuse stewardesses’ subordinate position in their workplace and in their unions. Unlike pilots and machinists, who negotiated their own contracts, male higher-ups from the major airline unions represented stewardesses at the bargaining table. At Pan Am, TWA, and Eastern, for example, leaders of the Transport Workers Union sat across from management in stewardess contract talks, while pilot leaders bargained for stewardesses at United, Western, and Braniff. Although collective bargaining entitled many stewardesses to better wages than their counterparts in teaching, clerical work, and other feminized jobs, union higher-ups’ and managers’ shared cultural assumption that stewardesses were not breadwinners meant that bargaining sessions stopped far short of those for pilots, machinists, and ground crews. Therefore, despite the fact that airlines required most international stewardesses to speak a second language and expected them to draw on the middle-class social skills that came with a college education, they were among the lowest-paid employees on most carriers’ property by the 1950s.
With the rise of the women’s, gay, and lesbian liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, airline managers and union leaders faced a bold new challenge to the stewardess wage gap and to the ideologies of domesticity that upheld it. A new generation of rank-and-file activists—who rejected the gendered term “stewardess” and called themselves “flight attendants”—united around these emerging 1970s critiques of heterosexuality, patriarchy, and domesticity. For the new movement, challenging sexual regulation would require transforming flight attendants from men’s economic dependents into breadwinners for their families. A living wage, a pension, and affordable insurance were, activists argued, necessary to sustain the broader forms of kinship that feminists and gay liberationists were advocating. Activists’ bid for a family wage touched off a searing new conflict with the airlines in the mid-1970s, since managers remained culturally committed to the ideology of domesticity and to the system of low-wage women’s labor that it had justified. This chapter traces the dispute between flight attendants, their unions, and the airlines as it came to an impasse in the mid-1970s.
Stewardess Labor as a Route out of Domesticity
For the activists who confronted their employers in 1976, airline work had always been a reaction to traditional family values. The vast majority of movement participants joined the industry in the decade after 1965. Though Asian American, Latina, African American, and Native American women had picketed, lobbied, and litigated for their right to work the skies, middle-class white women continued to make up the majority of new recruits at the major carriers. Mid-twentieth-century political economy and cultural values would ordinarily have channeled such women toward suburban domesticity. G.I. Bill benefits that guaranteed low-interest suburban home mortgages to white male veterans7 and union contracts that provided a family wage for white male industrial workers underwrote white women’s primary social role as wives and mothers.8 Although the nuclear family and the male breadwinner were particularly influential cultural forms in the immediate postwar period, historians of the twentieth century have demonstrated a longer-term trend in which a growing number of middle-class white women were staying single, getting divorced, opting not to have children, and otherwise rejecting the conventions of domesticity.9 Those who worked outside the home, however, often faced a workplace structured around the same patriarchal inequities as the domestic sphere. In nursing, clerical work, teaching, and other feminized trades, women were low-paid subordinates to male higher-ups and had little physical or professional mobility.
The stewardess profession provided an enticing alternative to the other forms of feminized labor. Unlike teaching, nursing, or administrative work, becoming a stewardess gave middle-class white women unprecedented access to an urban, cosmopolitan world, one usually reserved for businessmen. Stewardesses’ connection to major cities was a consequence of the operational structure of the airline industry in the mid-twentieth century. Major carriers based flight crews at airports with the highest numbers of flights. While smaller, local-service airlines stationed their workforces in midsized cities, including Portland, San Antonio, and Indianapolis, the vast majority of stewardesses lived in and flew out of the largest cities in the United States: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Given historically low urban real estate prices in an age when the white middle class had left for the suburbs, many stewardesses could afford to live downtown in their domicile city. Freed from the physical and financial responsibilities of home and car ownership and living in neighborhoods with twenty-four-hour services and entertainment, stewardesses could focus time between trips on their social lives. Kathy Lynch, who joined United Airlines’ Chicago crew base in the late 1960s, recalls a downtown cosmopolitan world as a key reward of the early days of her career:
It was a gracious way of life. We had nice apartments. I had a beautiful apartment in a building with a doorman a block from the Water Tower in Downtown Chicago. One of my first trips had a twenty-four-hour layover in Boston—a dream for a kid who had never been out of California. We stayed downtown at the Parker House, in big nice rooms.10
Most major airlines gave stewardesses up to four days off in their home domicile cities between trips. But as Lynch indicates, when stewardesses were not home, they were flying trips that lasted between two days and two weeks, punctuated by layovers in other major metropolises both in the United States and abroad. Janet Lhuillier, who worked TWA’s European and Mediterranean routes out of New York and Boston in the early 1970s, recalls the pleasure of overseas stopovers between flights:
We did these trips that went Boston-Paris-Rome-Athens. We had a ball. It was fabulous. . . . They had us eating for free in Athens. There were two restaurants solely paid for by the airline. This little place called the Kasbah. We would just order all these hors d’oeuvres, and the pilots would join us.11
Dining with friends and coworkers at a sidewalk cafe in Athens, Janet Lhuillier had been carried by her airline career far beyond the boundaries of domesticity. In an age when the dominant culture steered her white middle-class peers toward the private sphere and the suburban kitchen, Lhuillier spent much of her time in the hotels, bars, restaurants, and airports that most often defined men’s urban worlds.
While airline work gave stewardesses unprecedented physical and social mobility, the job also came with significant costs. Most importantly, stewardessing transgressed dominant cultural assumptions that young white women should marry and domesticate, a transgression that implicated both individual stewardesses and the airlines that employed them. Therefore, when airline executives and union higher-ups sat down to negotiate contracts for stewardesses, they used the collective bargaining process to mitigate the anxieties surrounding women’s airline work. By paying stewardesses far less than their male counterparts, by discouraging lifetime employment through withholding longevity pay, and by locking stewardesses out of the most lucrative retirement benefits, the airlines could compel individual women to quit their jobs and get married, because doing so would be the only means to long-term financial stability. Union contracts locked these inequities into airline labor economics. In 1972, for example, the average unionized baggage handler at TWA made 24.4 percent more than the average stewardess even though the stewardess job required more education and training.12
By 1970, the airlines’ strategy had begun to backfire. The low wages and scant benefits that were supposed to regulate stewardesses’ sexuality ended up amplifying the profession’s transgressiveness. Denied a family wage, stewardesses lacked the economic resources that helped their male counterparts comply with the ideology of domesticity. When the family wage came to the airline industry just after World War II, breadwinner paychecks were meant not just to pay the bills but also to impart cultural values in workers. Earning enough money to buy a house, to save for children’s college educations, and to invest for retirement, airline men learned the values of the middle class: thrift, self-denial, deferred gratification, and personal responsibility. Meanwhile, stewardesses were locked out of home ownership and unable to build a nest egg for retirement.
