"Women and the Jet Age is an international labor history of women in the aviation industry-primarily flight attendants-during the Cold War. This book focuses on two case studies: JAT Yugoslav Airways (Jugoslovenski Aero Transport) from socialist Eastern Europe and Air Jamaica from the decolonized Global South"--
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.
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
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.
