History of Global Arms Transfer, 8 (2019), pp. 67-82

Jet Age Feminism:
Emilio Pucci, Mary Wells, and the Braniff
Airways Stewardessof the 1960s†
By PHIL TIEMEYER*
This article considers the bold redesign of stewardess uniforms that designer
Emilio Pucci undertook at Braniff Airways in 1965. As part of a larger marketing
campaign to alleviate customer fears about the generic nature of jet travel, Braniff
promised “The End of the Plain Plane” through injections of color, high-end
style, and the objectification of stewardesses. The adoption of jet technology
thereby significantly impacted women, at a time when the United States was
experiencing the rise of a new feminist wave. What this article terms “Jet Age
feminism” is quite different from the radical feminism that not only sought parity
with men in careers but also demanded an end to the physical objectification of
women, contesting the stringent beauty norms placed on women even at work. In
contrast, “Jet Age feminism” was inspired by people like ad executive Mary
Wells, who masterminded the Braniff campaign, and Cosmopolitan magazine
editor Helen Gurley Brown. Braniff’s newly outfitted stewardesses embodied
much of these women’s feminist vision: promoting greater public mobility for
women without dismantling beauty culture. The end result was a compromised
feminism that benefitted wealthy career women like Wells, without freeing
Braniff’s stewardesses to attain the same access to life-long careers.
Whether for christening new routes or unveiling new aircraft, airport runways havesometimes supplemented their utilitarian purpose with something more festive. But in July
1965 aviation history marked a revolutionary moment on a different kind of runway: afashion runway assembled in a lavish ballroom of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Italy.
There, the famed designer Emilio Pucci, who attired celebrities such as Sophia Loren and
Jacqueline Kennedy, introduced his Fall haute couture collection. As part of the show, healso debuted the fruition of his months-long collaboration with Texas’ Braniff Airways: acompletely new ensemble of stewardess uniforms. Exceptionally colorful and formal-yetcasual, they were a sharp divergence from the monochromatic, military-inspired uniformsof elite carriers like Pan Am, British Overseas Airways, and Japan Air Lines.
The result, in the words of Vogue magazine, embodied the geographical fluidity andextraterrestrial yearning of the Jet Age: ‘In look, a combination of Texas, Florence, and† An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Research Institute for the History of Global Arms
Transfer in November 2018. The author is grateful to the members of the institute for their feedback, especially
Professors Katsuhiko Yokoi and Kaori Takada.
* Author affiliations: Associate Professor of History, Kansas State University, United States.

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PHIL TIEMEYER
Mars, the clothes [Pucci] has worked out are meant to meet every possible exigency—
including the future’.1 Braniff’s public relations materials added a similar point about
Pucci: ‘As a decorated Italian pilot, he is blazing a new space-age trail for erstwhile earthbound fashions. His concept for in-flight hostess attire is completely new, completely
contemporary, and completely in accord with his credo: “When I design, I think of awoman in motion”’.2
Of course, this ornate presentation was motivated to generate publicity for the airline.
However, this fact does not diminish the importance of Braniff’s innovations, which further
exacerbated 1960s America’s cultural fault-lines of women’s liberation and sexual
revolution.3 As Pucci and Braniff outfitted their stewardesses for a Jet Age future that could
as easily involve Mars as it could Texas (in Vogue’s words), women at Braniff wererendered at once more empoweringly mobile, but also more restricted than before by malesexual privilege.
This essay’s first part examines how and why Braniff’s creative team, including Pucci,
refashioned stewardessing as part of its larger marketing campaign, aptly entitled the ‘Endof the Plain Plane’.4 The numerous changes responded to a deeper fear among airline
executives: that the jet, with its expanded capacity that made air travel less exclusive, wasspoiling customers’ sense of awe. Flying risked becoming ‘plain’ for customers, so
Braniff’s marketers sought to manufacture renewed excitement, including through thedramatic refashioning of its stewardesses. This overhaul was financially vital for Braniff,since its Board committed in 1965 to shift very rapidly to an expensive all-jet fleet.