Organizing their lives around limited economic resources and unable to count on lifetime employment, many stewardesses built kinship networks that looked far different from those of male breadwinners or domesticated wives. Staying single, living with friends, and using the household as a space to pool resources, stewardesses often spent what little money remained at the end of the pay period on personal pleasures rather than on planning for the future. Janet Lhuillier describes the social and economic network she built while flying out of TWA’s New York base in the early 1970s:
My girlfriend and I were living with my United friend—six of us in a two-bedroom in Manhattan. But really nice. It was uptown—over by Gracie Mansion. None of us were rich. . . . The problem is that we didn’t fly that much so I spent all my money! I was always out doing something!13
Instead of narrating her household economy in terms of scarcity, Lhuillier recalled sharing a two-bedroom apartment with six friends with great fondness, a time when her life was organized around self-indulgence and fun. Kaye Chandler, who was hired onto TWA’s San Francisco crew base in 1968, was even more explicit about the pleasure that came with her departure from domesticity:
In 1968 and 1969 I got really involved with skiing up at Tahoe with some people from the fraternities at San Jose State. When I got based in San Francisco for TWA, I rented a room up at Tahoe and I also rented a house down in Santa Cruz. I would go between the two places and fly in the middle. It was a party. I had lots of cars! Cars were easy, and gas was 25 cents a gallon. I was always involved in my skiing and my sports, and I always had a bit of a different drummer going. When my girlfriends and I would get bored, we would take off and go to Sun Valley or go to Aspen for a week. It was really pretty wild. I didn’t think anything of jumping off cliffs with my skis.14
Chandler describes a lifeworld normally reserved for men in the late 1960s, one that rejects the responsibilities of domesticity and family in favor of a transient world of sports, cars, and socializing. In a narrative about mobility, adventure, and pleasure, Chandler offers neither an explicitly feminist critique nor an open indictment of the way that sexism limited women’s horizons in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Chandler, Lhuillier, and Lynch represent a new generation of women who were using airline work to create social and economic networks that, at least for a time, allowed women to live far beyond the boundaries of the world that traditional family values prescribed for them.
Stewardesses built these networks during a time of rapid social change. Participants in a new upsurge of feminist activism, and in an increasingly visible gay and lesbian liberation movement, were politicizing the decision to stay single, to cohabitate with friends or lovers, and to reject traditional domesticity. The kinship networks of Chandler, Lhuillier, and other stewardesses looked much like those that the new social movements were advocating as a means to challenge the cultural norms of the era. Women’s, gay, and lesbian activism would, then, connect stewardesses to a broad cultural debate that would transform their workplace as the 1970s evolved.
The Struggle over Dissident Women’s Sexualities in the Airline Industry
With the introduction of the four-hundred-seat Boeing 747 and its eighteen-person cabin crew in December 1969, a growing number of young women chose airline work as a route out of conventional domesticity. But as stewardesses reported for duty at new “jumbo jet” bases such as Miami, New York, and San Francisco, they would do so on the airlines’ terms. Managerial policy and union contracts tightly controlled who could be hired, how long a stewardess could remain employed, and how much she could earn. Individual stewardesses thus had little control over the economic resources necessary to sustain the households and kinship networks they built during their first years on the job. As the women’s liberation movement made an increasingly bold intervention in political debates, however, stewardesses gained a powerful new means to challenge the airlines’ unilateral control of their workplace. By 1970, activists were demanding that front-line stewardesses—and not just managers or male union leaders—shape airline compensation and operational practices.
Particularly visible among these new dissidents was Paula Mariedaughter, who joined TWA in 1968. From her first days at the airline, Mariedaughter was known far beyond her Kansas City crew base. In 1970, she began appearing in a series of glossy, full-page advertisements in the New York Times. Wearing false eyelashes and a hairpiece-enhanced bouffant, Mariedaughter smiled for the camera in the first-class cabin of a TWA Boeing 707. She motioned to a lavish spread: platters of appetizers; a full pork roast with candied fruit; a sterling silver coffee service; pies, cakes, and tarts; and a vast selection of wines, spirits, and cordials.15 Mariedaughter was one of several flight attendants—or hostesses, as TWA still called them—chosen to publicize a redesign of TWA’s renowned onboard experience, called “Ambassador Service.” To enhance the visibility of the brand refresh, TWA hired the famous Italian fashion designer Valentino to create a new wardrobe for hostesses. Mariedaughter modeled the winter uniform, which included a tight yet angular, deep purple, long-sleeved dress with gold buttons and black lace-up go-go boots. Her image ran in both the New York Times spread and glossy internal publications that broadcast Valentino’s work to pilots, managers, and other high-ranking TWA employees.
Although advertising agencies used her image to project a sexualized, cosmopolitan version of traditional femininity, Paula Mariedaughter joined the airline industry as part of an intentional effort to reject conventional gender roles. Raised in Miami Springs, Florida, in the 1950s in a G.I. Bill–financed ranch house with married parents and three brothers, Mariedaughter was the child of a father who wanted her “to be a respectable woman and a schoolteacher.” The women in Mariedaughter’s life, however, provided her with consistent—though clearly subtle—role modeling of alternatives to her father’s traditionalism. “My mother was never one of these women who said, ‘When are you getting married?’” Mariedaughter recalled. “She wanted me to go to college.” Recognizing her mother’s insistence that a young woman’s life should be more than a rehearsal for marriage and domesticity, Mariedaughter argued, “My mother wanted to give me wings.” In addition to having a close relationship with her mother, Mariedaughter often spent time with an aunt in nearby Miami Beach who always told her to “go out and have a good time and do whatever you want to do.” When that aunt’s sister got pregnant in high school a generation earlier, the aunt was sent away from her family to avoid the public sexual shaming that would follow her sister. Responding to her aunt and her mother’s explicit hope that she would have more opportunities and experience less sexual repression than the earlier generation of women, Mariedaughter quit her administrative job in a Veterans Administration hospital in 1968 and pursued a career as a TWA hostess.16
Paula Mariedaughter’s arrival in the airline industry would immediately carry her far away from domesticity. At 5'11", Mariedaughter was taller than most women who applied to fly for TWA. Her height provided an initial barrier to employment. Unlike white women of average body size, whom employment recruiters could hire on the spot in any city, unusually tall women—and all women of color who sought employment—were subjected to a second and more rigorous round of prescreening by management higher-ups in Kansas City. Mariedaughter passed the second test and quickly turned her height into an asset for mobility in the company. Soon after she was hired, Mariedaughter began taking special assignments that required her to don her uniform and enrich non-airline venues with the style and allure of 1960s jet-setting. When a Miami-based department store rolled out a new makeup line, for example, Mariedaughter and several of her peers got in uniform, sprayed up their bouffants, and posed with the product.17 By 1970, when she was selected to model for the Ambassador Service rollout, Mariedaughter had built a career that had, in her mother’s words, “given her wings,” becoming an official corporate representative for that physical, social, and sexual mobility.
