Factually! with Adam Conover - The Great Stewardess Rebellion with Nell McShane Wulfhart

Episode Date: April 13, 2022

The 1960’s are often depicted as the the golden age of air travel, but the reality for the stewardesses who worked the skies was far from gilded. “The Great Stewardess Rebellion” author Nell McShane Wulfhart joins Adam to explain the ludicrous conditions that flight attendants worked under, and how their effort to unionize and fight back sparked changes that still benefit working women today. You can pre-order her book here: https://bit.ly/3vgyjaM Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show once again. If you haven't listened before, what we're going to do today is I'm going to talk to an amazing expert about all the incredible things they know that I don't know that you might not know. My mind is going to be blown. Your mind is going to be blown. Both of our minds are going to be blown together. We are going to have a great time. I want to start by thanking everyone who supports this show on Patreon. Visit patreon.com slash adamconover to sign up and you'll get bonus podcast episodes,

exclusive stand-up I haven't posted anywhere else, including my 2019 hour Mind Parasites Live, and you can join our live community book club where we read a book and then discuss it live with the author. Our next book, we just picked it, is Never Enough, The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grizzell. So if you want to read that with us, discuss, and discuss it live with the author, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover to support the show. But let's talk about this episode. I just got back from a trip overseas and it got me thinking about flight attendants. You know, we're all familiar with flight attendants, right? They bring us ginger ale and V8 at 30,000 feet. They tell us when and how to put our masks on. And, you know, if required, they might duct tape an unruly passenger to their seat or two.

We know them, we love them, and hopefully we all treat them with respect. But what we fail to realize often is that flight attendants are also a crucial piece of American labor history. In fact, and this is absolutely true, the efforts of flight attendants transformed the American workplace and provided workplace protections for women, which are still codified into case law to this day because of those flight attendants. Here's what happened. If you go back to the 1960s, the job of what were then called stewardesses was sexist as fuck. They were required to be a certain age, maintain a certain weight, and they were certainly not allowed to be married, pregnant, or over 40 years old. They also had to undergo training at a place called the, quote, charm farm, where they learned

how to be perceived as attractive and available, wink wink, to the skinny-tied men they served above the clouds. That's right. These stewardesses were literally presented to the men who flew as available to them, as single girls who were ready to mingle. And unsurprisingly, as a result, they faced systemic and unrelenting harassment and abuse, not to mention bargain basement wages. Now, stewardesses slash flight attendants didn't have much in the way of power at the time. So a group of women did what generations of workers have done. They organized. They formed a union, first as part of the transit workers union. But when that didn't go their way because of sexism in the union, those women went their own way and formed their own union. And that union fought like hell for

them. They were among the very first to use Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to fight sex discrimination. They filed complaints and lawsuits with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They fought for better contracts and a less sexist workplace, and they won. Not only that, because they were the first ones to level many of these types of lawsuits, their wins became established case law. They set precedents, and that means that their wins are still benefiting working women and working people generally to this day because they established protections that we all now take for granted. So look, this is an amazing civil rights story that is very rarely told.

And the coolest thing is that many of the women who fought this battle are still alive. Now, a couple of years ago, I had the honor of talking with one of these early flight attendant organizers, Pat Gibbs, on Adam Ruins Everything on our Adam Ruins Flying episode, which, if you want to check it out, is still available on HBO Max. Well, I was really gratified to hear that our segment actually inspired the journalist Nell McShane-Wolfehart to write a book about these incredible women who achieved these incredible things. And when I heard that, I insisted that we have Nell on to talk about it. So it is my honor today to welcome Nell McShane-Wolfehart to the show. She's the author of The Great Stewardess Rebellion,

How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet. Please welcome Nell McShane-Wolfehart. Nell, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks so much, Adam. I'm happy to be here. So tell me very quickly the story about how you came to write this book, because I think it's a particularly fascinating story. Well, coincidentally, yes, I used to have a column in the New York Times travel section where I interviewed celebrities about what they took in their carry-on luggage, which was the best job I've ever had. took in their carry-on luggage, which was best job I've ever had. And one of the people I was interviewing, a certain Adam Conover, had just done an episode of his TV show on- Using the word celebrity very loosely.

No comment. It was a slow day at the New York Times. They were like, we got to fill these inches. Who can we call who will marginally fit, but at least can give us some quotes. Okay. Sorry. Go on. I'll just say you have a very good publicist. And so you'd happen to tell me the story of one of the episodes you had just done of Adam Ruins Everything, which was all about stewardesses and sort of the seamy underside of what we think of as this like golden age of travel, very glamorous, very Don Draper,

cocktails on the plane, roast beef, all this fancy stuff. And you were telling me this story. And I said to you, actually, I think I even said out loud, wow, that sounds like it would make a great book. And here we are. And you, from that conversation, went off and wrote a book about it. Yes, I did give you a thank you in the acknowledgements, which is all the credit you should expect. Wait, you did? You sent me a copy, but I didn't even look at the acknowledgements yet. Hold on a second, because who reads the acknowledgements? Normally, it's just like, oh, my kids are so,

oh, you read them first. Oh, just an interesting glimpse into somebody's personal life. It's sort of like gossip, but, you know. Wait, are the acknowledgements in this galley? I think maybe the acknowledgements didn't make the galley that they sent me. No, they're in the back of the book. You're in there. Oh, they're in the back.

I wanted to double check before this call that I had actually said thank you. I was thinking about the dedication. I was like, she dedicated the book to me. It's completely different. Well, thank you. I really appreciate the attribution at all. But of course, it's not even my story. Big thanks to Adam Conover who gave me the idea for this book during an interview.

