[imagesource: Anne Sweeney / Pan Am Museum Foundation]

The sexy stewardess stereotype has existed since the first airline took its privileged passengers to the skies.

Even today, the sexism surrounding being a flight attendant has managed to hang in the air.

Although, while being a flight attendant in the 1980s wasn’t exactly the worst for women, it certainly is a far cry from the job of today.

Interestingly, the book that helped cement that image of a flight attendant in a miniskirt serving men was called Coffee, tea, or me? The uninhibited memoirs of two airline stewardesses – which despite being published as factual in 1967, was later revealed to have been written by a male American Airlines PR executive, Donald Bain.

Image: American Airlines

Ann Hood, an American novelist and New York Times best-selling author, was an actual TWA flight attendant at the time that the Golden Age of air travel was tapering out – “I came of age when the jet age came of age,” she says over at CNN.

She has chronicled those adventures and memories in her latest memoir, Fly Girl.

Hood set her sights on the sky as a little girl, after reading a 1964 book that enticed her “because it talked about having a job that allowed you to see the world”. She thought sounded too good to pass up.

By the time she was ready to hit the ground running – hired as one of 560 TWA flight attendants out of 14 000 applicants – “hostesses” and “stewardesses” were upgraded to the gender-neutral term: “flight attendant”. Although, females were still seen as “beautiful and sexy ornaments” as Hood puts it.

As the fight for women’s rights and against discrimination raged on, the requirements to be hired as a flight attendant seemed to be stuck in the past:

The most shocking one, perhaps, was the fact that women had to maintain the weight they had at the time of hiring.

“All airlines sent a chart with your application, you looked at your height and the maximum weight and if you did not fall within that, they wouldn’t even interview you,” says Hood. “But once you got hired, at least at TWA, you couldn’t go up to that maximum weight. You had to stay at your hiring weight, which in my case was about 15 pounds less than my maximum limit.

“My roommate got fired over this. The really terrible thing about it, other than what it did to women, is that this restriction was not removed until the 1990s.”

Despite these setbacks, flying was still really glamorous and highly regarded:

“People dressed up to fly and remembered the food in a good way. It’s really different from today. I can only compare it to being in a fine hotel, or maybe on a cruise ship. Nothing was plastic and coach was super nice,” says Hood, who remembers donning her Ralph Lauren-designed uniform and carving chateaubriand cooked to taste for first class passengers, who also had a choice of Russian caviar and lobster bisque to go with their Dom Perignon.

Image: American Airlines

The mile-high club was also prevalent:

“It wasn’t uncommon on international flights to see a man go into the bathroom and a minute later his seatmate join him, or some version of that,” says Hood. “It didn’t happen on every flight, but you saw it.

“International flights usually weren’t as full as they are now, so in those middle sections of five seats on a 747 you could see a couple put the armrests up, take a blanket and disappear under it. I can’t say what they were doing, but it looked suspicious.”

Back then, you also got your fair share of oddballs:

“The weirdest would definitely be the woman in first class who appeared to be breastfeeding her cat. I mean, I can’t say that it was actually happening, but she had her cat to her breast.

“And then the guy who flew the whole way in his tighty-whities and his dress shirt and tie, because he didn’t want to wrinkle his pants for a job interview. Or the guy on a 747 in Frankfurt who was riding his bicycle down the aisle,” she reveals.

Ultimately, Hood walked out of the experience changed in a good way.

Image: Ann Hood

Despite the sexism and other challenges she faced, Hood recalls her time as a flight attendant in the 1980s with a lot of fondness.

She also left to start her writing career just as flying had changed forever, with flights becoming more democratised and a mindset shift from comfort to cramming passengers in like cattle taking hold.

[source:cnn]