Chapter 1 | Fly with Me

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ CASEY GRANT: Stewardesses were glamorous.

They were beautiful.

They were poised.

It just looked like the world was theirs.

And I wanted that life.

I just can't wait to see all the places I've heard so much about: Paris, Rome, Bangkok, Buenos Aires... ♪ ♪ ANN HOOD: How many small town girls like me looked at a flight attendant and thought, "That's the best job in the world"?

MAN: Rosemary, I'd like to talk to you about your coffee service.

You've been pouring from too high.

Oh?

JULIA COOKE: No other job offered as much freedom, with such a high cost of conformity.

♪ ♪ MARY PAT LAFFEY INMAN: We were not expected to have opinions.

We were to serve and look glamorous.

JOAN RIVERS: Where is the stewardess where a woman wants her, huh?

Huh?

Nowhere, busy with the men.

Coffee, tea, what you will, hello, hello, hello.

Hey, uh, how 'bout some coffee?

And make it hot.

CELESTE LANSDALE BRODIGAN: Selling sex instead of safety.

(soft chuckle) Oh, excuse us.

Excuse us.

Remember what it was like before there was somebody else up there who loved you?

Remember?

I hated that.

KATIE BARRY: Airlines hired these women who are independent and curious.

And it's amazing to me that airlines would expect that they would be a docile group, because why would they be?

(sign chimes) TWA has been shut down for more than a month by a strike of stewards and stewardesses.

♪ ♪ SONIA PRESSMAN FUENTES: I don't think we realized what a revolutionary thing we were doing.

PATRICIA IRELAND: Stewardesses played a major role in launching the women's movement.

DOROTHY SUE COBBLE: They took up economic issues, but they also focused on issues having to do with appearance, grooming, and control over women's bodies.

VICKI VANTOCH: How did these women go from conforming to gender stereotypes to fighting for gender equality in the workforce?

(protestors speaking indistinctly) KATHLEEN HEENAN: I was a TWA flight attendant.

But I was an activist in the change.

I was there.

(crowd chanting) ♪ ♪ (car engine rumbling) (plane engine buzzing in distance) INMAN: One of my best friends, she had a brother who bought this Corvette.

(car engine revving) We would be out on the road and she'd say, "Well, where do you want to go?"

And I would say, "Let's go to the airport."

HOOD: When I was in high school, I convinced my friend Nancy that we should go on a trip when our junior year ended.

And that June, off we went.

I shopped for a week for the outfit I was going to wear on the flight.

(indistinct chatter) UNDRA MAYS: My first flight, I was about eight or nine.

We were all dressed up; socks with the little lace all around the edges of it.

I thought, "This is just like Easter."

♪ ♪ I'd been on boats before and I thought, well, this was going to be similar to a boat.

♪ ♪ When we started to roll, "Oh, this is more like a rollercoaster."

♪ ♪ HOOD: I remember the takeoff.

(ringing sound) I remember playing with the air.

You know, I had my own little vent, gently putting a breeze on my face.

♪ ♪ I couldn't believe when they gave me food.

They put my breakfast down and it was delicious.

Scrambled eggs, and those little sausages, and a fruit plate.

And I just was dazzled from the minute I stepped on that plane.

♪ ♪ MAYS: I thought, "Oh, this has to be what heaven feels like.

♪ ♪ I've got to be close to heaven."

It was the most beautiful thing I had experienced, just being in the air.

♪ ♪ (seagulls squawking) ♪ ♪ (indistinct talking) COOKE: So many of our advances as humans come from travel.

Go!

(propellers whirring) COOKE: It is an incredibly human impulse, and yet it was really restricted for women until the 20th century.

♪ ♪ (crowd applauding) These new technologies came around, enabling humans to move around, and women really wanted to be a part of it.

♪ ♪ HOOD: Ellen Church was a registered nurse, but she got her pilot's license.

She knew that aviation was the future.

(propellers whirring) TIEMEYER: But because airlines refused to countenance that a woman could be a pilot, Ellen's idea was, "All right, if they're not going to let me be a pilot, at least maybe they'd let me be a flight attendant."

(engine running) KATIE BARRY: In the late 1920s, you see an experimental era, where some airlines are trying out different models of cabin service.

The most obvious model would be Pullman porters.

(train bell ringing) MIA BAY: But there's a longstanding association between technological know-how and white supremacy.

And they do not think that Black people have the kind of authority to kind of help people through the challenges of flying.

COBBLE: So the airlines thought, "We probably want white men because this might be a position where you would get promoted into management."

♪ ♪ HOOD: Ellen Church went to San Francisco to the office of what would later become United Airlines.

And she went to an executive and she said, "I think if there were nurses on airplanes, "more people would fly.

"You're trying to attract passengers, "but people think it's dangerous.

"People get sick.

"A nurse would be a calming person and we'd be able to take care of passengers."

(engine whirring) Planes weren't pressurized, so they flew under 10,000 feet.

And that means you feel every bump.

It was always turbulent.

VANTOCH: There were no circulation systems.

So you could smell hot oil, and the disinfectant used to clean up after airsick passengers.

(indistinct chatter) To go from coast to coast, it took 28 hours at minimum.

Often planes would get grounded in the middle of nowhere, passengers would have to wait for several days until the weather cleared.

It was really a big adventure, (chuckling): instead of a reliable way to travel.

TIEMEYER: It was a harrowing thing, to fly.

You couldn't get a life insurance policy to cover you if you flew on airplanes because the death rate was something that no one wanted to insure.

♪ ♪ BARRY: The idea is that if you're encouraging people to fly, especially men, at a moment when flying can seem very scary... (laughs) ...if you put young white women on an airplane, then they're going to think, "Well, if these young white women are fine with flying, I should be fine with flying too."