Anne Sweeney

Anne Sweeney Public Relations

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The Bimbo Buzzer Sounds

By Anne Sweeney 

The young male headhunter is not impressed.  Eleven years spent traveling to more than 40 countries, living in London and Hong Kong, flying in and out of war zones, appearing at special events, speaking fluent French and dealing with every culture, race and religion on the planet didn't matter.  Neither did my college degree, published writing, work as a trainer, a union rep, and an in-flight director aboard the 747 in charge of 350 passengers and crew.  That I was able to evacuate said aircraft in 90 seconds, deal with hijackers and put out fires, literally and figuratively, counted for nothing. The Bimbo Buzzer had sounded and 11 years of international experience and achievement is reduced to a stereotype of Coffee, Tea or Fly Me.

 Fortunately for this chauvinistic sleazebag, flight attendants of my era were not trained in judo. Nor did my complaint to his boss carry any weight. In those days, sexual harassment was a perk, not a deal breaker.

One of the "Real Women of Pan Am" featured in our award-winning PR campaign for World Wings International.

Despite this, I never felt compelled to downplay or hide my years aloft. Because my public relations career is largely focused on promoting travel, my experience proved an advantage. But I understand why many former flight attendants do, in order to avoid this kind of stereotyping.  Nancy Hult Ganis, the producer of such highly regarded films as Aleekah and The Bee, never told her film industry colleagues she had worked as a Pan Am stewardess.

ABC's TV series, Pan Am, followed the fortunes of four stewardesses in the early 60s.

           TV critics expressed surprise that a stewardess would know anything about Marx and Hegel as did the mutinous, self-serving Maggie, played by Christina Ricci. Actress Kelli Garner was cast as Kate, recruited by the CIA. That was rejected as implausible but in fact, the CIA did indeed find multi-lingual, college graduates with international mobility, to be effective agents. 

National Airlines' infamous Fly Me ad campaign..

As historian Victoria Vantoch notes in her book, The Jet Sex - Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon, stewardesses had been promoted as personable care givers, goodwill ambassadors for the US and as a marketing tool for the airlines. But the free and easy vibe of the 60s paved the way for a more sexy - and sexist - approach.   

Suddenly, the skies were more than friendly,  they were downright salacious.  Madison Avenue introduced an array of ads where stewardesses promised to Really Move Our Tails for You, invited passengers to Fly Me and  appeared in ads for Braniff  doing the Air Strip in uniforms designed by Emilio Pucci.  

A tacky tell-all, Coffee Tea Or Me, all about lust on the flight line,  hit the best seller list, purportedly written by two United stewardesses but actually penned by a male ghost writer.

Wings but no whip. The dominatrix look at Southwest Airlines.

         Sedate suits gave way to hot pants and micro skirts that could go right from the runway to the gynecologist's table. PSA's cabin crews were outfitted to look like San Diego car hops. All you needed to complete the Southwest ensemble of hot pants and high boots was a whip. Carefully coiffed hair suddenly exploded into messy manes or towering beehives. The All-American stewardess, once a symbol of graciousness and class,  turned into a sexually available seductress.  Stewardesses were promoted as sex objects to be ogled in the air and bedded on the ground.

PSA's micro skirts and go-go boots were designed to sell more than seats.

   Although Pan Am did not get on board this Bimbo Bandwagon, its stewardesses found their carefully cultivated, cosmopolitan image threatened by the rise of a new brand of stewardess that Victoria Vantoch calls "tawdry temptresses."  International flying demanded far more than pushing a bar cart between Fresno and Oakland in a micro skirt and go-go boots, but the American public, provincial then and now, did not get the difference. The job remained prestigious in Europe and Asia where cultural norms were less flexible and presumably, the taste level higher.  

Fighting for Their Rights 

Marlene White overcame racist airline polices to become one of the first African-American stewardesses.

Indeed, although scorned by the feminists of the 60s and 70s, flight attendants had been in the vanguard  of women's rights, well before Betty Friedan issued her  manifesto, The Feminine Mystique. As early as the 1950s, stewardesses were forming their own unions, fighting for equal  pay and promotional opportunities and protesting sexist and oppressive employment policies.  

African-American women were up against double discrimination - most airlines simply did not hire "Negroes" as stewardesses. Vantoch devotes an entire chapter to the struggles of young African-American women to break the color barrier.