As she used the zeitgeist of 1960s jet-setting to her own advantage, Mariedaughter began a personal and political transformation that would soon provide a far greater challenge to the dominant culture than the one TWA sold with her image. From her first days on the job, Mariedaughter openly contested traditional family values. “When I started flying, that book Open Marriage was popular,” she remembered, referring to Nena and George O’Neill’s best-selling 1972 critique of monogamous marriage. “It was about how one person can’t meet all your needs, [and how] you could have a wonderful marriage with other relationships. And I was buying into that.” Mariedaughter recalls that as she began to push the boundaries of middle-class women’s sexuality, having multiple relationships with older and sometimes married men, she began to yearn for more fundamental changes in her life. “I just didn’t connect [with those men],” she insisted. “But then women’s liberation came along.” Mariedaughter argues that the upsurge of feminist activism in the early 1970s shifted her political trajectory, allowing her to build new connections not to businessmen she met on the airplane but to the women she worked with.
The women’s liberation movement would help Mariedaughter answer pressing new questions that social and physical mobility were raising. In the early 1970s, many of those questions surrounded a woman who was a friend and coworker from TWA. Mariedaughter recalled the relationship:
We used to fly together as often as possible. And if we couldn’t fly together, we would bring each other presents. She used to bring me these lemon bars. She was tall like me. Had been married briefly and was divorced. She and I took a trip to Atlanta together. We had been out all day, and that evening we came home. I was feeling really close—and excited about being with her. The first thing I know is she wants to call her boyfriend. I felt so left out. That was her priority. But she was enough for me.
Though anxiety and pain surface in her memories of the period, that friendship brought Mariedaughter a new way of thinking about her sexuality and her future. Because of this connection, Mariedaughter began to recognize that she wanted to organize her personal and political life around same-sex desire, intimacy, and camaraderie.
Mariedaughter would soon find those connections in organized feminist activism. In 1973, she attended the founding convention of the Stewardesses for Women’s Rights, an organization linking front-line stewardesses to the women’s liberation movement. As she volunteered to be the lower Midwest coordinator for the new group, Mariedaughter gleaned two resources: a set of texts that provided a radical and lesbian feminist framework to interpret her life on the job, and connections to principled feminist workers who would be role models for her own leadership at TWA.18 With those resources, Mariedaughter began what she calls a “transformation” in the workplace and beyond. First and foremost, she did away with the hairpieces, the false eyelashes, and the manicured nails that had featured in glossy magazines just a few years earlier. She began going to work without makeup, presenting her body as it naturally appeared. Second, Mariedaughter changed her name. Paula, after all, was not Paula Mariedaughter when she appeared in the New York Times in 1970. She was Paula Nielson then, named after her father. Unlike so many of her colleagues who would leave their airline jobs to marry and to take a husband’s name, Paula stayed at work and used her mother’s name—Marie—to create a new matrilineal surname. Finally, Mariedaughter began to confirm already widespread workplace rumors about her sexuality and came out as a lesbian. By early 1974, Paula Mariedaughter was going to work as an outspoken, visibly identifiable leader in the women’s liberation movement.
Mariedaughter was not alone. At every major airline, a generation of self-identified feminist flight attendants was coming together to challenge the economic and cultural terms of their employment. Their activism would create both new tensions and new solidarities in the airline industry, workplace politics that were particularly evident in Mariedaughter’s journey through the early and mid-1970s. Soon after she began her personal transformation, for example, an aggressive, openly antifeminist TWA captain kicked her off his aircraft for insubordination. After departure from Washington National on a multistop flight to Kansas City, the captain berated Mariedaughter for her natural appearance and ordered her to apply lipstick. Mariedaughter refused. Stranded at an en-route stopover in Saint Louis after the captain and the rest of the crew departed, Mariedaughter called her union, and rank-and-file activists soon rallied to her defense. Recognizing the growing militancy of front-line activists, TWA quickly backed down, dismissing the captain’s insubordination charge, reinstating Mariedaughter without discipline, and compensating her for the lost flight pay.
Mariedaughter prevailed partially because of the advocacy of Mary Ellen Miller, an increasingly visible and outspoken rank-and-file leader of TWA’s flight attendant union. Speaking in clipped, matter-of-fact sentences, Miller recalled that she first applied for a job as a flight attendant as part of an effort to leave a troubled relationship:
I came [to TWA] because I got married rather than stay in college. I had a scholastic and music scholarship, but I made a bad decision to drop out and get married. It did not work out and was a bad situation. I needed to safely get out and get away.19
Soon after she arrived at TWA, however, dominant cultural values about sexuality put her in another dangerous situation, one that sparked her career as a union activist. Miller recalled:
It was 1972 and I got pregnant. I decided I was going to have the baby. I decided I was going to keep flying—even though we had to inform them right away, I waited so I could keep flying. They grounded me without pay. I got pissed and started writing letters to the Women’s Equity Action League. I wrote letters all over the place. I had the baby in 1973 and started starving myself and doing all sorts of dangerous things so I could get back to work. I had no other income. It just made me madder.
Because the bodily changes associated with the gestation process would rupture the fantasy of sexual availability without consequences, most airlines strictly forbade flight attendants from flying while pregnant, grounding them without paid maternity leave. Miller, like many other flight attendants who got pregnant, was single and the sole breadwinner for her household. Losing her paycheck at the moment she needed it most, women like Miller were forced either to seek abortions, which were still illegal in many states in 1972, or to turn to families or boyfriends for economic support. Miller refused both choices and had her daughter on her own. Her anger at being forced to perform difficult physical labor late into her pregnancy and to starve herself to get back to her company-mandated target weight galvanized Miller to become an activist. As a new single mother, Miller joined the women’s liberation movement in Kansas City and got involved with her union to help defend the workplace rights of the women she worked with.
