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My Life on the Road

Page 11

by Gloria Steinem


  Back in the galley, stewardesses were only too glad to tell me about the indignities, from ad campaigns with slogans like “I’m Sandy, Fly Me,” and “She’ll Serve You—All the Way,” to an “Air Strip” in which they were required to walk up and down the aisles while stripping to hot pants. Passengers were influenced by this image of stewardesses, and made them second only to farmers’ daughters as objects of sex jokes. This image was publicized by such X-rated pornographic movies as Come Fly with Me and The Swinging Stewardesses. Some pilots expected to be serviced sexually on layovers, and though the answer from stewardesses was overwhelmingly no, passengers assumed they must be saying yes. Airlines fended off sex discrimination lawsuits for refusing to hire male stewards by maintaining that the care and feeding of passengers was so peculiarly “feminine” that it amounted to a “BFOQ”—a bona-fide occupational qualification—otherwise reserved for wet nurses and sperm donors. Stewardesses could be “written up” for any infraction of the rules, including talking back to an obnoxious drunk passenger or refusing to sell more drinks to an already inebriated one. They were made to share rooms on layovers while male crew had private rooms, and they were definitely not on a job ladder to the executive suite.

  But pilots, on whose physical condition much more depended, got away with many fewer physical requirements and weigh-ins, a fact visible in red faces and potbellies. They also earned an average of 400 percent more than flight attendants, and had a lock on piloting because the air force, which paid and trained almost all of them, hadn’t trained a woman pilot since World War II. Then, WASPs ferried planes across the Atlantic, but after the war, no Amelia Earharts needed apply.

  The more I listened to all this, the more I admired the degree to which this group of women maintained their humanity, despite being regulated right down to getting demerits if they didn’t smile constantly. As one said to me, “Even my face is not my own.”

  Of course, punished people sometimes pass punishment downward, especially to members of their own devalued group. Flying to Kansas for a campus speech with my speaking partner Dorothy Pitman Hughes and her newborn baby, a stewardess ordered Dorothy, who was nursing her daughter, into the lavatory, as if nursing were an obscene act. Only Dorothy’s fierce objection, my threat to write about it, and the anger of a nearby white woman passenger dissuaded her. When I was traveling with Flo Kennedy, a stewardess insisted that the plane couldn’t take off until Flo’s purse was stashed in the overhead bin. Flo pointed out similar purses on white women’s laps, flat out refused to remove hers, and asked the stewardess why she was oppressing other women when she herself was oppressed. In solidarity with Flo, I took my satchel out of the overhead, though it really was luggage, and put it on my lap. Neither Flo nor I would budge. Finally, the plane took off anyway.

  We laughed about such scuffles later, and Flo kept reminding me that they gave us an opportunity to teach, though each one was also punishing to the soul.

  Mostly, though, stewardesses were a revolution waiting to happen. When I was on a plane from St. Louis, long the airport nearest home for Phyllis Schlafly—a creation of the Fairness Doctrine, because she was the rare woman the media could find who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment—a flight attendant whispered to me, “I had Phyllis Schlafly on my flight, and I put her in a middle seat!” I knew things were changing when I got on a flight from San Francisco, and found a stewardess wearing a button, I’M LINDA, FLY YOURSELF. Then some flight attendants rebelled against having just first names on their identifying pins. Why should they be Susie or Nan while the pilots were Commander Rothgart or Captain Armstrong? (Eventually they also demanded last names preceded by Ms. so they wouldn’t be identified by marital status.) Their name demand was right up there with salary and safety. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “When the slave leaves bondage, his first act is to name himself.”

  By the mid-1970s, a newly minted group called Stewardesses for Women’s Rights opened a small office in Rockefeller Center. I visited it and found women from many different airlines holding joint press conferences, pressuring in and outside their company unions, protesting their image in airline ads, and exposing such hazards as recirculated air that endangered them and their passengers. Knowing that the job would be more honored if men were doing it, too, they were making the integration of men into this all-female workforce as much a priority as integrating female pilots into the all-male cockpit. They pushed to change stewardesses to flight attendants, since even steward would mark a job description by gender.

  As I learned from listening to these smart women who were treated as not smart, stewardesses of the 1960s had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), trying to change the “no men, no marriage” policy of their job. Aileen Hernandez, the only female or African American on the EEOC, supported them. Years later they finally won, but the airlines called the ruling “improper” because Hernandez, after leaving the EEOC, had become president of the National Organization for Women. A judge actually agreed. That’s why discrimination was still okay when I started flying a lot—and remained okay until 1986.