Some of this essay’s narrative on the ‘End of the Plain Plane’ campaign has already beenchronicled by accomplished historians and journalists. Readers interested in a fuller
consideration of the subject should consult Victoria Vantoch’s The Jet Set: Airline
Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon, which places the Braniff campaign inthe context of other US airlines’ efforts in the late 1960s to sexualize stewardesses as ameans to grow their customer base.5 In addition, William Stadiem’s Jet Set: The People,
the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation’s Glory Years offers the mostdetailed study to date of Braniff’s decisions that culminated in the ‘End of the Plain Plane’
campaign.6 Finally, Kathleen Barry’s Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants,
chronicles stewardesses’ multi-pronged fight against sexism in the workplace, whichbecame all the more intense due to the Braniff campaign and the various copycats that
followed in the US aviation sector.7 Overall, my work shares a common basis with thesepreceding contributions, while offering particular novelty in the analysis put forward in thesecond and third parts of this essay.
The essay’s second part examines Pucci’s and Braniff’s refashioning of stewardesses inrelation to American notions of feminism in the mid 1960s, rendering what I call ‘Jet Age
feminism.’ This term is firstly a chronological designation, referring to the status of
1 McCarty, J, ‘Beauty Checkout’ in Vogue, 15 Sept 1965, p. 62.
2 Vitra Design Museum, Alexander Girard Archives (hereafter AGA), Box ‘MAR 00105 D-4’, Folder ‘Girard

Press - 01/1964-12/1965’, Press release, ‘Emilio Pucci: Fashion Innovator’, 19 July 1965.
3 Works that chronicle the feminism and the sexual revolution in the 1960s include: Allyn, Make Love, Not
War; Bradley, Mass Media and Feminism; Cott, Grounding of Feminism; Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs, ReMaking Love; Hill, Peacock Revolution; Kessler-Harris, Out to Work; Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver; Rosen,
World Split Open; Scanlon, Bad Girls Go Everywhere.
4 AGA, Box ‘MAR 00105 D-4’, Folder ‘Girard Press - 01/1964 - 12/1965’, Press release, ‘Announcing the Endof the Plain Plane’, November 1965.
5 Vantoch, The Jet Sex, pp. 153-85.
6 Stadiem, Jet Set, pp. 242-75.
7 Barry, Femininity in Flight, pp. 174-84.

68Jet Age Feminism
feminism in the United States in the first decade of civil aviation’s adoption of jet
technology (1959-69). Yet, it also more specifically refers to how notions of feminism
intersected with civil aviation culture during these years. Women could not serve as pilots
on US airlines throughout this first decade of jet travel, nor could they enter America’s
space program. Thus, stewardessing was the most a woman could aspire to, and Braniff’s
iteration was the first intentional effort by an airline to reshape womanhood in the Jet Age.
When Pucci and the person who commissioned him for Braniff, advertising executive Mary
Wells, offered women the mixed bag of greater mobility but also greater subservience tomen, they indicated that women’s ‘Right Stuff’ would be quite different from astronauts’.8
These women endured the erasure of risk as a valued workplace trait, and training for thejob became less tied to safety and more tied to personal grooming.
The essay’s final part contrasts the Jet Age feminism of stewardesses and that of Mary
Wells, the ad executive who masterminded Braniff ’s 1965 campaign. While both
encountered sexism in their work, the class difference between these women rendereddivergent fates. Wells successfully blended the competing pulls on Jet Age women towards
career, sexiness, and marriage. Ultimately, she and her new husband, Braniff’s President
Harding Lawrence, met at work and soon thereafter became one of America’s first dualcareer ‘power couples’, with husband and wife competing to take home the larger salary.