Hell yeah. That's a wonderful citation for me. But yeah, this is a story that we did on Adam Ruins Everything a couple years ago, very briefly in the seven minutes that we normally do stories like this. It's a really cool story, but I actually only know as much as we did about it on television. So I'm really excited to hear a fuller picture of how the flight stewardesses changed flying forever. So please, like, let's launch into it. Like, let's talk about that moment at the, you know, that we have the madman vision of air travel. Oh, everyone used to wear suits. It was so nice. And they gave you free food. And it was so great. What was the actual reality for

the people working on those planes? Well, a lot of that is really true. I mean, there were like fancy bars, there were men in suits, there were, you know, flight attendants slicing roast beef onto your plate and tossing salads in front of you and making cocktails. Even at one point, there was an actual piano on the back of a plane. They had cleared away about 20 rows of seats

and put in a piano and opened up sort of a piano bar lounge area with sofas and a cocktail bar. And this is the best part. Any passenger who wanted could go to the back of the plane and start playing the piano and like singing along. This sounds like such a nightmarish idea by today's standards. Literally giving your fellow passengers a way to make more noise and encouraging them to do it. I cannot even imagine what that would have been like.

It didn't last very long, I think, partially because people got too drunk because, you know, open bar and partially because it was a terrible idea. And also they lost about 20 rows of seats to make space for the piano. So they couldn't sell them any tickets. But well, so let's talk about that piece of it for a second, because that was my first thought, like, hold on a second, when they would have open bars or whatever, like wandering around. Today, they try to pack seats into every square inch of a plane, and they're constantly trying to push more and more and more in. So what was the situation under which, like, it made economic

sense to do things like that? Flying was much more expensive then and much more exclusive. I'm talking about the 60s and then into the 70s. And it's kind of gone downhill ever since. But the main target of every single airline was business travelers. And those were almost exclusively men. And that might still be true today. But back then, it was absolutely true.

They were not really targeting families. They were not targeting single women. They were targeting male business travelers. And so they created all these amenities to make it appealing to them. There were, you know, cigars and like a big part of what happened with the stewardesses is that they were sort of selling the stewardesses

as part of the attraction of the flight. Like each airline would try and differentiate itself from other airlines by virtue of what its stewardesses looked like, what kind of uniforms they wore. And this was meant to be part of the thing that like sold these upmarket tickets to these male business travelers. male business travelers. It was really kind of like a Playboy Club style marketing where it's like part of the appeal of flying on this airline is that an attractive stewardess is going to wait on you hand and foot in this sort of like sublimated sexual way that is, I mean, you know, there's no, we're not talking about actual sex work here, but we are talking about a sort of relationship that evokes a, perhaps that part of your lizard brain in some way. It was only somewhat sublimated, honestly. Through the 60s, it was a lot about, you know, the amount of personal care you'd get from every stewardess.

And the photos were of these smiling, thin, white women, always smiling, always, always smiling. That was like an unquestioned part of the job. And then as the 70s kind of got going, they really got into like sex sells. And the ads became way more overt in terms of selling sex to these passengers. And the uniforms got tinier. I mean, there was one airline called National, which had a whole campaign. And it used photos of real stewardesses. So it would be like a photo of a smiling stewardess

looking straight at the camera. And it would say her name. And the copy read, I'm Cheryl, fly me. Or then there would be Donna. I'm Donna, fly me. And of course, the airline said like, oh, it's just a bit of fun. We don't mean anything by it.

But the flight attendants, as you can imagine, hated it. I mean, it sounds like it honestly sounds like an early 2000s Britney Spears song level of innuendo. And we used, yeah, I mean, I remember we used those images in our episode. And they're in your book as well. Like, they are the kind of ad you look at by today's standards. You're like, holy shit. Yeah. It's pretty astounding.

And some of the photos are just like, you know, stewardesses in bikinis. You know, it's not subtle, to say the least. So, what were the conditions like for the women who actually did that work? Well, when my book starts, which is in the mid-1960s, sort of underneath that kind of very glamorous exterior, the actual working conditions were pretty oppressive. You couldn't even get a job if you weighed over a certain amount. Like, if you were over, I would say say maybe a modern size six, you know, it would be impossible to get a job. You couldn't wear glasses. You couldn't have any scars. You couldn't really have acne. And you couldn't have children or be married. And you couldn't be more

than 32. In fact, they wouldn't hire you if you weren't in your early 20s, but they would absolutely fire you on your 32nd, in some cases, 33rd, in one generous case, 35th birthday. Were they doing like weigh-ins and stuff like that? Like, hey, before you get on the plane, like just step on the scale? Absolutely. In a lot of the airline offices, like in the operations room in the airport where the, you know, the flight attendants and the pilots and the administrative staff would work and they would wait there before they got on the plane there would be a scale in the middle of the office in the middle of operations and any supervisor or

even any pilot could just like grab a stewardess and put her on the scale whenever they wanted and if she weighed too much they could take her right off the flight wow like hey sorry you know fuel is expensive like i'm sure there's like a a way to like a fig leaf that they put over it. No, no, not at all. No, not at all. It was very clearly mandated that you had to stay under a certain weight. They had weight charts that you had to adhere to. If you were a certain height, you had to stay out. You had a maximum weight that you had to stay under. stay under. Wow. I mean, that's like, you know, there, there are jobs that, uh, are, you know, in show business that like we, we accept this sort of thing with, but even for that, even for that kind of job, that sounds like really onerous and like demeaning and degrading. Extremely degrading. Um, but it was something a lot of the women didn't think about that much, or at least at the beginning. I did a long interview with Patricia

Ireland, who was the president of the National Organization for Women for 10 years. And she was a stewardess. She used to be a stewardess of Pan Am. And she told me even when she went for her stewardess interview back in the early 1970s, you know, the recruiter like pulled her into the room and he asked sort of like walk back and forth across the room in front of her and to turn around very slowly. So basically examining her body to make sure that she looked good enough. And she told me, I didn't even think about it. I didn't think anything of it. It was just perfectly normal. Wow. I mean, was this just a little more context? Cause I was certainly not alive during the sixties where they're like, was this at all common in other sort of women's service occupations or or was this like really a step up in the airline industry i think the flight attendants are a particularly

unique industry like their their job so much of their job was about appearance and you know this became a problem as i explore in the book is, you know, passengers stop taking them seriously because they're, you know, the airlines are pushing this idea that they're really just there to be looked at. And they're essentially a flying cocktail waitress. And so appearance was like, you know, you wouldn't even be interviewed for the job if you didn't meet like a list of 20 different criteria all about appearance. And then they would bring you to a

stewardess school and teach you how to become a stewardess. But even there, most of the classes were about hair, they were about makeup, about nails, about, you know, how many inches above your eyebrow the hat should be. Anything about the emergency exits in the classes or like, or flotation devices or smoke in the cabin, any of that? Well, I guess there was probably a lot of smoke in the cabin. It was the 60s, but. A lot of smoke in the cabin. And I would say that was maybe 10% of the classes at the stewardess school. Yeah.