  When corporate raider Carl Icahn took over TWA, he expected flight attendants to both take a pay cut and accept a work increase—unlike the (almost totally male) machinists and pilots. In 1986, flight attendant Vicki Frankovich led a strike of unprecedented length and unity—and campaigned for a public boycott of TWA because of its discrimination. Ms. magazine named her one of our Women of the Year. Icahn had the support of the pilots and machinists and more or less won, but he was forced to admit that the striking flight attendants had cost him $100 million.3 When I met him quite accidentally, I discovered he was furious about the Ms. article supporting Frankovich. He told me he didn’t discriminate against women. As proof, he said that if he needed one of his top male executives on a national holiday—and that executive spent the holiday with his family instead—he would fire him, too.

  I could see what flight attendants were up against. By then, I’d been flying so much and listening to so many that I had to resist saying we when I talked about job problems. I also began to get the other end of women’s stories whose first chapters I had seen on earlier flights.

  In the 1970s, on a flight to Milwaukee, for instance, a stewardess told me she resented feminists for saying that men could do her job, and that women could be pilots. “That isn’t the way the world works,” she said with energy. “You’re telling people to fight what’s in our nature and biology. You’re only making women discontent by telling them to do the impossible.” At the end of the 1980s, I ran into her again on a flight to Albuquerque. She was now the mother of two little girls, and giving out flight attendant’s pins and pilot’s wings to children on board—as airlines often do to welcome families—and offering either one to both boys and girls. She had discovered there were boys who liked her job of taking care of passengers, and girls who wanted to pilot the plane.

  What had changed her mind? Two things, she said. Because her airline finally had been forced to democratize its hiring, she worked with male flight attendants and realized they could do the job because “people are people.” Second, she had read that Whitney Young, the late civil rights leader, confessed to boarding a plane in Africa and feeling an involuntary moment of fear when he saw that the pilot was black. He realized how much self-hatred had been bred into him by a racist culture. “I also mistrusted myself and other women,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I learned that from my mother—but I’m not going to pass it on to my daughters.” When I last saw her, she was standing at the front of the plane, giving out pilot’s wings to two little girls.

  Some women were novels in themselves. Tommie Hutto-Blake was a flight attendant I saw in 1972 in a Manhattan church basement at the first meeting of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights; then again at the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977; then as an activist at a 1994 political event in Dallas; then in 2008 when she was campaigning for Hillary Clinton; then on a flight
of American Airlines just before she retired after thirty-eight years as a flight attendant, thirty-five of them as a union activist, and took on political activism full time. That last time, she was a revered passenger. I was led back to where she was sitting by two younger women flight attendants, and one was a union vice president who was just finishing law school. It was a long way from lighting cigars and doing Air Strips.

  In the 1970s, I had read a newspaper report of an African American stewardess who showed up for work with an Afro at a time when the few black flight attendants were expected to look as “white” as possible. She compounded the offense by carrying a copy of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. The pilot of the flight refused to take off until she was put off the plane. When I was back on the same airline, I asked a stewardess if there had been a protest. She said yes, but as far as she knew, the pilot got away with it. Like a captain of a ship at sea, he could do anything he wanted.

  More than twenty years later, I was in a big-city radio station for a news interview, and a female station manager showed me around. She was a rarity in an industry where 85 percent of managers were males, so I asked how she had come to this position. She explained that after a divorce, she had gone back to school, started in radio at the bottom, loved its ability to create community, and discovered she had a gift for managing people.

  “Do you happen to remember,” she asked me as we finished our tour, “a news story about an airline pilot who put a black flight attendant off the plane for reading Eldridge Cleaver?”

  I said I definitely did. I’d always wondered what became of him.

  “Well, that pilot was my husband,” she said calmly. “So I divorced him. That one true act was my beginning.”

  Over the years, those stories in the sky would teach me more than I could have imagined: from deregulation, fare wars, and nonunion airlines, to post-Iraq fuel costs, hijacking fears, and bankruptcies that somehow required pay cuts for everybody except executives with golden parachutes. I experienced the kindness of flight attendants who brought me back a dessert or a meal from first class, or let me lie down in the middle of an aisle when I had a back spasm, or took the armrests out of three-across seats so I could sleep coast to coast, or illegally moved me up to first class when there was an empty seat, or sent me off with a split of champagne to thank me for supporting their job struggles. They still are not part of the job ladder into the executive airline ranks, and they still are far more likely to take pay cuts than the almost totally male machinists and pilots even though about a quarter of flight attendants are now men. But ever since they won the right to work beyond marriage and beyond thirty, I’ve seen more and more whose stories had begun on flights decades before. A modern airliner is very different from a timeless village in India, but it dawned on me one day that all my air travel has much in common with long-ago village walking. If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you.

  COURTESY OF THE OBERLIN COLLEGE ARCHIVES

  WITH MY MOTHER, RUTH NUNEVILLER STEINEM, AT OBERLIN COLLEGE, 1972.