Meanwhile, Braniff offered a more limited version of Jet Age feminism to working-classwomen: marriage wasn’t for them an opportunity to advance their careers, but rather wascause for being fired. As such, even though both Wells and Braniff’s stewardesses became
paragons of a boldly modern way of being a woman in the Jet Age, neither was a truemodel for the more radical feminism that was gaining currency at the time. Jet Age
feminism, over time, gave way to something more inclusive.

I Democratizing the Jet Set:
Braniff and its Stewardesses Enter the Jet Age
1965 was a momentous year for Braniff International Airways, then a medium-sized carrier
based in the medium-sized, but growing city of Dallas, Texas. From its first flight in 1928,
Braniff subsisted as a regional carrier in the heavily regulated United States aviation
market, granted routes in Texas, eastwards towards New Orleans, and northwards towards
Kansas City. The years after World War II offered Braniff a first foothold outside themidsection of the US. A merger in 1952 expanded the route network to Chicago, while its
first flights between Dallas and the East Coast came a few years later. Finally, Braniff had
become an international carrier already in 1948. With the award of routes to Latin America,
Braniff became the Western Hemisphere’s equivalent of Trans World Airlines on European
routes: it served as the US’s second flag-carrier, alongside the much stronger Pan American
Airways, on routes as far south as Buenos Aires.9
Even so, Braniff had very little brand visibility in the US’s biggest cites or in Latin
America’s metropoles. Only three percent of potential customers in the New York area had
heard of the airline, putting it at a significant disadvantage in the largest consumer market.10
Moreover, Braniff was falling behind major airlines in the rush to transition to an all-jet
8 On the application of the term ‘Right Stuff’ to US astronauts, see Wolfe, Right Stuff.
9 For a history of Braniff, see Cass, Braniff Airways.
10 History of Aviation Collection, Braniff Collection (hereafter BC), Box 18, Folder 4, ‘Harding LawrenceMarkets an Airline’ in Media Decisions, Jul 1968.

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fleet. It had secured ten Boeing 707-720 jets between the plane’s debut in 1959 and 1964,
enough to cover routes to Chicago, New York, and Washington, but its other routes
depended on a fleet of piston-engine planes. This lack was particularly glaring on Braniff’s
Latin American routes.
When Harding Lawrence took over as Braniff’s new President in March 1965, the new
executive team already was tasked to fully transition Braniff to the jet era. He therefore
unveiled a business plan that included purchasing dozens of new jets valued together at$160 million, of which $120 million was borrowed. Included were 14 new regional jets
(BAC-111s) and 17 new Boeing 727s for longer routes. By mid-1967, Lawrence promised,
all of Braniff’s non-jets would be retired.11 Overall, Braniff was set to expand its seating
capacity by 57 per cent by January 1966, with another 27.5 per cent increase by July 1966.
Executives then faced the daunting challenge of increasing ticket sales, in order to makethis investment pay off. Central to this strategy was a new marketing and advertising
campaign, for which Lawrence had already identified his chosen partner: advertising
executive Mary Wells of Jack Tinker and Partners. Wells details in her autobiography
Lawrence’s urgent plea, ‘Listen, Mary, I need a very big idea for this airline, something so
big it will make Braniff important news, overnight’. Behind this need for attention lay theupcoming jet purchases, ‘I’m going to buy a large fleet of jets and they’ll cost plenty … I
don’t want to fly a lot of empty seats around’. Lawrence reinforced his plea for a total
makeover, ‘I want to hire you people at Tinker to help me reintroduce Braniff to America.
Actually, I want you to introduce Braniff to the world’. 12 He then agreed to double theairline’s advertising budget, to $6 million, in the first year.13
Bold ideas started taking shape during Wells’ research into the state of air travel. In mid1965, her team spent time in airports, on planes, and at ticket offices, where theyinterviewed air travelers. The main finding was at once obvious and insightful: ‘All planes
looked alike; all terminals looked alike; all stewardesses looked alike. There was a great
prevalence of gray, a military hang-over’.14 Wells rightly perceived that many civil aviation
resources had direct ties to America’s military mobilizations in World War II and the Cold
War. Many airfields and terminals were hastily built during the early 1940s, and most pilots
were trained either in World War II or Korea.