It was a less safe time as well. But yeah, I mean, was this something that you spoke about the woman from the National Organization of Women who was like, yeah, that was normal. But like, I assume that for this to change, women eventually must have been like, hey, this sucks. At some point, right? Yeah, well, that's really the story of my book. It's about how women learn to realize, hmm, this sucks. And what they did about it. Yeah, tell us that story, please. Yeah, it's essentially like from the mid-60s through the end of the 70s. There was this huge push by flight attendants who were sort of looking around,

especially as the women's movement got going, and they could see that sexist restrictions were falling away in other occupations, but somehow in the airline cabin it still felt like, you know, 1950. And so they start pushing back on these requirements, especially the things like, you know, you couldn't fly once you got married. I mean, the airlines had huge turnover when it came to stewardesses. Like, they might lose 80% in one year. But it was a very exclusive job.

I think TWA usually accepted about three percent of applicants. Like, wow, it was extremely exclusive. Well, because at that time, I mean, there were certainly less job opportunities for women, but also at a time when travel itself is so much more exclusive where, like, you can't even afford the plane ticket. The chance to go on the plane and travel must have been very attractive. But the chance to go on the plane and travel must have been very attractive. It absolutely was. And that's what almost all the women I interviewed talked about. Like, it was sort of a way to get out of their small town or even their big city or off the farm.

And they had this idea that they were going to, like, see the world. And it was very glamorous. Like, the way the job was portrayed in all the ads, even the recruitment ads was like, you can become this cosmopolitan woman of the world. If once you become a stewardess, it was a really exclusive and in demand job. You could go to Minneapolis. It's just funny because, you know, air travel is, is now the complete opposite to us. You know, it, it's, it's a, it's a chore and most of the places that we travel, so many of us fly all the time. And most of the places we travel to, we're not like amazed by, right. We're like, you're traveling for work or you're traveling to visit a relative and you're like, yeah, great Chicago. Okay. Um, but, uh, but yeah, so I also have to, there must have been an immense amount of harassment on these planes.

An incredible amount of harassment and not just from the passengers, but also from like the pilots and the supervisors. One of the things that women had to do as part of their uniform, they always had to wear a girdle. And so they were subject to these sort of girdle checks when like a supervisor or it could be a pilot, the pilots could really do whatever they wanted, they would be able to sort of grab their ass and check if they were wearing a girdle. And they could just do that at any time. But there was a lot of there was generally a lot of harassment. But really, that was due to think I think, the airlines pushing so hard on this, like, sexy stewardess image. They were kind of inviting the passengers almost to take

advantage of them. Yeah. And the restriction that they have to be single, like, what is the justification for that other than, hey, the women are accessible to you, available to you, right? Or was there any other justification that they offered for that? There are some really amazing justifications. In the book, I cover a couple of hearings they had at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when the stewardesses start fighting back against the no marriage rule. You know, they start pushing back, they lodge complaints at the EEOC, and the airlines start fighting all these complaints. And they say that, no, it's a job for women. Women have already, actually, they use the word girls. They say that girls have always done this job and girls can do it well. And their inherently female makeup makes them good at doing the job. And they would list

the things that women were better at than men, things like caring for other people and decor. Their interest in decor was apparently a qualification, a reason to restrict the job for men and to hire only women and to not let them get married. They said that if women got married, it would hurt their business because their husbands would start calling the airlines complaining about why their wives weren't home. Okay. And they also said that a married woman's number one occupation is her husband and children. And so that's why one of the reasons they didn't want to hire married women. How is she going to decorate the inside of the plane when she's decorating her own home? We need her to adjust the potted plants on top of the piano

at the back of the plane. What a fucking mirror universe in many ways. But okay, so how did the stewardesses start fighting back? That's really the meat of the story. Right. Well, for a lot of them, they started getting older. And then they realized, you know, when you're 19 and you sign a contract to work as a stewardess, and even though the contract says you can't, you know, get married or you have to leave when you turn 32, like, you think that's a million years away. You think, like, forget it. I'll be, you know, I'll figure this out long before then you turn 32. Like, you think that's a million years away. You think like, forget it.

I'll be, you know, I'll figure this out long before then. I'm just going to do this right now. So they signed these contracts and a lot of them took the job and they loved the job. Like, you know, some of that glamorous aspect was really true. And sometimes they were flying all over to interesting places and going out to dinner. And this was not the age of like, they would stay in the closest, crappiest airport hotel and get there in a shuttle bus. Like there would be a car to pick them up at the airport and they would stay at decent hotels. And if you worked for, you know,

one of the ones that flew overseas, like Pan Am, like you really were seeing the world. Like what everyone thought of as the glamorous life of stewardess, you were actually living that. So they liked the job and they all of a sudden realized that, yeah, they were about to be fired or they saw their friends losing their job. And they started to think like, this isn't fair. This is ridiculous. And you could also watch, you know, around you, the pilots getting older. Pilots could fly until they were 60 and the ground crew and the cleaners and everyone else could keep their jobs as long as they wanted, but they couldn't. So they started lodging complaints with the EEOC. They were like some of the first people to lodge complaints there. And once they started doing

that, the complaints just started stacking up and stacking up. And the EEOC eventually had to take some action. And parallel with that, they launched a bunch of lawsuits and they sort of attacked on both those fronts. And in addition, they put some pressure on their unions to push back against the airlines. But for a long time, that was less successful, and they had more success with their lawsuits. Okay, so let's break some of that down, because I would imagine that even the project, if you're a stewardess at the time, of just organizing other stewardesses together would be difficult, because A, you're working in small groups and you're traveling all over the place.