As Mary Ellen Miller and Paula Mariedaughter became feminist union activists in the early 1970s, they encountered two distinct and contradictory political trends in their workplace. On the one hand, activists were energized from a decade of legislative and legal advances against institutionalized sex discrimination. Since the late 1950s, rank-and-file leaders had been using local union infrastructure to file grievances against the airlines’ increasingly restrictive age and marriage limitations.20 Those efforts got a significant boost with the passage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned race- and sex-based discrimination at work. In November 1966, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the new federal agency formed to apply the Civil Rights Act to the workplace, ruled that sex was not a “bona fide occupational qualification” for being a flight attendant.21 With the ruling, the EEOC formally invalidated airline managers’ long-standing legal claim that only young, single, attractive women were qualified to perform the job. Since the EEOC could not seek direct redress from employers, and could only recommend that the U.S. attorney general sue companies that violated the law, relief from overly discriminatory managerial policies came slowly. Nevertheless, as months and years went by, the legal momentum shifted in flight attendants’ favor. In April 1971, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals finally closed the debate, siding with flight attendants and the EEOC in the landmark case Diaz v. Pan Am and ruling that female-only hiring policies resulted in unlawful discrimination.22 Although the Mariedaughter lipstick dispute and the Miller pregnancy grounding demonstrate that individual flight attendants would have to continue to fight overtly sexist policies on a case-by-case basis, flight attendants had gained powerful new resources to win those claims.
On the other hand, even as activists were securing the right to marry and to stay on the job after age thirty, the ideology of domesticity continued to shape the political economy of the profession. Flight attendants were often the lowest-paid airline employees and continued to be denied the longevity pay and retirement benefits that had helped lift so many airline men out of the working class and into the middle class in the mid-twentieth century. Therefore, as they sharpened their political skills by fighting overt sex discrimination, Paula Mariedaughter, Mary Ellen Miller, and other women began to focus those skills on challenging the economic disparities that shaped their work. The new cohort of activists would, in other words, fight sexism by insisting that—just like the men they worked alongside—flight attendants deserved to be breadwinners for their families. But as they transformed themselves from passive dependents into active political agents, feminist leaders would face new unrest at work as tensions mounted not just between activists and managers but between flight attendants, their unions, and their male coworkers.
Gay Men, Suspect Masculinity, and the Ideology of Domesticity
Like the many women who became flight attendants in the 1960s and 1970s, a small but growing number of men had been joining the profession because they wanted to live outside the borders of traditional family. Since flying for a living allowed for ample time away from the watchful eyes of friends and relatives, and since downtown layovers across the globe gave flight attendants access to a variety of sexual cultures, many men who had sex with men used the profession to build social and intimate networks.23 With the emergence of the modern gay rights movement in the 1960s, those men were ever more likely to forge a political identity around those same-sex desires and to mobilize to make the airline industry at least somewhat open to gay men.24
Despite the explicit repression of homosexuality and the strict policing of all male flight attendants’ behavior and appearance, airline managers included male flight attendants in the lucrative compensation and retirement benefit programs that they categorically denied to all flight attendants who were women. That overtly sexist disparity drove a wedge between male flight attendants and their female colleagues, who were becoming ever more committed feminist activists. Thus, as the gay liberation movement was persuading many gay men to join feminists and lesbians in critiquing domesticity and marriage, male privilege would provide a significant obstacle to solidarity between male and female flight attendants in the early and mid-1970s.
Men were a small but tenuously elite subset of the flight attendant ranks, making up less than 4 percent of the total flight attendant population in the late 1960s.25 Nearly two decades earlier, major carriers such as American and United had ceased hiring men to work as stewards on domestic routes. As Phillip Tiemeyer demonstrates in Plane Queer, Cold War anxieties about male homosexuality and effeminacy led managers to cast doubt on any man willing—or even worse, wanting—to perform work imagined to be docile and servile.26 Nevertheless, a few carriers, all with prestigious international route systems, continued to hire male stewards during the Cold War. TWA, for example, had been hiring men since 1946, placing them directly into the lead flight attendant position, one many airlines called the purser.27 Although pursers were not managers and were fully eligible for union membership, they were granted authority that was denied to all other flight attendants: managing in-flight service delivery, directing the cabin crew’s response to emergencies, and acting as a liaison between flight attendants, pilots, and management during trips overseas. By the 1960s, when airliners had gotten much bigger and faster due to jet propulsion, and as flight crews grew with the size of aircraft, TWA’s international flights were staffed with large groups of women in subordinate positions and with one man who was always the most powerful person on the crew. And because management hired men directly into purser positions rather than selecting them from the existing flight attendant ranks, that man was often the youngest and most junior person on the airplane.
With pursers came both the cultural cachet and the suspicion that followed effete masculinity, an anxious allure similar to that which surrounded male wait staff in the era’s five-star restaurants. On the one hand, pursers were assumed to be skilled, technically competent workers. Grooming inductees with the scientific management principles of Fredrick W. Taylor, male purser supervisors clicked stopwatches on in-flight checkrides, timing appetizer deliveries; measuring exact positions of plates, glasses, and silverware on tray presentations; and testing the temperatures of soups, sauces, and steaks as they came out of the galley. On the other hand, pursers’ manhood was always under scrutiny. TWA purser Richard Wagner, who joined the airline in the late 1960s, recalled, “I had a particularly harsh supervisor. He would make pursers light a cigarette and then walk across the office smoking it.” When the applicant reached the far wall, the test would have one of two outcomes: the label of homosexual, which yielded immediate termination, or no label, which allowed the candidate to proceed through the hiring process. Though Wagner and many of his classmates had sex with men and identified as gay, they had to master nuances that would foreground technical competence while covering up the sexually aberrant properties of their manhood.28
Given those aberrations, compensation became a badly needed means for the airlines to stabilize the gender and sexuality of their pursers. At TWA, every man hired was guaranteed the highest possible introductory flight attendant wage and received a pay bump for both international flying and purser flying. Women, conversely, received the lowest possible introductory rate, beginning as regular domestic flight attendants. Thus, on the eve of the unrest in the early 1970s, the starting wage for a purser was $10.16 an hour while flight attendants started at $8.16, a full 20 percent less.29 Purser’s pensions were also artificially inflated, not only because the international and purser bumps were used to calculate retirement benefits for the defined benefit pension plan but also because pursers were provided with a special and separate defined-contribution pension plan to which the company contributed the equivalent of 5 percent of a purser’s annual salary.30 Although pursers’ suspect manhood provoked anxiety and ire from individual managers, pursers were still men. Because the ideology of domesticity brought expectations of a family wage, the airlines designed a particular economic infrastructure to maintain that cultural norm.31
Special hourly and retirement pay for men presented a political problem for flight attendant unions. On September 16, 1975, just as things were heating up between flight attendants and management over a broad array of social and economic issues, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York began hearing arguments in McGuire v. TWA, a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of 2,050 women flight attendants. The complaint alleged that both the company and the flight attendants’ union violated the Equal Pay Act of 1963 by inflating the pay differential between regular flight attendants and pursers and then restricting purser employment to men. Though, after pressure from scores of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaints, women began being promoted to purser in May 1968, McGuire and the plaintiffs wanted compensation for all the years they flew for TWA while being denied promotions because of their sex.32
The case left Peggy McGuire, a flight attendant union activist and the named plaintiff in the lawsuit, in a bitter conflict with Richard Wagner. Along with Arthur Teolis, Buddy Ledger, and many other young men, Wagner had come to a prominent union leadership position through his particular interests as a purser, having helped found and finance an organization called the Purser Benevolent Association for the roughly 5 percent of TWA flight attendants who were men. Many of the association’s causes were undeniably legitimate. Since homophobia, for example, prevented pursers from bumping back into regular domestic flight attendant positions that managers cast as more servile and more emasculating than purser positions, junior male flight attendants had nowhere to go during seasonal or cyclical downturns in the international operation, making them disproportionately likely to be laid off.33 Fifty junior pursers were laid off during the 1970 recession, but the vast majority of them would have kept their jobs if they had been allowed to work one of the other positions on the crew.34 To McGuire and her peers, however, it seemed that pursers were fighting to defend the jobs they had gotten by using sexism to jump the seniority line and then using sexism again to reap special pay and benefits.