The militarized stewardess uniforms, however, took root in the 1930s. Their dark colors,
stripes on sleeves, and lapels decorated with stylized wings were inspired by the US Navy,
which America’s first major airline, Pan Am, mimicked for its crew aboard the ‘flying
boats’ that navigated the skies at the time.15 Early air travel was also bumpy, cold, andfraught with the potential danger of crash landings; thus, a drab, heavyweight uniform thatconveyed authority in times of danger was appropriate. That such uniforms persisted
through the 1950s is partly a consequence of the accretion of tradition, but it also reflects
the resurgent connections between aviation and militarization during the early Cold War.
After all, the great innovations of Cold War-era civil aviation—pressurized air cabins,
improved radar navigation, and, most importantly, the jet aircraft—were all byproducts ofmilitary research and development begun during World War II and enhanced during the
11 AGA, Box ‘MAR 00110 D-5’, Folder ‘Girard Press - 01/1966- 12/1966’, Press Release (no title), 16 Jun
1965.
12 As quoted in: Wells Lawrence, Big Life in Advertising, p. 33.
13 BC, Box 34, Folder 2, Memo from Rex Brack to All Employees, 24 Nov 1965.
14 Mary Wells, as quoted in: Black,C., ‘Meet America’s Top Woman Exec’ in Honolulu Advertiser, 25 Mar
1975.
15 The history of the first flight attendants at Pan Am, who happened to be all-male, is described in: Tiemeyer,
Plane Queer, pp. 14-41.

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Jet Age Feminism
first decades of the Cold War.16
In expressing her concerns about a ‘military hang-over’, Wells could have also noted that
her work for Braniff was happening in the middle of the US military’s mobilization in
Vietnam. In March 1965, right as Wells won the Braniff contract, US Marines made theirfirst landing at Da Nang, and the US Air Force and Navy commenced Operation RollingThunder, President Johnson’s gruesome aerial bombing campaign of North Vietnam
comparable in size to the raids over Japan and Germany during World War II. As such, thedecisions to “feminize” Braniff’s stewardess uniforms by adding lush colors, foregoing
stripes on the cuffs, and replacing the lapel’s streamlined wings with a curvaceous golden
dove—the symbol of peace—were quite timely. As historian Victoria Vantoch notes,
American society at the time had an entrenched masculine-feminine dichotomy that also
impacted Cold War notions of technology: the aviation industry ‘relied on polarized
descriptions of “cold” and “efficient” (read: masculine) aircraft technology versus “warm”
and “friendly” (read: feminine) service in ways that tapped larger Cold War discourse about
gender and technology.’ 17 As such, the ‘Right Stuff’ of Braniff stewardesses had to bediametrically opposed to the cold, hard, technical exploits of America’s men at war in
Vietnam if it was to succeed in elevating Braniff into the jet age via the expansion of its
customer base.
The initial inspiration for Braniff’s new campaign was color. Throughout her team’s
research, Wells was most struck by its stark absence in airports and on planes: ‘[T]here wasno color. This was the sixties, mind you, when color was a hot marketing tool … [Harding
Lawrence] liked thinking about color; he reminded me that Braniff would be flying toplaces associated with brilliant color, Mexico and South America’.18 Indeed, color also had
deeper importance in the 1960s as a widespread design fad. As fashion historian Shirley
Kennedy notes,
One could not help but notice color everywhere. Colors vibrated and seemed to
explode on the Pucci silks, as they did on the Pop Art canvases of Lichtenstein,
Warhol, Wesselman, and Rosenquist … psychedelic rock concert posters, and theBeatles’ cartoon movie, The Yellow Submarine.19
Color was playful, young, and, as Lawrence noted, it recalled the alleged simplicity ofthe pre-modern cultures. Mary Wells conceded, ‘Color was my idea, but not really. There’s
no magic talent in advertising. Too many people don’t do their homework and find theobvious need’. 20 The need, as she saw it, was to wed the ultra-modern jet with theprimordial wonder of color.