Maybe they don't, you know, is there one place that they can all get together and talk? But also, I don't know, that must have seemed unusual to even start that process of organizing, wouldn't it? That would be what I would imagine. It was different, I think, from a lot of other things. Like you said, it's not like organizing workers in a factory who come to work at nine and they leave at five and they're all in the same place. Like, they're always traveling, their schedules change every month. So much,

so many of the papers that I went through researching this book are just letters from stewardesses written from hotels all around the country. They're all written on hotel stationery. Like, they're always on the move. But stewardesses have been organized for a really long time at almost every airline. I think Delta is the one lingering big exception. And so they always had a union. And when they kind of figured out how to make the union work for them, that made some big change.

But you have to also look at the idea that a lot of these women, they thought, okay, like, I'll do this for a few years between high school or college and getting married, and then I'll quit. And, you know, it's very hard to get people to care about things like, you know, career longevity when they fully expect to be married in a couple years and off the job. And that's a technique that's often used by employers to try to dissuade people from organizing. They say, well, this is part-time work. No one really expects this as a career. If you don't like it, leave. For instance, just taking Amazon, right? Amazon is seasonal work for many people. And they

said, this is just, you're just coming in for three months and making a couple extra bucks to buy Christmas presents, Uber, that kind of thing. And it takes a big shift in attitude to say what you were sort of saying that some of them were saying that, hey, I don't want to leave the job. I like the job. I'm going to make the job better. It's that's sort of the difference, a big difference maker in a successful organizing or not. How did they how did they, you know, leap across that gap? Because I could imagine at the beginning of the process, it would, you know, you'd be one stewardess talking to another and they'd be like, Hey, I'm just, I'm just trying to make a couple extra bucks until I get married. Right.

Um, like I'm not, I'm not, I don't want to get involved, you know? That's absolutely it. Like, um, one of the main characters in my book, Pat Gibbs, um, she was an organizer. She, you know, she was, uh, an officer in the union. And her technique for getting people to come to union meetings was free snacks. She realized that free cake is a building block of power. And she would try and get people involved by offering them free snacks. She would also try and stir people up and get them mad by pointing out all the things that the men got that they didn't get. And sure, some people still did not care about this. But when you, you know, especially with the women's

movement starting up, like when they actually could put the job in context. And like I said, you could see women sort of climbing career ladders and making progress all around you, but you were like really stuck in your job. That sort of incited a little bit of motivation, let's say. And when the court cases, when they started winning some court cases and they started winning some recognition from the EEOC, then like those restrictions started to fall. You know, the age restriction eventually went away. The marriage restriction went away. The pregnancy restriction went away. And then the job turned into a career.

And once that happened, then they could really turn their attention to things like working conditions, like wearing high heels on the plane, for example. They're walking maybe eight miles up and down the plane on the aisles during a shift, and wearing three-inch heels while doing that seemed a little bit of an unreasonable demand. And the plane is bumpy. And my understanding is planes used to fly lower then. So there would be more turbulence. And so you're walking around eight miles in turbulence in heels. We interviewed Pat Gibbs on Adam Ruins Everything. She's an incredible person and an incredible labor leader.

Really cool that you spoke to her. But I want to ask, oh, yeah, just one more piece of context. I'm curious about, cause right now when you, uh, you know, you're on a plane, the flight attendants are very much part of the crew, right? Like they, we all know now, or at least many of us have gotten the message that like, you know, safety is the most important thing and that that's what, you know, those folks are there for. And also, you know, there's a lot, you know, disarmed doors and cabin checks and all these sorts of things. And also, you know, there's a lot, you know, disarmed doors and cabin checks and all these sort of things. And there's like a lot of communication between the pilot and the crew. Was that the case in the 60s, early 70s? Or was that something that started to grow over

time? Like the idea of the stewardesses slash flight attendants as like a very serious part of the airline of the, you know, the takeoff and landing and all the other parts of making sure the plane gets in safely. Well, that was always part of the job. They've been doing that job since they first got on the plane. And it's actually thanks to the efforts of the stewardesses in my book that you can now think about flight attendants as safety professionals instead of, you know, flying cocktail waitresses. They really fought to, like, have themselves taken seriously. And that was one of the things that they could protest with the ads, the super sexist ads that were coming out in the 70s. And they were like,

sexualizing stewardesses is unsafe because passengers do not take us seriously. Like, you know, one of them would tell a man to put his seatbelt on and he'd say like, oh, I've been flying since before you were born. Or they would be running the safety check and people are just kind of like staring at their hot pants. Hot pants and go-go boots was a popular uniform during one year in the 70s. Like, I can't really imagine. It was a time of laugh-in and, you know, all that. I get it.

But it's still funny to imagine. I get it. But it's still funny to imagine. I honestly try and think about myself trying to deliver hot coffee to like 200 passengers wearing hot pants and like lace up go-go boots. I find that overwhelming. But then like trying to get them to listen to you and to take you seriously when you're like, well, we're going to have an emergency landing. Or if you're wearing like a button that says fly me and you're trying to direct people to the emergency exit, you can see there's sort of like a dissonance there and why passengers might not have taken them as seriously as they might. But that importance to the process, I also imagine, is like a big source of strength for those workers when they're trying to organize that like, hey, we play a really important role here.

