Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants

by Phil Tiemeyer

Overview

Women and the Jet Age is a global history of postwar aviation that examines how states nurtured airlines for competing political and economic goals during the Cold War. While previous histories almost exclusively stress US and Western European aviation progress, Phil Tiemeyer examines how smaller, poorer states in socialist Eastern Europe and in the postcolonial Global South utilized airlines of their own to forge rival pathways to modernization.

Part of this modernization involved norms for working women. Stewardesses at airlines around the globe encountered novel threats to their dignity as the Jet Age approached. By the late 1960s, stewardesses endured harsh objectification: High hemlines, tight uniforms, and raunchy marketing were touted as modern and liberated. These women, whether from the West, East, or South, forged their own pathways to achieve greater dignity at work. In Women and the Jet Age, Tiemeyer's global account of the rise of air travel and of early feminist strivings among stewardesses is one of the first histories to place such developments—political, economic, and feminist—in dialogue with each other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501781803
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	07/15/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	324
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Phil Tiemeyer is Associate Professor of History and Director of Security Studies at Kansas State University. He is the author of Plane Queer, cowinner of the John Boswell Prize for best book in the field of LGBTQ history.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Confines of Cosmopolitanism
1. Clare Boothe Luce: And the West's Postwar Cartography of Colonialism
2. The Nonaligned Airline: JATAirways and Yugoslavia'sEast-West-South Axis
3. G. Arthur Brown: And Air Jamaica's Precarious Founding
4. Alix d'Unienville: And the West'sStrict Confines on CosmopolitanWorking Women
5. Dragica Pavlovi: JAT Stewardessesat the Crossroads of East,West, and South
6. Marguerite LeWars Kirkpatrick: Making Jamaican Women RaciallyEligible for Jet Age Labor
7. Mary Wells Lawrence: And theLaunch of America's Jet Ag
8. Love, Fashion, and the Stjuardesa: Yugoslavia's Jet Age Feminism
9. "Rare Tropical Birds": Postcolonialand Neo-imperialist Legaciesof Jet Age Feminism
10. Jet Age Feminist Subversives: Firsthand Accounts fromAir Jamaica and JAT Stewardesses
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Brigitte le Normand

An original, fascinating and highly readable study into the history of women flight attendants in the postwar era.

Dominique Reill

Vibrant, thought-provoking, humane. Learn how the West won the skies, how the Global South protected just a sliver of sovereignty within them, how the Third-Way East capitalized on connecting the Middle East to the world, and how the women manning these aircraft survived, often thrived, and sometimes were crushed while claiming new futures for themselves.

Brigitte Le Normand

An original, fascinating and highly readable study into the history of women flight attendants in the postwar era.

Andrew Denning

Women and the Jet Age works expertly across the First, Second, and Third World divides of the Cold War. Phil Tiemeyer's deep research in the United States and Western Europe, the former Yugoslavia, and Jamaica reveals unexpected connections, contributing to histories of the Cold War, aviation, and women.