Color ultimately infused everything that Braniff remade under Wells’ direction: ticket
counters, airport lounges, stewardess uniforms, and ad materials. But the original burst thatstarted this colorful makeover involved the planes themselves. As Wells notes, she firstconsidered having a fleet all in yellow, or orange, or indigo. Her art director drew
renderings of planes in these colors, then placed them on the floor for the staff to critique.
‘Then I asked him to do one with all different-colored planes’, recalls Wells. ‘When thatsketch hit the floor of the reception it was a thunderbolt, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind
16 Tiemeyer, Plane Queer, p. 58.
17 Vantoch, The Jet Sex, p. 175.
18 Wells Lawrence, Big Life in Advertising, p. 34.
19 Kennedy, Pucci, p.98.
20 Black, ‘Meet America’s Top Woman Exec’.

71PHIL TIEMEYER… Seven colors looked like a big idea and wow and friendly and it would be big news’.
Sharing the concept with Lawrence was also a surprisingly easy success: ‘When he studied
the sketches of his planes in seven different solid colors he was quiet for a minute. I don’t
think I breathed. Then he laughed. He said, and I will never ever forget it, ‘That will doit!’’21
Wells then made a second vital decision, one which tied the universally accessible
inclination to embrace color to more exclusivist impulses from high society. After all, she
did not employ a child-like adoption of color as one might find in a nursery school, or eventhe notionally ‘primitive’ collage of color that one would find in Mexican textiles. Instead,she delegated the implementation of Braniff’s color infusion to two of America’s andEurope’s top-name designers, both of whom were famous for their use of color: Emilio
Pucci from the fashion world and Alexander Girard from the interior design realm. By
effectively purchasing their aesthetic for use at the airline, Wells assured that Braniff’s
colors had a patina of elitism.
Pucci’s explosively colorful cocktail dresses were famous primarily because of thecelebrities who wore them. He had a coterie of rich patrons who would buy directly fromhis boutiques in Italy. By the mid-1960s, he was also exporting to department stores in the
US. But, as the accomplished author and Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown recalls,
Pucci’s price point was prohibitive: ‘I remember seeing my first Pucci dress in Burdine’s
department store in Miami in 1963 when I was on a book promotion. “How long has thisbeen going on?” I asked myself and, though I didn’t think I could afford one—$190 for one
little skimp of a dress—I tried on four in fifteen minutes for sheer pleasure’.22 That Brown,a best-selling author, ruminated about whether she could afford Pucci’s creations speaks to
his exclusivity.
Ironically, this deployment of an elitist aesthetic was Braniff’s tool for democratizing air
travel. Braniff’s new customers would be drawn from two divergent income groups. The
first was comprised of those wealthy enough to partake in Girard’s and Pucci’s worlds as
consumers. Since this group, mainly consisting of business executives and their spouses,
likely was already accustomed to flying by plane, Braniff’s embrace of Jet Set glitz may
have been enough to lure them away from their competitors.23 Yet, more numerous were
customers with considerably less spending power, many of whom were first-time flyers in
the 1960s. In their case, too, there was an allure to the Braniff aesthetic. In an aviation
market strictly regulated both domestically and internationally, customers found eachairline offering the same fares to any desired destination. The only difference was the typeof aircraft flown—hence Braniff’s desire to catch up to competitors with more jets inservice—and the quality of service.