You do need us to take off. We're not just waitresses. Right. Like it is we are part of the crew. And if we do not do this, then none of this happens, which is like a very, you know, that's that's a position of strength to a certain extent. Yeah, I mean, it's like there are certainly essential members of the crew and for sure they plan the plane cannot take off without flight attendants but they were um because there was so much turnover in the job you know especially with the no marriage and no kids and yeah um and no aging rules that they airlines would replace them in a second like and you've seen you know you can see that with strikes even in the 1993 strike like there was a massive

strike back then and like they just brought in other workers. Yeah. Like in a second because they thought they could train them in a few weeks and get them on the plane and that was it. So tell me about the union. When did they or maybe there's a couple of different unions. There often are in cases like this. But how did stewardesses slash flight attendants, to use both terms, begin to join the labor movement? terms, begin to join the labor movement? Well, like I said, flight attendants have always been organized, which is, or at least since the 40s, which is really amazing.

Oh, really? Even before the 60s? Okay. Even before the 60s. Yeah, they've been organized for a very long time. But for some reason, even though it was only women who were, like domestic airlines didn't hire men until 1971. So it was only women for all of those years. But somehow the leaders of the flight attendant unions were always men. And the flight attendant unions were affiliated to one of them was affiliated to the pilots union, which basically took charge of the flight attendants and made all the decisions for them. Wow. And in the other case, in the case of the stewardesses I talk about in the book, the American Airlines flight attendants, along with TWA and a bunch of other huge airlines, they were affiliated to the Transport Workers Union. Also, almost all men. And so they had

these unions, but their decisions were still being made mostly by men. And that's part of what causes this sort of uproar in my book and the revolution that I talk about, which is when the stewardesses decide that they've had enough and they're interested in leading their own union and not being told what to do. Wow. I mean, yeah, this is like, we're in a wonderful period of like, you know, union power and people's interest in unions growing. And it's of course, always better to be in union union than not to be in one. But once you are in one, there's always questions of how is the union structured? Are the workers represented by the union actually represented well?

And there's so many cases of two tier, three tier unions where people are part of a union that is actually serving only one class of the workers. And, you know, there needs to be some kind of structural reform. That's the case in unions in my industry that work that way. So how did they take power in their union? Or they started their own union. Is that what happened? That's essentially what happened. A little bit of a spoiler.

But, yeah, there's essentially like a giant revolution among flight attendants. Because not only are they fighting with their employers, they're fighting with the airlines who are, you know, don't give them the same benefits as men, don't give them the same pay, insist that they have like perfectly polished nails and can take them off the flight if they don't. So not only are they fighting their employers on all these things,

in a lot of cases, they're fighting their union leaders as well because the TWU, Transport Workers Union, it's mostly former subway workers, former bus drivers. It's a lot of older white men who think that they know best. And the stewardesses, you know, when it comes to bargaining time, they list all the things that they want. Single rooms, single hotel rooms on layovers was a huge one for them, like a deal breaker. They previously had to room with each other?

Yeah, like if you were on a long flight and you had to lay over in a hotel before flying back, pilots got their own rooms. And once men came on board, the male flight attendants would get their own room, but the women always had to share a room. And you can imagine, like if you're a flight attendant and you're flying all night, and then you have to share a room with another woman woman women would be reading their book in the bathtub so like the bedside light wouldn't disturb their companion or you couldn't make a phone call because somebody wanted to sleep or somebody snored um so this was a huge issue for them like they were need your rest

you've been flying all day yeah you just need a little bit of time. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, like men, you know, men came on board in like 1971. And then the whole crew goes in the airplane to the hotel together. Pilots go off to their own rooms. And then these junior men who have just joined the job, they get their key and they go sauntering off to their own room. And women who have been working for 10 years have to share a room. It's just really, it's degrading. So this became like a huge issue for them. They were, they were like, okay, you have to have single rooms, like enough of this. And this was an issue of what the transport workers were not interested in. They were not interested in bargaining for it. They were not interested in getting it for the stewardesses. They didn't even want to talk about it when they

had their discussions with American Airlines. It was like a total disconnect between what the women wanted and what the men were willing to even discuss on, so supposedly on their behalf. So that was the sort of incident where they kind of started to realize that maybe being represented by people who are, who are not stewardesses was, was a bit of a downside. Um, well, let's talk about after we take a short break, let's talk about how they actually took that power and made that change. We'll be right back with more Nell McShane Wolfhart. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. OK, we're back with Nell McShane Wolfhard. So we've been talking about how stewardesses back in the 60s, 70s were part of these unions that did not represent them well, did not represent their issues.

So what did they do in response to that? How did they make the change that they needed? Well, they tried a bunch of different things. make the change that they needed? Well, they tried a bunch of different things. They kind of started gradually standing up for themselves more and more about the single hotel rooms issue, which I just talked about. They actually voted down the contract twice before finally agreeing, before finally getting single rooms, before that finally convinced the Transport Workers Union that they were serious. And so they managed to bargain for that. But this was like unprecedented.

Stewardesses did not vote down their contracts. They were happy with whatever the TWU brought back. It's a big deal whenever workers vote down a contract that their union leaders negotiate. The union leaders negotiate the contract, the workers get to vote on whether they want it or not. And if the workers vote no, that's like a big repudiation. Because it's like,

hey, our own union is not giving us what we want. Go back to the fucking negotiating table, please. Yeah, that's exactly what it was. It was like a big deal. American Airlines management was shocked and horrified and everyone was very pissed off, which is sort of the beginning of a series of pissing people off that doesn't really end until the end of the book. And so that was like one of the kind of formative instances. And then one of my main characters, Pat Gibbs, she starts to get involved in this sort of splinter movement. And the idea is that they are going to leave the Transport Workers Union and form their own independent women-led union. So there's a tremendous amount of intrigue and organizing and parking lot fights and drama. And in the end, there's a vote and the American Airlines flight attendants, of which there are thousands,

vote to leave the Transport Workers Union and form their own independent union, which is the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, and it is still around today. Well, and that is still the union that represents American Airlines flight attendants today. Yes, yes. That is so cool. But that is such an incredibly, I want to say, aggressive thing to do. Like, it is very, very difficult for union members to say, hey, we are going to leave this union and start a new one. Like, just to get that, first of all, just getting that cleared legally is very difficult. You're basically guaranteed to be sued if you try something like that today. But also, you have to fight with other workers who you're in a union with. You have to say, that would be seen by many as a betrayal in many cases. So it's very,

very difficult to do, much less get people to go along with it. Absolutely. And that's like a huge point of conflict in the book between the women who wanted to stay with the transport workers. One of them, Tommy, she was the president of the union, and she said, we can do it and we need to have like a, you know, play with the big boys. And if we just stay in here, we'll be running the damn union. And so she was absolutely staying with the TWU, staying with organized labor and, like, slowly building a path to power in that way. While Pat and her sort of group of subversives is running this alternative campaign to have their own women-led union. And so that's kind of the climax of the book.