  One Big Campus

  How do I love campuses? Let me count the ways. I love the coffee shops and reading rooms where one can sit and talk or browse forever. I love the buildings with no addresses that only the initiated can find, and the idiosyncratic clothes that would never make it in the outside world. I love the flash parties that start in some odd spot and can’t be moved, and the flash seminars that any discussion can turn into. I love the bulletin boards that are an education in themselves, the friendships between people who would never otherwise have met, and the time for inventiveness that produces, say, an exercise bike that powers a computer. Most of all, I love graduations. They are individual and communal, an end and a beginning, more permanent than weddings, more inclusive than religions, and possibly the most moving ceremonies on earth.

  I’m often asked how many campuses I’ve visited. The truth is I have no idea. I’ve gone to several each month of my lifetime on the road, and I’ve gone back to many more than once. All I know for sure is that university and college campuses, with some high schools and prep schools added, have been the single largest slice of my traveling pie—and they still are.

  When I started traveling to campuses, protest against the draft and the war in Vietnam was empowering students as a political force—and there were many more movements to come. They have brought about change, from what gets taught to who gets tenure; from how the university invests its money to where athletic uniforms are made; from students taking a role in campus decision-making to Take Back the Night marches against sexualized violence on campus; from marginalizing some by class, race, sexuality, and physical ability to including diverse people and new courses of study.

  In my own college life, I got through four years as a government major without learning that women were not just “given” the vote, that the real number of slave rebellions was suppressed because rebelling was contagious, or that the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then, academic courses on Europe far outnumbered those on Africa, even though it is the birthplace of us all and is bigger than Europe, China, India, and the United States combined. When I’m on campus now and look at course listings, the relative importance reflected in them is much better but still way off.

  There has always been this question of what is being taught. As Gerda Lerner, a pioneer of women’s history in general and African American women’s history in particular, summed it up, “We have long known that rape has been a way of terrorizing us and keeping us in subjection. Now we also know that we have participated, although unwittingly, in the rape of our minds.”1

  No wonder studies show that women’s intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence. I say this as a reminder that campuses not only help create social justice movements, they need them.

  Now, campuses look more like the country in terms of race and ethnicity—though we’re not there yet, and bias can survive college degrees. I see women outnumbering their male counterparts on some campuses, but degrees are often a way out of the pink-collar ghetto and into a white-collar one. Women still average much less in earnings over a lifetime than men do and have to pay back the same college debt.

  I see campuses representing more age diversity. More than a third of college students are over twenty-five, and this age group is growing faster than students of conventional age, a change that was pioneered by veterans and the GI Bill of Rights, then by older women returning to campus. I remember watching a thirty-year-old pregnant woman arguing about the health care system with an eighteen-year-old male student, and thinking: This has to be good for education.

  In campus terms, you might say I’ve gone from mimeographing to tweeting; from curfews to hooking up; from no-credit women’s studies courses in summer school to the National Women’s Studies Association; from African American history as demanded by black students to such history as the expectation of all students; from gay and lesbian groups forbidden to meet on campus to transgender and transsexual students who challenge all gender binaries; from blue book exams to handwriting as a disappearing art; and from limited seminars to limitless Web hangouts.

  For instance, during early visits to campuses, I saw students painting a big red X on sidewalks wherever a woman had been sexually assaulted—and ending up getting arrested for vandalism instead of being praised. Now I see their daughters and granddaughters using Title IX—the federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination in education, including sports—to threaten campuses with the loss of federal funding if sexual assault creates an environment hostile to women’s education. For decades, places of higher education obscured the rates of sexual assault, in order to protect a campus reputation and encourage parents to send their daughters. Now I see a few campuses that are honest about and have policies to deal with sexual assault—which happens to an average of one in five women on campus, and a few men, too.2 It shows
this is beginning to be taken seriously, which is a reason for parents to trust those campuses.

  As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism. Scholarly language may be so theoretical that it obscures the source of feminism in women’s lived experience. One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is “I don’t know enough to be a feminist.” Or even “I’m not smart enough to be a feminist.” It breaks my heart.

  But despite all these differences, with the passage of time, I’ve found there is a pattern to campus visits. It goes like this:

  I arrive at the airport—or train station or bus station—where I’m met by one or more of the hardy band of activists who invited me. In the car on the way to the campus—or hotel or classroom or press conference—I learn they are worried. In the South or Midwest, they may warn that this is the most “conservative” place I’ve ever been. If we are on the East or West Coast, they’re more likely to say it’s the most “apathetic.” Or perhaps it’s “activist,” but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production. They have reserved a hall for tonight and have publicized the event, but they’re worried that hardly anyone will come. After all, they’ve been told that feminism is too radical or not radical enough, antimale or male-imitative, impossible because men are from Mars and women are from Venus, or unnecessary because we’re now in a postfeminist, postracist age. The nature and specifics of the negative depend on the part of the country and the year, but the common thread is: self-doubt.

 

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