As advertising executives for Braniff’s competitor Pan Am researched the habits oftravelers with limited budgets, they found the following: ‘Once they [are committed to] pay
full fare, they are prepared to shop among competitive airlines on the basis of the comfort,
service, and enjoyment aspects of the trip’.24 With its new jets and Wells’ stylish overhaul,Braniff seemingly offered these customers more for their money. They lounged in Girard21 Wells Lawrence, Big Life in Advertising, p. 35.
22 As quoted in: Kennedy, Pucci, p. 7.
23 On the usage of the term ‘Jet Set’ to refer to an elite class of celebrities in the 1960s, see Stadiem, Jet Set.
24 J Walter Thompson Company Collections, ‘J. Walter Thompson Company Account Files, 1885-2008 andundated’, Box PA10, Folder ‘Research Reports 1969’, ‘Preliminary Exploration of Consumer Perceptions of the
747 Plane in England, France and Germany’, November 1969, p. 18.

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styled airports, boarded planes decorated with bold fabrics and Latin American artwork
chosen by Girard, and they were served by hostesses who sported the same sort of Puccidesigned outfits as movie stars. These middle-class and working-class customers were
thereby offered an opportunity to partake in the ambiance they saw in movies and readabout on celebrity pages.
Braniff’s Pucci-clad hostesses also addressed—or at least diverted attention away from—a growing personnel crisis tied to the democratization of the jet era. With larger and fasteraircraft, customers were beginning to fear that air travel would become like mass transit:
utilitarian rather than exclusive, crowded and impersonal rather than enjoyable. In theparlance of Mary Wells’ ad campaign, air travel increasingly occurred on a ‘plain plane’. A
report commissioned by Pan Am just a few years later, in 1969, concluded that middleincome consumers were disappointed by increasingly large jets: ‘The impression of masstravel … underlines their basic concern about de-humanization. They feel the individual
passenger will be one of a mob and will not have the kind of personal attention theyseek’.25 Jumbo jets with upwards of 400 seats would soon exacerbate these concerns. Yet,already the first models of jets, including the 727s Braniff purchased in 1965, stirred
misgivings. While Braniff’s largest pre-jet plane, the DC-7C, seated 75 passengers, the new
727s could accommodate 154. Inevitably, passengers desiring a personal touch would more
frequently be disappointed.
As such, stewardesses faced increasingly unattainable expectations. As the Pan Am reportsummarized, ‘[C]onsumers … desire to be treated as individuals. Some of them are evensensitive to ‘cookie cutter’ pleasantness on the part of the stewardesses … They want toreally feel that some one cares about them as individuals’.26 However, flight attendants in
the Jet Age cared for more people and undertook the same work in a reduced amount offlying time. In a way, Braniff’s stewardess outfits offered a potential remedy. By turning
the aisle into a fashion runway, passengers might think of themselves more as spectators
than guests deserving high-quality service. They could participate in Jet Set sophistication,
but in an impersonal way attuned to the Jet Age reality of mass transportation.

II Jet Age Feminism Takes Off
A new wave of feminism hit the United States in the early 1960s. As activist Betty
Friedan’s 1963 best-selling book Feminine Mystique described, many middle-class andworking-class housewives were awakening to a sense of depression, even as their families
prospered:
Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped forgroceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children,chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she wasafraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’27
The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which protected women from discrimination in hiring andfiring for the first time, allowed feminists to increasingly seek equality in the workplace.
Financial independence through a lifetime of work could create more opportunities for
25 Ibid., p. 16.
26 Ibid., p. 18.
27 Friedan, Feminine Mystique, p. 57.

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women, not only outside the home, but even potentially outside of marriage andchildrearing altogether.
