The Golden Age of Air Travel Gets a Reality Check

Such victories had lasting impression. “The stewardess insurrection modified your entire airline trade, one of many largest companies in the US,” Wulfhart writes. Her account credit these girls as having performed a pioneering function in preventing intercourse discrimination, and he or she tells the story properly.

And but studying the small print seems like pouring salt in a really outdated wound that has but to heal; it’s dramatic, invigorating and instructive as a textbook instance of the braveness, ingenuity and persistence it takes to impact such progress — nevertheless it’s additionally extremely painful.

The day I completed studying “The Nice Stewardess Revolt,” headlines described the Idaho laws that criminalizes abortion after six weeks, together with any termination of ectopic pregnancies, which will be deadly to girls carrying them. The brand new measure additionally encourages vigilantes to revenue from such medicalized persecution; its sponsor says that if a rapist has ten siblings, every can sue the rape sufferer for $20,000 as punishment for terminating any being pregnant ensuing from the violent legal assault on her physique. A $200,000 bonus for the rapist’s bounty-hunting family members — your tax {dollars} at work!

Different headlines cowl the present epidemic of “unruly passengers,” a euphemism for the rage-filled vacationers who’re punching, sexually assaulting, urinating on, knocking out the enamel of and verbally abusing flight attendants. A couple of offender has needed to be duct-taped to his seat till the airplane landed safely. In the present day’s routine crises require much more than a fairly face from the nation’s beleaguered flight attendants.

However regardless that flight attendants can now get married, get older and achieve just a few kilos with out dropping their jobs, girls’s our bodies in all places are nonetheless being policed by bureaucracies that insist on the precise to regulate their bodily and sexual autonomy. The infrastructure of patriarchy isn’t one thing we dismantled a very long time in the past; it’s simply as savagely implacable because it was when stewardesses acquired organized. Even when we’ve come a great distance, child, most of us don’t want a journey author to inform us what a protracted, arduous method we nonetheless need to go.

Wulfhart’s epilogue reminds us of the enduring reality that the stewardess insurrection bestowed as a key element of its legacy: “By standing as much as an trade that most well-liked its girls docile, fairly and younger, they demonstrated to the world that energy was out there — you simply needed to attain out and seize it.”

Leslie Bennetts is a journalist and writer of “The Female Mistake” and “Final Lady Earlier than Freeway.” A frequent speaker on girls’s financial safety points, she is engaged on a e book about girls within the second half of life.