to have their own women-led union. And so that's kind of the climax of the book and like the sort of head-butting that went on and the arguments and like the really, it was a really difficult time, but also a very exciting time, I would say. Yeah, but that's such a fascinating struggle because both of these women share the same goal, but they have a completely divergent way to go about it.

And I mean, was there, is there merit in both approaches? Did Tommy have her, you know, have her day? Was there progress made on that front as well? Or did history prove one of them right? That's such a great question. And even when I talk to them today, there's still a lot of hard feelings about this, even though this happened in like the, you know, the late 1970s, you know, they became resigned to it. And Tommy, who's like such a great character, such an interesting person. Once the vote happened, then it became clear that a majority of flight attendants wanted to go independent. They wanted to have their own union. She was like, okay, this is what they want. This is what we'll do.

And she went, she went with it. A lot of other people were not so forgiving. And even if I talk to Pat today, she'll say that she wasn't sure that now she's not sure that she was right in doing that, that she doesn't know. I mean, it's impossible to know what it would have been like if they stayed with the Transport Workers Union. But there wasn't even a high-ranking TWU official who was a woman until 1981. So that might give you some idea. Yeah. And like sometimes those power structures are such that, you know, you can't always change everything from the inside because you might be so disenfranchised within a certain power structure that the best option is to create a new one. And to build your own power rather than try to change

some larger system yeah 100 and i think that there was just there was like the slow path to power which was staying with the twu and trying to build power within this very traditional structure or there was a sort of renegade maverick path to power which was just going out there and taking it um and so they went one way and, you know, they could have gone another, but it definitely makes for a more interesting story that they decided to forge their own path. It sounds like they were also pushed in that direction by the failure of the union to actually get them what they needed. I really want to ask, though, I'm sorry, I've been meaning to ask this for a while. You're wearing a shirt right now

that says, stewardesses for women's rights, women's rights, which is, first of all, thank you for, for dressing up for this interview. But, but I assume, I assume that this was a contemporary group at the time. And I'm just curious what the, what the shirt represents. Yeah, this was actually one of my, my favorite things about writing this book was learning about this group called, I mean, you can guess it's from the 70s. It's called Stewardesses for Women's Rights. And their logo is sort of the pictograph for like the woman's symbol of like the circle with the cross and half of a pair of airline wings, like the sort of wings that you might see, you know, pilot wear. This was a group that started in the 70s.

It's a big part of the book. wear um this was a group that started in the 70s it's a big part of the book and it's about what's basically one of the ways that women started pushing back with the airlines was a group they formed to protest and to kind of build sisterhood and it was women from all different airlines they would meet in like a church basement in the village and then they expanded they they got members from all different airlines like all over the country they grew rapidly they ended up with an office in 30 in 30 rock in the 30 rock building wow um and they got donations and they threw like big parties and they got so much press because obviously like stewardesses getting mad about things was an amazing news hook and everybody

wanted to write about them. And basically, they were just like this group of sort of like, you can sort of imagine them with like long hair and bell bottoms, protesting, they would protest the ad agencies that put out these super sexist ads, they would, they would like picket them, they would push back against their employers, they, they did all this, and then they would, you know, put their hair up and put on their mini skirts and go trotting off to work in the cabin. And one of their big supporters, the woman who was there from the beginning, was Gloria Steinem. Wow. So, they were really like at the center of the women's rights movement of the time, like just a really important group.

Yeah. And yeah, they're really amazing. And they got an incredible amount done. They were only around for maybe four or five years, but they had conferences. They would bring in experts to talk about the psychological issues that women were facing on the planes. They basically would help each other and encourage each other. They wrote letters to each other. They were always signed in sisterhood. They were just an incredibly supportive group. Eventually, like, fell apart a little bit because people started moving on, and people like Tommy, like one of my main—I describe them as characters, but these are real women still alive today.

But she realized that even though Stewardesses for Women's Rights was getting all these headlines and bringing all this attention to the cause, that they didn't have a seat at the table. And she realized that if she wanted to actually seize power and make real change in her job, that she would have to join the union and take a position of power in the union, which she did. Just hearing you tell this story and talk about these images, um, of, you know, women dressed in bell bottoms and getting on the plane and, you know, go-go boots and like strikes and all these things, uh, makes me go, man, this would make a great TV show.

And then I remember it was made into a TV show. There was a TV show called Pan Am that came out like 10 years ago in the wake of Mad Men. This is when every, every network was trying to rip off Mad Men. And the show was, I don't, I work in the entertainment industry. I don't like to talk shit. The show wasn't good. It was, I watched, I watched like a couple episodes. They made one of the stewardesses a spy for some reason. It was like very broad. But it's such a cool, like the whole milieu is so cool that I I'm like, oh, it needs, it needs a better treatment somewhere. Well, from your mouth to God's ears, Adams.