Braniff’s flight attendant corps did not fit this more radical iteration of feminism. The
airline kept rules in place so that stewardessing could not serve as a life-long career,
primarily by firing women when they married or became pregnant. As a result, the average
duration of a stewardess’ career totaled 18 months, a reality which continued for several
years beyond passage of the Civil Rights Act. Managers also maintained beauty-based
hiring standards, the same as they were before 1964. In 1962, Braniff hired only those
women who were no larger than ‘5’7” and 130 pounds’ and possessed ‘an attractive,
wholesome, well-groomed appearance’. It also openly promoted its no-marriage policy as
virtuous for stewardesses: ‘the wealth of knowledge and experience gained from theirenriching and challenging career as a Braniff hostess contributed immeasurably to theirlater success as a homemaker’.28
By 1968, these standards had changed only slightly, with women two inches taller andfive pounds heavier allowed to apply. Also, in sync with the nation’s growing divorce rate,
the no-marriage policy was loosened, but only slightly:[A] young lady is qualified for employment as a Braniff hostess if she is 20 to 27
years old; from 5 feet, 2 inches to 5 feet, 9 inches tall with weight in proportion to herheight and not over 135 pounds; single, or a childless widow or divorcee unmarriedfor one year or more; has 20/50 vision in each eye without glasses; has at least a highschool education and good character, and is blessed with sound judgement, an
attractive appearance with a clear complexion and an attractive smile, a pleasantdisposition, even temperament and a pleasant sounding voice.
With such a focus on cultivating rigid notions of beauty, mention of a flight attendant’s
most important work seemed almost nonsensical: ‘While very few hostesses will everencounter any type of emergency situation … passenger safety is their primary function’.29
Not surprisingly given their focus on beauty, Braniff’s marketers also openly mocked themore radical feminism of Betty Friedan and others. For example, when the airline opened a
new training academy for flight attendants in 1967, it was heralded as an ‘ultra-modern andbeautiful edifice [that] has been artfully designed with the feminine mystique in mind’.
This use of Friedan’s own term ‘feminine mystique’—which in her book referred to
women’s degradation via cultural expectations to be conventionally beautiful—was highly
ironic, with the airline professing to promote exactly what Friedan fought against.
And while radical feminists fought for women to proceed from university educations into
life-long careers, Braniff again sought the opposite. Its new training facility was
sarcastically christened the ‘Hostess College’, but contained only five classrooms. There
were instead more extensive facilities for beautifying the stewardesses-to-be. Highlights
included the ‘Powder Puff Room … where girls learn the secrets of makeup and flawlesscomplexions’. And in place of a library, studying at the ‘college’ took place at the ‘the rowsof electric hair dryers where she may do some homework on jet aircraft passenger
configurations while her hair dries’.30
While clearly opposed to radical feminism, there was another iteration of a more limited
28 BC, Box 26, Folder 1, Press release, ‘Exacting Qualifications Remain Unchanged as Braniff Hostesses Hold
Silver Anniversary Party’, June 1962.
29 BC, Box 26, Folder 1, Press release, ‘A Braniff International Hostess Is…’, undated.
30 Ibid.

74Jet Age Feminism
feminism in 1960s America that Braniff’s flight attendants did embody, at least to a certain
extent. This rival to Friedan’s Feminine Mystique also was introduced by a best-selling
book: Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl from 1962.31 Brown’s book had a coremessage that, like Friedan’s, supported women who entered careers and strove for financial
independence. The two parted ways, however, with Brown’s more open stance towards thesexual revolution, especially as it impacted women at work. For Brown, it was a positivethat some workplaces were ‘sexier than Turkish harems, fraternity house weekends ... or
the Playboy centerfold’.32 Accepting male sexual advances in the workplace as inevitable,
Brown counseled women to utilize these moments to advance their careers. A successful
woman would develop the skill of playfully dismissing certain advances and accepting
others in exchange for career assistance.
Brown wrote Sex and the Single Girl mainly as a how-to guide to assist the growing
numbers of unmarried women, primarily younger women, who entered the workforce andintended to stay until retirement. As historian Patricia Bradley notes, ‘When Brown
published her book, women between ages twenty-five and fifty-four were on the cusp of
exploding into the workforce, a group that increased 45 per cent from 1962 to 1975’.33
Thus, Braniff’s stewardesses were typical of a wave of ‘single girls’ (Brown’s term)
entering the workforce, even if they couldn’t aspire to a life-long career due to airlines’
marriage bans and other restrictions.
