Glamour and gunfire: Life of a Pan Am stewardess

EVEN before a global pandemic crippled the airline industry last year, whatever sheen of romance international air travel once held had long worn off. Blame the shrinking seats, the expanding fees (for services from baggage to food to in-flight entertainment), the never-ending security lines. As swift and accessible – and frankly, miraculous – as flying had become in the 21st century, it was entirely uncontroversial to find it miserable, too.

But after a year of severe restrictions on travel, it’s easy to miss those small miseries. So a new book looking back at the height of the jet age offers more than one delicious flavour of escapism. Focusing largely on the mid-1960s, Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am remembers a time when air travel was synonymous with luxury and glamour – not just for passengers but also for the women hired to wait on them.

Julia Cooke, the daughter of a Pan Am executive, builds Come Fly the World around interviews with five women: Clare, Karen, Lynne, Hazel and Tori; four white, one black; four American, one Norwegian. For some, working as a Pan Am stewardess was always the dream; for others, it was the backup plan that kicked in when their visions of a career in biology or the Foreign Service faded. For all of them, working for Pan Am was transformative.

In the earliest days of commercial air travel, cabin attendants were exclusively male, but by the 1950s, growing competition among carriers changed that: “Each airline tried to convince customers that it had the highest level of luxury and service, and the women who served a predominantly male clientele became a particular selling point,” Cooke writes.

Pan Am – at the time, the only American airline to fly exclusively international routes – had a particular reputation for sophistication to maintain. “We must add to our excellence ‘a new dimension’ – that is, emphasis on what pleases people. And I know of nothing that pleases people more,” chief executive Najeeb Halaby would later explain, “than female people.”

Pan Am’s recruiting strategy focused on enticing restless, ambitious women into its ranks. “How can you change a world you’ve never seen?” (was it a taunt or an invitation?) read one job ad. What Pan Am promised was a kind of education, and, in Cooke’s telling, it attracted women who valued the same. Throughout the 1960s, a full 10% of