How Did Stewardesses Become Flight Attendants?

There were no unions for cabin attendants work­ing for the airlines prior to the early 1940s. Their roles had been defined early on by passenger ship service, and these attendants were usually males who were termed “stewards” or “pursers.” Dur­ing the 1920s, Pan American World Airways first employed male stewards on their Key West and Miami service to Havana, using 10-passenger Fokker aircraft (see Figure 15-9, p. 144).

Domestically, women came into the airline work force in 1930 when Boeing Air Transport, later United Airlines, hired Ellen Church, a reg­istered nurse. Church was enamored of aviation and had applied unsuccessfully for a pilot’s posi­tion with Boeing Air Transport. Having been rejected as a pilot, she suggested that having a registered nurse on board would help alleviate passengers’ fear of flying in those early days and that she could professionally attend to air sick­ness as well.

Church became the world’s first stewardess on May 15, 1930, in a three-month experiment that ultimately used eight registered nurses on the west coast to Chicago routes. The addition of these nurses was an unqualified success and, within a short time, most airlines in the country also began adding nurses to their flight crews. They were called “stewardesses.”

Stewardesses in the 1930s were required to be unmarried, younger than 25 years old, weigh less than 115 pounds, and be under 5’4” tall. At the time, there was some correlation between these physical requirements and the size of the interior of most passenger planes. In addition to attending to passengers, their duties included fueling the airplanes, hauling baggage, and light cabin maintenance.

In 1953, American Airlines imposed an upper age restriction for continued employment for stewardesses that called for their retirement upon reaching 32 years of age. Their union was able to limit this rule to new hires, exempting current employees. By this time, many airliners had pressurization systems that allowed flights to be conducted at higher altitudes in quite com­fortable conditions, out of most of the weather and turbulence inducing air sickness and fear of earlier times. These aspects of commercial flight were significantly enhanced with the introduction of passenger jets late in the 1950s.

By 1960, the stewardesses were represented by a division of the Air Line Pilots Association known as the Air Line Stewards and Stewardess Association (ALSSA), now an independent union known as the Association of Flight Attendants.2