Those privileges infuriated McGuire. Rising to power in the labor movement in the 1960s, she had learned to navigate the mid-twentieth-century bureaucracy in an overtly sexist workplace. Although McGuire had become accustomed to accommodating and ignoring the old-fashioned, often overtly sexist ways of the older men who ran the Transport Workers Union, she abhorred the junior pursers, publicly castigating them with allegations that they purposely allowed TWA to continue making contributions to the special purser pension plan even after junior male pursers were demoted to regular flight attendant positions after 1970.35 Though some of her characterizations oversimplified pursers’ principles and politics, the young men were indeed advocates for their own interests, even when those interests ran directly counter to the needs of their female coworkers.
By the early 1970s, the women’s liberation movement was offering a new economic equation that would assuage at least some of the tension between women like Peggy McGuire and pursers like Richard Wagner. Before 1970, the ideology of domesticity had delivered the 4 percent of flight attendants who were men an equitable wage—as long as those men acquiesced to management’s gender policing and closeted their same-sex desires. As women like Mary Ellen Miller joined the movement, however, there was an increasingly vocal call for a fair wage for 100 percent of flight attendants. During a broad-based social transformation, both gay liberationists and women’s liberationists had provided a bold challenge to compulsory heterosexuality and traditional family values. It was becoming ever more apparent to both pursers and feminist activists that the entire flight attendant group stood to benefit from enriching the practice of trade unionism with the ideas of those movements. Therefore, by 1975, Mary Ellen Miller and Richard Wagner were sitting down together on the same side of the bargaining table, two leaders of a new upsurge that was demanding and winning vast improvements in wages, benefits, and work rules for all flight attendants.
The Long, Hot Summer of 1976
Initiating contract talks with all of the major carriers in the mid-1970s, flight attendants closed ranks around a single goal: ending historic pay disparities between themselves and other airline workers. Though flight attendants were firm in their new commitment, their agenda presented a significant strategic challenge. To close the flight attendant pay gap, activists would have to upend the status quo of collective bargaining in the airline business. As they had in many other industries since labor’s watershed advances in the 1930s, airline union higher-ups would meet with company officials to bargain for new contracts every few years. Those agreements had delivered gradual, incremental pay bumps that would help already-high wages cover the rising cost of living. But for a group that had never received the high wages, incrementalism only widened the pay gap between flight attendants and other workers. Thus, flight attendants rejected gradualism at the bargaining table. The new activists leveraged the assertive politics of the women’s, gay, and lesbian liberation movements, insisting that they, too, were breadwinners and that they deserved immediate pay and benefit improvements that would deliver a family wage. Flight attendants’ ambitious new political economic vision set off a conflict between rank-and-file activists, the airlines, and the union men who had always spoken for flight attendants at the bargaining table.
The industry-wide standoff over flight attendant wage disparities heated up at American Airlines in the spring of 1975. On April 18, Transport Workers Union International vice president William Lindner sent a memorandum to the leaders of the TWU locals at American, those for customer service staff, machinists, and flight attendants. To mitigate the high inflation of the mid-1970s, when a delayed contract settlement would dilute the value of raises, Lindner proposed making a deal with management to expedite bargaining. If all TWU locals agreed to limit contract talks to a short list of disputed items, American would agree to give a robust, standardized wage increase to all union members.36 Flight attendants balked at Lindner’s proposal, recognizing that uniform pay increases would preserve historic pay differentials between labor groups and pointing out that the deal would prevent flight attendants from bargaining for work rule improvements that were particularly important to the rank and file. In mid-June, flight attendants united in opposition to Lindner’s initiative, voting down the contract that resulted from expedited bargaining by a 76 percent to 24 percent margin.37
Struggling to recover from the rank-and-file rebuke, Lindner scheduled a series of informational “road shows” about the contract. TWU higher-ups hoped that flight attendants would reverse their votes and approve the deal if they learned more about its contents.38 The problem with Lindner’s solution, however, was that rather than being confused or uninformed, rank-and-file flight attendants were abundantly clear about the source of their displeasure—which was the flight attendant wage gap. Back to the polls flight attendants went when the road shows wrapped up, and back down the contract went, failing membership ratification for a second time in early September.39 Forced out of coalition talks by rank-and-file flight attendants, TWU higher-ups had no choice but to pursue standard collective bargaining with American Airlines in the fall of 1975.