As Vantoch notes in great detail, stewardesses were hired and trained to be independent and enjoyed a greater level of freedom than other young American women of that era.  But they endured more, not less, discrimination. Most airlines required them to quit upon marriage or reaching the age of 30 or 32.  Maternity leave was out of the question and the endless weight checks and supervisor  harassment  took their toll.

How NOW?  

But some of us who turned to the new Women's Movement for support were bitterly disappointed. I told Vantoch in an interview last year, how disrespectful and rude some of the members of the San Francisco NOW chapter were to me and the other Pan Am women I brought into the group. I ran for office in the chapter - and won - but not before enduring questions about whether I had finished high school and if sleeping with the pilots was a requirement of the job. The Bimbo Buzzer was sounding in the most  surprising places!  I was floored a few years later when Patricia Ireland was elected NOW's president. Ireland left Pan Am to become a lawyer and she has never tried to hide her flying background. I wonder what would have happened if she had joined San Francisco NOW. Feminism might have lost a great leader.

The Women's Movement grew more and more radical and out of touch with mainstream women, minorities  and "pink collar" workers. Straight women were castigated for "sleeping with the enemy." After a pregnant Erica Jong was booed off the stage at a poetry reading by militant lesbians, I decided to quit and take advantage of some of the new opportunities our efforts had won. I took a management job and eventually  won a position in Pan Am's Public Relations department. It wasn't easy.  I endured some hard times and sexual harassment, but to the company's credit, they did something about it. I learned a great deal and I always felt valued. Three months after I was laid off after a massive downsizing, Pan Am took me back as a consultant.  

At Pan Am, my background was understood and respected. But outside "The Family"  it clearly was not. My encounter with the headhunter had made me see that things were changing and that my hard-won skills and experience might not carry the weight they did in the past. The image was tarnished. I would no longer be seen as  cosmopolitan, independent and well-versed in the world's politics and cultures. My successful battles for gender equality would be unrecognized. The small town girl whose dreams came true, who made the most of an amazing opportunity and represented her company and her country with grace and conviction, was replaced by pop tarts in hot pants. The Bimbo Buzzer was not only activated, it was drowning out much that I valued.

One of the most poignant aspects of The Jet Sex is Victoria Vantoch's own realization that the iconic American Stewardess was no more. Vantoch's mother was a stewardess for Eastern Airlines - well educated and a fighter for civil rights in her youth. Vantoch was proud of her mother and enjoyed the perks of flying around the world through her travel benefits. But upon applying to a top private school, she found herself patronized by the admissions officer who told her she should "become a stewardess like your mother." Once proud of her mother's job, Vantoch now saw it as an insult and something not to be mentioned.

 The Bimbo Buzzer was indeed sounding for Vantoch's mother.  She flew until Eastern Airlines went out of business in the early 90s. At age 48 she tried desperately to find another airline position, and finally landed a job at American Airlines. But the stewardess career had lost its cachet.

Victoria Vantoch wrote The Jet Sex to answer a question that now haunts many of us who once soared.  She asks how her mother, "a talented public speaker, near-fluent in Russian and committed to women's rights, chose a career that ultimately allowed her to be written off as a vapid sex object and ultimately a low status service worker."

Vantoch interviewed dozens of former flight attendants  to find the answer. The voices of the women ring true, and clearly show their pride, professionalism and longing for the adventure, freedom and camaraderie they once prized.  Her book is a brilliant study of popular culture, the struggle for women's rights, exploitative advertising and  even Cold War conflicts  as Pan Am and Aeroflot use their stewardesses as propaganda tools touting the superiority of one system over the other. 

The Jet Sex is a serious book about a subject that has never been taken seriously.  It is fitting that it has been written by an historian. Because the Golden Age of Air Travel and the women who shaped it, belong to another era, when so much in America seemed possible, and when brave, bright young women looked to the skies and claimed their dreams.

     Anne Sweeney is president of Anne Sweeney Public Relations, a marketing  communications firm, offering targeted public relations services to the travel, hospitality, and restaurant industries and to businesses in the fields of retail sales,  interior design, book promotion, art and antiques and health care.    

     A versatile writer, Anne's work appears in

local, national and Internet outlets. She publishes Spin a newsletter on communications and writes a political blog, The Banshee.  She is frequently interviewed about the Golden Age of Air Travel and her Pan Am career, appearing,

on Good Morning America, ABC News, BBC2, and BBC

World Radio.      

    In 2013, Anne accepted a Gold Adrian Award for Public Relations Excellence for her campaign on behalf of World Wings International, The Real Women of Pan Am.   

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