Let's try a movie. If anybody's listening, look, I can't get, I can't get this movie made, but if anybody's listening, uh, maybe, maybe, uh, hit up now and talk options. Um, so let's talk about once this, uh about once this union, the new union was actually formed, what was Pat Gibbs' union called? The Association of Professional Flight Attendants. And professional also was like put in there very deliberately, you know, sort of counteract this sort of sky bunny image. We are professional, like this is a career, this is an occupation, this is a vocation. So once they had formed their new union, how did they go about making change? What sort of changes did they make and what sort of techniques

did they use? Well, they were able to deal directly with their employer, with American Airlines. They were like, all of a sudden they had a seat at the table. They were doing bargaining. They were doing all this stuff for themselves, which is a big change from having everything sort of filtered through the men at the Transport Workers Union. And they were, well, Pat Gibbs especially is like a pretty ballsy straight shooter, I guess. And so there was a lot of confrontation, I would say, that probably hadn't been there when it was just some white men talking to some other white men. But they, they, well, the book sort of ends after they form their own particular union. Maybe I'll write a sequel and talk more about what goes on as they're running their union. But it's, they're able, essentially, they're finally in a position where they can talk

directly and ask directly for what they want. Yeah. And they're pretty good at getting it. You said that there was a strike in the early 90s? Yes, in 1993. Tell me more about that. I was alive at that point, but I don't remember this strike. Tell me more about it.

This is a strike that flight attendants, even today, they still have the scars and they talk about it. And sometimes my interviews with flight attendants about what happened in the 60s and 70s would even get derailed because they feel so passionately about what happened in 1993, which was basically a huge strike right around Thanksgiving weekend, like a very important time for travel. And the CEO would basically, they all went on strike and the CEO basically brought in scabs to work as flight attendants. And it was like And it was very traumatic for them.

I think it was resolved by Bill Clinton, maybe, after like four or five days. But it was a huge issue for them. I mean, as you know, striking is a last resort for workers. They do not want to go on strike. But throughout the period of deregulation and, airline fares are going down and wages start going down and basically these, a lot of flight attendants start losing their jobs, like things kind of get worse in the airline industry for a long time. And they were pushing back against that. But yeah, it was a difficult time. It must have been especially difficult to go on strike

because that would have been just like maybe a decade after the air traffic controllers strike, which was a disastrous strike that that like honestly went so poorly. It like hurt the entire labor movement in America because Reagan like broke the back of the air traffic controllers. broke the back of the air traffic controllers. We were talking off mic about my interview with Stephen Greenhouse, who wrote a labor history book, and that's like a whole chapter in his book, Beaten Down, Worked Up, about how that strike was a huge debacle. And so I can just imagine the prospects of going on strike in the early 90s in the airline industry must have been very nerve-wracking to even contemplate. For sure. Yeah. And like, even in the 60s and 70s, like, there are talks of strikes when people,

when these women are feeling like really disenfranchised and extra upset, but it never comes to that point precisely because it's like such a traumatic experience for them. And, you know, trying to find ways to work around it, either at the bargaining table or through other kinds of negotiations or through lawsuits that work better for them. But okay, through all of this, you know, union effort, bargaining, creating a new union, wielding their power when they had to, what gains were these flight attendants able to win for themselves? And how did that affect our own experience of flying? Oh, that's a great question. Well, starting in the 60s, once they eliminate the age rule and the marriage rule, like if you see a flight attendant today who's wearing a wedding

ring or in her 40s, that's thanks to these women that I'm talking about in my book. Like, they did that. And then other things like, you know, even with the uniforms and like when men came on board in 1971, the women are like, okay, we can use this. We can leverage this to like fight back against things like having to wear a girdle on the plane, which you can imagine it's a very restrictive garment and having to wear that while walking eight miles in high heels at 30,000 feet is not the most comfortable experience. Or things like, you know, like nail polish, various different things. There was, you know, there was basically all these appearance related rules that were things, of course, they were not being paid to take care of. You know, the hair and the nails and the uniforms and all these things.

They had to pay for their own luggage. But when male flight attendants came on board, they were allowed to use whatever luggage they wanted to. There was all these discriminatory rules. And so then they were able to push back. Once men came on board, they were able to push back against some of those rules by saying, the men don't do this. You know, why do we have to do it? And using the words sex discrimination frequently. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine that there was also, you know, over this period of time, we're talking about a lot of changes in our own government's treatment of sex discrimination, sexual harassment, that sort of thing in the workplace and that this was a, that helped them make their case. Or maybe they

even drove some of those changes, did they? They were actually revolutionary in that when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which banned employment discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, all those things, stewardesses were some of the first people to seize on that. And they were like, okay, we can actually make a difference with this. And there's a lot of stories, some of them maybe apocryphal, about how sex was just added to the act as kind of an afterthought. But it really was about race.

But like sex was sort of slipped in by one of these senators. And they were like, okay, now we can make a difference. And so they started lodging complaints. And like I said, filing lawsuits. And all based on sex discrimination in employment. So they really managed to, through their actions, through using Title VII, they established case law. And some of that has, like, gone on to benefit working women in America today. Like, those basically making it illegal to treat men and women differently in the workplace. I mean, sometimes that's just theoretical or it's just on paper,

but it made like an absolute real difference to working women in the U.S. That is hugely groundbreaking. So this law goes into effect, the big Civil Rights Act, and they are the first to use the language of that law in order to, you know, like bring suit or bargain for, you know, like, like bring suit or bargain for, you know, Hey, this is discriminatory behavior. You can't treat women this way. And then that just became case law that benefited everybody. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Wow. I mean, that is, I really remember, you know, when I interviewed Pat Gibbs, um, sitting there with her and thinking

like, I am really sitting with a really important civil rights leader was the feeling that I had. And I sort of didn't realize that until I was like sitting with her talking to her about it, that it really hit me. Because, you know, I was doing so many interviews a day, you know, like working on this TV show really fast. Okay, let's sit down and do this one. Then I'm talking to her going like, wait, hold on a second. This, this person is like incredibly historically significant, took these heroic risks. Like this, this person should be on a fucking coin. You know, did you have that sense when you were talking to these women? It must've been really remarkable. Oh, a hundred percent. And I think part of that is that,

you know, this idea of like the stewardess as this kind of like pliable, smiling person who's just there to help, like that has really stuck with us. You know, that is like when I was researching this book and I was, you know, Googling things like stewardess porn just kept showing up in my Google searches because this idea of like the sexy stewardess and like is so prevalent. And even in our culture today, like it has not gone away. So to contrast like the behavior of some of these women and like they were militant, like they're out there picketing, they're bargaining, like they're really making an absolute difference. And like pushing back on these, you know, incredibly sexist mores of the time. It just doesn't jive with the idea we have of a stewardess. And like I said, even now. So I think that's what is so interesting about them is that they have this image. And they also like to use that image to their advantage.