Although the talks were arduous amid mounting tensions between rank-and-file flight attendants, TWU higher-ups, and management, the process received a boost when United Airlines flight attendants locked in a robust new contract just after New Year’s Day, 1976. Two years earlier, flight attendants from United and several smaller carriers had ended their subordinate relationship to the Air Line Pilots Association, breaking off and forming their own union, called the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA). In full control of the economic agenda, AFA activists drove a hard bargain against United Airlines management, winning 15 percent and 11 percent raises in the first two years of the contract and securing improvements in work rules and benefits. The United deal was particularly significant because it delivered full “retroactive pay” for the months that flight attendants had spent hammering out the terms of the pact with management. Retroactive pay had been standard for pilots, machinists, and ground crews for decades. But since management had long assumed that flight attendants were not breadwinners and would not need compensation for diluted wages, the group was rarely awarded such compensation.40
Energized by the victory on retroactive pay at United, TWU higher-ups intensified their pressure on management in flight attendant negotiations at American Airlines. The union soon reached a tentative agreement that—temporarily—ended the dispute between flight attendants and management. On May 27, 1976, flight attendants went back to the polls to vote on a new pact that offered significant improvements to the deal that flight attendants had rejected in September. Depending on seniority, flight attendants would receive a raise of approximately 12 percent in each of the first two years of the contract and enjoy the single hotel rooms and other work rule improvements included in the United deal.41 With the improvements, however, came a significant weakness. American flight attendants would receive only 33 percent retroactive pay for the nine-month delay at the bargaining table, far less than the United group, which won 100 percent back pay. Fiercely debating the merits of a contract that would be the best in their union’s history while still inferior to that of their United colleagues, a majority of American flight attendants opted to accept the proposal, and the referendum passed by a 61 percent to 39 percent margin.42 American flight attendants were, nevertheless, closely watching the intensifying conflict at TWA as they went to work and claimed their raise.
Just one week after the settlement at American, contract talks at TWA came to a precipice, one that would mark a new level of contentiousness in flight attendant labor relations. The dispute reached its first breaking point at the New York Sheraton Hotel on Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue on the long night of June 4, 1976. At midnight eastern daylight time, flight attendants would walk off the job if union leaders failed to cut a deal with management. Night had fallen at Kennedy, Logan, Dulles, and the other major airports of the East Coast. But it was already morning in London, Paris, Rome, and Athens. Any delay in a truce would push crews to abandon their aircraft and set up pickets in those cities and then, once the sun rose, across the United States.43 School had just let out for the summer, and a flight attendant strike at New York’s largest airline would strand tens of thousands of passengers during the busiest travel weeks of the year.
As reporters milled in the lobby waiting for a verdict, talks slid from tense to hostile in the conference room upstairs. The root of the conflict lay in the presence of three parties at the bargaining table in flight attendant labor relations, rather than the two groups normally involved in contract negotiations pursuant to U.S. federal labor law. On the union side of the table were two constituencies. The first were the elected, rank-and-file leaders of Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 551. Representing flight attendants who flew international routes were New York–based pursers Richard Wagner and Buddy Ledger. Kansas City–based Mary Ellen Miller and Los Angeles–based Victoria Frankovich negotiated for flight attendants on domestic routes. Rounding out the group was Arthur Teolis, another purser, who served as president of Local 551.44 Significant divisions existed among the rank-and-file leaders: Wagner, Ledger, and Teolis had been involved in earlier efforts to defend the family wage for pursers only, and the women’s liberation movement—especially after Miller’s experience with pregnancy discrimination—deeply influenced both women’s trade unionism. Nevertheless, all were front-line crew members who had been tasked with a single, unambiguous goal by their peers: closing the flight attendant pay gap.
Next to the rank-and-file leaders were two senior staff from the TWU: International Vice President Fredric Simpson and Vice President for the Air Transport Division Ernie Mitchell. Simpson and Mitchell had come of age a generation earlier as activists in a union that had well-known leftist political leanings and had been committed to cross-racial solidarity among transport workers since the 1930s. Neither had ever been flight attendants, however, and both helped run an organization in which all senior officers were men. But regardless of their personal distance from the sex discrimination that had galvanized a new generation of rank-and-file leaders, Simpson and Mitchell recognized the need to close the flight attendant pay gap. Private correspondence from 1976 reveals that winning a large flight attendant wage increase was the top bargaining priority for the entire union. To achieve their goal, Simpson and Mitchell had hoped to win a large raise in hourly rates at TWA and then use that raise to set a benchmark for Eastern and American Airlines flight attendants, whose contracts became amendable after the TWA agreement.45
Across the table from the two-party union delegation was a management negotiating team facing economic pressures as immediate and as intense as those on the union. With a potential strike just hours away, top TWA brass were present, including Chairman of the Board Charles Tillinghast and President Ed Meyer. TWA was indeed a large carrier, flying more passengers than any airline except industry giant United. But it was by no means too big to fail. The airline lost $121 million in 1975 and continued to struggle with fuel prices that remained twice what they were before the 1973 oil shock.46 With the economy finally emerging from the recession in April 1975, TWA would need to capture the largest possible share of a growing marketplace in order to bolster its revenue streams to cover rising costs. A flight attendant strike during the apex of the U.S.-Europe summer high season would destroy management’s effort to build market share. Therefore, Tillinghast and Meyer came to the bargaining table with the company checkbook open. Recognizing that the social transformation of the 1960s and 1970s had emboldened gay and feminist workers, and aware of activists’ growing insistence on closing the flight attendant pay gap, Tillinghast and Meyer’s team was ready to give everyone a raise and to offer substantive improvements in working conditions. As the deadline approached, management appeared willing to sign a deal that, depending on a flight attendant’s seniority, would provide a pay increase of between 29.2 percent and 44.5 percent over the life of a three-year contract.47
Impressed with the size of the pay hike, union leaders debated how to respond to two key shortcomings in the proposal. First, despite United and American flight attendants’ recent victories, TWA’s offer provided no retroactive pay for the fifteen months the union had spent bargaining for the contract. Flight attendants would earn the new wages only starting the day the union signed the new accord, effectively rewarding the company for spending a year stalling at the bargaining table. Second, the contract lacked firm language on work rule improvements, the regulations entitling flight attendants to shorter days, more time off, and guaranteed pay during delays and cancellations.48 Struggling with the pros and cons of the deal, Local 551 activists took a straw poll on how to move forward, a vote that transcended the ideological positions of the group. Mary Ellen Miller sided with purser Buddy Ledger and moved to compromise with management and accept the deal. Victoria Frankovich, meanwhile, joined forces with purser Richard Wagner and voted to reject the contract and strike. Local president Arthur Teolis stepped in to break the tie, voting with Miller and Ledger to ratify the pact.49
Minutes after the rank-and-file activists expressed their willingness to compromise, the sexist culture of airline unionism jeopardized the settlement. As was then standard practice in most flight attendant unions, Fredric Simpson and Ernie Mitchell got up from the table when they received the nod that the elected flight attendant leaders were ready to agree to a deal. They left the room and joined company brass at a separate bargaining table, where they would iron out the final economic details of the fact. Flight attendants were not allowed to witness or participate in those negotiations. Miller, who watched the union and company men walk out of the room that night in 1976, summarized the situation:
Of course they didn’t think women could handle money effectively . . . so our function was really just to let the TWU people know about flight attendant stuff. But it wasn’t to talk. It wasn’t to negotiate. And it wasn’t to make any of the real decisions. That was all done off in another room somewhere with these guys. [TWU staff] were guys in the mid-1970s, and they had the same expectations of women flight attendants as the company. They thought we were going to be hired and not stick around.50
Miller argued that although Simpson and Mitchell had grown up on the opposite side of a class divide from Tillinghast and Meyer, their common investment in traditional gender roles led them all to assume that flight attendants’ economic stability would lie in their future husbands’ wages and not their own. Presumed to be short-term employees, flight attendants had been routinely denied the full voice in contract negotiations that all of their unionized male peers expected. Corporate executives and union higher-ups had been able to justify that disparity in the culture of the 1950s and early 1960s. But in an age when the ideas of the women’s, gay, and lesbian liberation movements had transformed flight attendants like Mary Ellen Miller, Victoria Frankovich, and Richard Wagner, the disparity was no longer sustainable.
