In 1972, two Eastern Air Lines stewardesses, Jan Fulsom and Sandra Jarrell, started Stewardesses for Women’s Rights. Both women had suffered because of the airline industry’s sexualization. Fulsom told the Los Angeles Times that in her three and a half years working for Eastern Air Lines, she had been “pinched, fondled, leered at, asked out on dates and propositioned more times than she [could] remember.” Her most traumatic experience of sexual harassment occurred when a drunken man passenger shouted at her, grabbed her, and ripped her skirt off. When Fulsom complained to the flight captain, he responded with laughter.

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After Jarrell failed to meet Eastern Air Lines’s target weight, her supervisors threatened her with suspension. Jarell knew that airlines did not enforce weight restrictions for men working as flight attendants and pilots, who never seemed to be called for weigh-ins. This double standard, she understood, came from “airlines obviously want[ing] to perpetuate the sex image of the flight attendant.” She resigned from Eastern in 1971 and filed a complaint with the EEOC. When she later tried to get her job back, her interviewer told her she exceeded the maximum hiring weight. Her interviewer described Jarrell as “defensive and hostile whenever the subject of the weight program arose.” Jarrell was unable to convince the EEOC that the airline’s decision was an act of retaliation.

After Fulsom and Jarrell shared their stories with each other, they realized that the airline industry’s existing unions, dominated by men, didn’t pay much attention to the gendered discrimination women working as flight attendants experienced. Their group brought an explicitly feminist agenda to airline labor activism.

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Only 15 people attended the group’s first meeting, but that number grew quickly. Members leafleted persistently, dragged friends to meetings, and held consciousness-raising sessions in airport employee parking lots. These actions sensitized flight attendants to shared workplace problems and helped individual flight attendants recognize that they were not alone in their anger. Within two years, the organization had grown to 1,000 members. Within four years, it had 3,000 members.

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The leaders of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights gave members a set of critical and practical tools to challenge sexism and chauvinism. First, they suggested that flight attendants should challenge the objectification of women by the airlines and the media through everyday acts of consciousness raising. For example, they asked their members to, “Talk about women and men and gender roles the roles they play to their friends on airlines and outside of the airline industry.” Leaders encouraged the group’s members to use the media to challenge exploitative advertising and to call out those who perpetuate negative stereotypes about flight attendants. The group maintained, “Sexist airline advertising is a threat to passenger safety because it undermines our authority in the event of an emergency and passengers don’t take orders from the objects of their sexual fantasy,” and its leaders also insisted that women needed to assume positions of institutional power and shape policy.

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But perhaps their most important tool was persistent legal action against the airline industry. Stewardesses for Women’s Rights found a lawyer willing to take flight attendants’ complaints about weight, grooming regulations, and promotion opportunities to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They quickly filed 14 complaints. And the group’s efforts spurred other flight attendants to complain to the EEOC, resulting in a cascade of lawsuits challenging the restrictions airlines placed on stewardesses’ age, marital status, weight, uniform, and hairstyles.

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Black flight attendants also used the courts and the EEOC to challenge the airlines’ white beauty standards. Deborah Renwick, a stewardess with United Airlines, received a three-week suspension and then was terminated for having an Afro. With the support of the NAACP, she successfully sued United Airlines and won the right for flight attendants to wear Afros.

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The impact of these legal actions was dramatic. As the EEOC and the courts struck down marriage, pregnancy, and age requirements, the average job tenure of a flight attendant increased from 15 months in 1965 to over six years a decade later. While not all lawsuits and complaints were successful and some cases, especially those surrounding weight requirements, dragged on for years, flight attendants remade the face of the airline industry and created new employment opportunities for women through their sustained struggle in the courts and in the press. Their uniforms became more professional and less revealing. Working alongside feminist groups such as NOW, and with their unions, they educated the public about the realities of their work and empowered each other to speak out against their demeaning treatment.

The impact of their activism was felt beyond their profession, as well. Educated, ambitious, and motivated, these flight attendants went on to take leadership roles within their unions and to become more politically active in other aspects of their lives. One member of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights described it as “my awakening to the feminist movement, to the labor movement. It woke me up to my political goals and ideas.”

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Flight attendants’ demands for respect as women and workers—and their organizing efforts to put some muscle behind those demands—still resonate today.

Gillian Frank is co-host of the “Sexing History” podcast and a postdoctoral research fellow at University of Virginia’s Program in American Studies.

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Lauren Gutterman is co-host of the “Sexing History” podcast and an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Subscribe to their podcast, Sexing History, on iTunes. For interviews with flight attendants and more on flight attendants’ struggle against workplace sexual harassment and sexual discrimination, check out this episode.

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