You know, sometimes they would go to Congress or they would pick it and they would wear their uniforms and they would have the hair neatly done and makeup perfect. And then they would be out there fighting for their rights. And it's just this contrast between what people think a stewardess should be like and what she's actually like is huge. And I think that's what's so intriguing. But it must have been, what a risk to take, because not only are they having to fight for their rights as workers

against these large corporations, they're violating a lot of gender norms by doing so. Like these very deep seated ideas about what women should and shouldn't do. And we have those ideas today, but like in the 60s, in this particular way, 60s, early 70s must have been all the stronger. It must take an incredible amount of bravery to do that.

Absolutely. And some of the people who were pushing back on making these changes were also stewardesses. Like these extremely strict weight limits that they had, you know, for at every airline. A lot of the stewardesses liked those weight limits because they said, and this is a direct quote, it would keep the fatties out.

Like they really reveled in this glamorous stewardess image. You know, they loved it. They embraced it and they wanted that to continue. So like some, you know, pushing back against these rules was not beneficial to them in that way. I just love that that was a direct quote. Yeah, I know. It's awful. It's really awful. It is, but it's also making me laugh. I'm sorry. Just to use that bluntly. I mean, why do you think that this story isn't more told, right? Because this is such a, you know, like, I did this on Adam Ruins Everything because it was pitched by one of the researchers in our room. I don't know

where they came up with it, right? But I told you in passing for an interview, oh, we just did this cool segment and you're like, oh, wow, this should be a book. I presume you looked around and go, oh, there's not really, this hasn't really been publicized that much. Seems like there's room for a book here. Right. Um, uh, why, why are these folks not on, you know, Mount Rushmore on the coins on the, you know, whatever, you know, why is there only like half a season of a bad network show made about them? You know, why is this story not more famous? I guess the short answer would be they're women. Uh-huh. Okay, great. Moving on. Next question. No, sorry. If you have more to say, please do.

No, I think that's pretty much it. You know, part of it is a stewardess image. It's like, you know, people do not expect this behavior of stewardesses. And so, they kind of like quash it a little bit. But I think just plain old sexism, you know, it's not considered interesting or ladylike for flight attendants to go on strike or to picket or to push back. But I mean, so thankfully they did. And I know that the stewardess unions, or sorry, I'm sorry.

We've been saying stewardess often because that was the term at the time. Now we'll say the flight attendant unions, right? Are still some of the most more militant, powerful unions in aviation. What are the conditions for those workers now? Are they, I assume they're still fighting for those gains, but are their work conditions still improving? Are there backslides happening in this space?

Like, do you have any sense of that? Well, we're talking at a particular time when still, you know, in the middle of a pandemic, when things are, I would say, worse for flight attendants than they've been in a very long time. Like, every day in the news, there's stuff about, like, passengers abusing flight attendants over masks, or generally just like, you know, people have been punched. There was that guy who was, the passenger was famously duct taped to a seat on Frontier Airlines because he'd been groping the flight attendants and physically assaulting them. And also in the 60s, this was encouraged. What's the problem?

I got an ad here from 1965 says I'm supposed to do this. I was mostly amazed that they just had like duct tape on the plane, like next to little cans of Coke or something. I thought that was pretty prepared. But yeah, so it's definitely a difficult time for flight attendants at the moment. And a lot of them are overworked, you know, during the pandemic, you know, things, flights were canceled, people were furloughed, and now they're bringing them back and there's not enough of them. People don't want to work, especially, you know, in unsafe COVID conditions. You can basically just Google like what's happening with flight attendants now, and you'll see that they're like the ones who went back on the line are, which is, you know,

the expression for working, are overworked, underpaid, totally exhausted, like working shifts that are too long. So it's an especially tough time for flight attendants. And if you look at the other, Sarah Nelson, who's the president of the other big flight attendant union, the Association of Flight Attendants, she's always out there speaking out on this. And like she has a lot to say about how the treatment of flight attendants right now is untenable and it really can't continue. But it also does show you the legacy of the work that these women did that just just you mentioned Sarah Nelson. She's one of the more prominent labor leaders in the country and she's the head of one of the flight attendant unions, that this is still like a really powerful tradition in American labor,

that these are workers who still really stand up for themselves and fight. Absolutely. And I think like the kind of through line, like from the women of my book, from the 60s and 70s through to Sarah Nelson today, like the major takeaway from all of this is that women cannot win without unions and that unions cannot win without women. That is a really good takeaway. I really enjoyed that. I mean, well, thank you so much for coming on to tell this story. Now, this has been really wonderful. I'm so thank you again for acknowledging my incredibly large contribution to your book. Well, I really am grateful for the idea. I've gotten so many ideas from other people

mentioning something to me, and I've never had a spot to acknowledge them. So I appreciate even having a mention. Well, now, thank you so much for coming on to tell us about this. What is the name of the book exactly? And where can people get it? The book is called The Great Stewardess Rebellion. And it's going to... Incredible title. Thank you.

It took a lot of work to get there. And it's... Title's always the hardest part. I know it is. It's always the hardest part. It really is. It's out on April 19th. And you can preorder it right now everywhere you buy books. Got it.

And if you're listening to this and it is after April 19th, which it might be, you can pick up a copy at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Nell McShane-Wolfhard, thank you so much again for coming on the show. Thanks so much, Adam. This was really fun. for coming on the show. Thanks so much, Adam. This was really fun.

Well, thank you once again to Nell McShane-Wolfhart for coming on the show. If you want to check out her book, The Great Stewardess Rebellion, head to factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And you'll be supporting not just this show,

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