With history weighing on all parties, negotiations devolved into open conflict when the men returned to share the details from their private bargaining session. Though Simpson and Mitchell had gotten TWA to agree formally to all of the previously promised pay and benefit enhancements, the work rule improvements that rank-and-file leaders thought would be included had been stripped from the deal. Work rules would instead be negotiated as part of a separate side letter to be finalized after contract ratification. The glaring problem with that strategy was that if negotiations over the work rules failed, it would be illegal for flight attendants to go on strike in protest, because federal labor law prohibits walkouts when contracts are in effect. If flight attendants signed before midnight, they would forfeit all economic leverage over the work rules negotiations.51
All five flight attendants were furious. They immediately rescinded the 3–2 authorization vote and refused to sign the accord. Simpson and Mitchell blew up, loudly and angrily denouncing the activists for threatening to scuttle the giant raise that could be used to force deals at Eastern and American. Exercising their executive power as top TWU officials, Simpson and Mitchell told management negotiators that they would sign the contract and that the dispute was settled. Miller, Wagner, and the others jumped in the middle and yelled back, pointing to the TWU Constitution, which gave Local 551’s leaders the right to send the accord to all front-line flight attendants for ratification. Simpson and Mitchell could sign the deal now to avert a strike, but it would not be binding until front-line flight attendants voted on it. It would be perfectly legal, Miller and Wagner’s group angrily reminded the union men, for local elected leaders to lobby their coworkers to vote no in the referendum, which would end up sabotaging the agreement.
That, of course, was exactly the strategy that Local 551 activists adopted. Just before midnight, the group poured out of the conference room and into the throng of reporters in the lobby. Flight attendants confirmed that a tentative agreement had been reached, encouraged their coworkers to report for duty, and reassured the public that, at least for the moment, TWA would continue to operate normally. However, as Miller told a reporter from her hometown newspaper the Kansas City Star, “The deal is very tentative.”52 Three days later, Victoria Frankovich, Buddy Ledger, Mary Ellen Miller, Arthur Teolis, and Richard Wagner sent a letter to all of their coworkers. Although the activists were circumspect, highlighting the historical value of the pay and benefit improvements, they relayed their frustrations about Simpson and Mitchell’s last-minute deal with management. “The tentative agreement does not accurately reflect what the Local 551 negotiating committee believed to have been the understanding reached during negotiations,” the activists told their peers.53 Two weeks later, it was clear that many front-line flight attendants shared the activists’ frustration with the status quo of male-led flight attendant contract negotiations. On June 26, 1976, 2,324 flight attendants, or 63 percent of those voting, told Local 551 to reject the compromise and to call an immediate strike to secure better wages and working conditions.54
With a strike authorization from the rank and file, core flight attendant activists strategically deployed the threat of labor unrest to exercise maximum economic leverage over their employer. In the process, TWA flight attendants upended the ideology of domesticity, turning the women who worked the front lines from men’s dependents into active political agents in their unions. Although federal labor law gave TWA flight attendants the right to strike as soon as the contract ratification failed on June 26, activists opted to delay the strike in an effort to amplify its effectiveness. Miller, Wagner, and the other Local 551 leaders asked their peers to fly their trips during the last week of June and to focus on preparing their finances and their families for a work stoppage. Then, on July 2, 1976, flight attendants would walk out forty-eight hours before the U.S. bicentennial celebration, shuttering Kennedy Airport just as guests arrived for the city’s largest gala in two hundred years.
Faced with unprecedented insubordination from the airline’s most subordinate labor group, TWA managers responded with an aggressive countermobilization. On June 30, TWA sued Transport Workers Union Local 551, demanding that the union pay the airline back for business lost amid strike threats and seeking an injunction to block a walkout on Bicentennial Weekend. After a federal judge ruled in favor of TWA’s motion for an injunction, Miller, Wagner, and the other activists approached management to engineer a compromise. In exchange for TWA’s dropping the damages suit, flight attendant activists agreed to give the company at least five days’ notice before any work stoppage, blunting at least some of the force of a surprise strike.55 Nevertheless, flight attendants scored a victory in protecting their overall right to strike during the legal confrontation with TWA.
Invigorated after a strategic advance, flight attendant leaders upped their militancy. During the third week of July, TWA sent a new, slightly improved contract proposal to the union. To the airline’s deep displeasure, Local 551 activists rejected the settlement offer outright, refusing to send it to rank-and-file flight attendants for a ratification vote. Instead of compromising, Miller and Wagner’s group prepared for a conflict, serving TWA with a five-day strike notice for a work stoppage that could begin as early as August 1, 1976.56 The timing of the new threat was potentially even worse for the airline than the bicentennial strike. If flight attendants walked out, the carrier would be shuttered during the Republican National Convention in Kansas City.57 That affair was setting up to be the most important political event of the year because an ascendant Ronald Reagan was mounting an effort to challenge Gerald Ford for the nomination, an outcome that would have drastically shifted the terms of the general election. TWA was Kansas City’s largest airline, operating roughly 35 percent of daily flights and controlling two-thirds of the seats from Reagan’s home state of California.58 With the other airlines sold out well in advance of the convention, the delegates who would be so crucial to Ford’s or Reagan’s nomination would, on short notice, have to take a bus or train or carpool their way across the country.
Faced with the choice between a high-stakes strike and a contract settlement that could derail their political momentum, ordinary front-line flight attendants became political activists. Scribbled notes, formal mailgrams, and reams of petitions were pouring into local and national union offices, revealing both the overall militancy of the rank and file and widespread strategic disagreement among flight attendants. “Working conditions are more important than money,” barked a petition from hundreds of Kansas City–based flight attendants. “Tell Mitchell off!” they ordered, insisting that Miller and the other activists hold the line against TWU vice president Mitchell and the other union higher-ups.59 Other front-line flight attendants were even more pointed in their displeasure with the non–flight attendant union staff. For example, a series of flyers began appearing under flight attendants’ doors in TWA’s Los Angeles layover hotels, explicitly accusing Mitchell of selling flight attendants out and claiming that he had been witnessed with company brass at posh restaurants.60 Meanwhile, other rank-and-file flight attendants complained that Miller, Wagner, and the other Local 551 activists were being too confrontational. Material deluged Mitchell’s office demanding that he force Local 551 activists to allow the rank and file to vote on TWA’s settlement offer from late July. In one of dozens of letters to Mitchell, for example, San Francisco–based flight attendant Judy Marsalis pointed out, “We are a thinking group who wants the chance to decide for ourselves. If it passes, then that is the will of the majority.”61 Concurring with Marsalis, front-line flight attendants sent Mitchell fifty single-spaced pages of signatures on a petition demanding a popular vote on the contract that Local 551 seemed committed to rejecting.62
Recognizing the strategic disagreement among their peers, Local 551 proposed a solution that would come to define flight attendant unionism over the coming decade. For thirty years, union higher-ups and managers had been making political and economic decisions for flight attendants. To right that historical wrong, activists decided to let ordinary flight attendants decide the fate of the contract dispute for themselves. Ballots would be mailed to all TWA flight attendants’ homes by August 4 and would be due for return no later than August 20.63 If the referendum passed, flight attendants would work under the terms of TWA’s offer from late July. If it failed, flight attendants would walk out immediately.
After three weeks of heated debate over the proposal, a majority of TWA flight attendants opted to settle the dispute. By a margin of 55 percent to 45 percent, front-line flight attendants voted to approve the contract offer on August 20, ending the TWA standoff of the summer of 1976.64 Though there were few significant improvements in the final deal over the original pact of June 4, the overall value of the raises proved too much for flight attendants to risk in a strike. By the beginning of the contract’s final year in October 1977, regular domestic flight attendants would start at $12.58 per hour. With inflation figured in, that would mean a flight attendant flying maximum hours could earn as much as $49,000 a year in 2015 dollars. Even with high inflation rates in the late 1970s, and even though unionized employees in the manufacturing sector made more than this, the equivalent of $49,000 a year was a large sum of money for a group that had been underpaid for decades. The contract’s top wage—of $21.70 per hour, or roughly $84,000 a year in 2015 dollars—was even more money.65 Flight attendants recognized that there was still vast progress to be made, especially in terms of the work rules that guaranteed flight attendants time off, protected them from overwork, and extended flight pay during delays and cancellations. But since the women on the front lines could now expect top pay rates that matched those of many unionized male industrial workers, activists recognized that they had made significant headway in challenging the ideology of domesticity. Regardless of whether they were single, married, or partnered, whether they were parents or childless, whether they were gay or straight, and whether they were women or men, flight attendants cashed their new paychecks and learned how it felt to be a breadwinner.
Conclusion
On July 26, 1976, at the peak of the standoff between flight attendants, their union, and management, TWA’s senior vice president of administration, D. J. Crombie, wrote a memo about the flight attendant dispute to the leaders of all of the other unions at the airline. Clearly exasperated, Crombie tried to explain why, even after TWA made a highly lucrative offer to Local 551, ordinary flight attendants were still threatening to walk out on strike. “This is the costliest contract settlement offer we have ever made to TWA flight attendants, and probably the most expensive settlement proposal ever made to flight attendants in the airline industry,” Crombie told representatives for pilots, machinists, and ground crews.66 Crombie had every right to be surprised by the situation, because it stood out in the history of airline collective bargaining. In an era when notoriously hard-bargaining pilots were getting 25 percent raises in three-year contracts, TWA flight attendants came hair-raisingly close to declining a deal that gave many of their peers a 40 percent raise.67 Crombie appears not to have fully grasped that flight attendants were not thinking about the TWA contract dispute in the context of the history of airline collective bargaining. They were thinking about it in relation to the social transformation of the 1960s and 1970s.
During an era of rapid social change, a new generation of activists was redefining kinship and family values. At the airlines’ behest, the stewardesses of the 1960s had forgone traditional domesticity, staying single, moving in with friends, living paycheck to paycheck, and—at least in some cases—spending what little money they had on personal pleasures. By the mid-1970s, many of those flight attendants were mounting a new challenge to traditional family values, but one on their own terms and not the airlines’.
As flight attendants and a whole generation of women’s, gay, and lesbian liberationists confronted the cultural foundations of the ideology of domesticity, they raised new questions about its economic foundations. The labor market, the activists insisted, was not keeping pace with social change. How, young people asked, can you stay single and raise a child as Mary Ellen Miller did, or how can you come out as lesbian or gay as Paula Mariedaughter and Richard Wagner did, if a living wage, affordable health insurance, and a secure retirement are channeled through traditional marriage and husband breadwinners? In 1976, flight attendants used the collective bargaining process to force the labor market to provide an affirmative answer to their questions. Robert Callahan, the rank-and-file president of the Transport Workers Union local at Eastern Airlines and Southern Airways, addressed the stakes of the situation. “The idea that we are ‘kids,’ that we are not breadwinners, allows Eastern Airlines to live comfortably with the low wages and poor working conditions with which we are forced to live.”68 As flight attendants took on the economic roots of heteropatriarchy in the summer of 1976, the airlines could no longer “live comfortably” with those inequities.
Flight attendants, however, raised many more questions than they answered. If, for example, flight attendants were winning the wage increases necessary to turn their job into lifetime employment, why should they continue to be denied the protective union work rules that pilots and machinists had expected since World War II? And if elected rank-and-file leaders could effectively advocate for the most important economic issues, craft a legal strategy to defend themselves against management, and build a communications network to motivate their peers, why did flight attendant activists have to report to male-led parent unions? Flight attendants at American, United, and TWA were energized when they cashed large new paychecks and as they reported to work after winning headline-making labor standoffs. The more they achieved, however, the more they asked these fundamental questions about their workplace. Because they lacked ironclad union work rules, and because their group was made up mostly of women who went home to work a second job providing child care and housework, flight attendants worked more than their male coworkers in the 1970s. As the 1980s approached, flight attendants took on the airlines—and their own unions—as they built a movement to challenge that overwork.