Brown stayed in the public eye and promoted her version of feminism well after her book
was published in 1962 and Friedan’s a year later. She was again making waves in 1965,
when she became editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and revamped it to be a standard-bearer
for single women. From her editorial role, she developed the notion of the ‘Cosmo girl’ or‘single girl’ (synonymous terms Brown employed) to designate a woman who wasfinancially independent, while also comfortable being sexy, dressing in conventionallyfeminine ways, and being sexually active in ways the woman herself saw fit. As long as
they overlooked the temporary nature of Braniff stewardesses’ jobs, Brown and her
devotees could look to Emilio Pucci, Mary Wells, and Braniff stewardesses as innovatorsof the single girl lifestyle, as practitioners of Jet Age feminism.
Brown treated Emilio Pucci as an important liberator for women. She saw an almost
political ferment in his fashions, likening Pucci’s impact on women to the Flapper fashionsof the 1920s. As Brown writes, ‘I think Emilio, some thirty years later, had somewhat thesame effect on American women. No, we weren’t exactly constricted or restrained byfashion or society like those twenties women, but he did help us express ourselves …
experience a new freedom, a sensuousness we hadn’t felt or shown before. The dresses
were spare, sexy, and liberating!’34 These same traits were true of Pucci’s Braniff uniforms:
they allowed stewardesses to negotiate their workplace and other spaces of modern life
with agility and grace and were the envy of many women who flew on Braniff in theensuing years.
Pucci heavily focused on sportswear throughout his career. Inspired by his passion foraviation, which culminated in his service as a pilot in the Italian Air Force during WorldWar II, he thrived when designing fashion for bodies in motion. After all, pilots of Pucci’s
generation commonly flew in cockpits exposed to the elements, which in turn forced pilots
31 The most authoritative account of Brown as a messenger of a rival form of feminism is found in: Scanlon,
Bad Girls Go Everywhere.
32 Brown, Sex and the Office, p. 183ff.
33 Bradley, Mass Media and Feminism, p. 11.
34 As quoted in: Kennedy, Pucci, p. 8.

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to modify their clothing choices to adapt to this harsh environment. Most prized in the
cockpit was a combination of warmth and mobility: leather jackets that were sturdy andwarm, yet form-fitting to keep one’s arms free, and equally tight leather caps and goggles
that mitigated the harshness of the wind while still allowing maximal head movement. Withhis piloting career cut short by injury, Pucci after the war applied his aerial fashion
knowledge to the next-best thing: the ski slopes, which also demanded the samecombination of warmth and dexterity in harsh conditions. As his new career as a designer
was taking off, Pucci opened one of his first studios in the ritzy village of Gstaad in the
Swiss Alps, a haven for the younger, more active elite among the Jet Set, who helped alpine
skiing take root as a stylish and increasingly popular postwar leisure activity. Pucci’s outfits
became de rigueur in these exclusive hide-outs, as they mixed the durability and casualnessof leisure fashion with a luster more reminiscent of high fashion.
More broadly, this ideal of promoting mobility had long been standard for male fashions,as with the embrace over the 19th and 20th centuries of fitted slacks, tighter suits, and fewer
frills. However, Pucci brought to women this same emphasis on streamlined, form-fitting
clothing that maximized flexibility. As fashion historian Shirley Kennedy summarizes,‘Emilio Pucci created clothing with the idea of the body always moving: clothes mustmove comfortably with the wearer, as though she were perpetually on the ski slopes, and,off the rack, they must fit as if custom made’.35 By the time of his collaboration with
Braniff, Pucci had updated his aesthetic for active women, employing miniskirts, tights, orboth in combination: ‘Motion and movement are very important in our lives. A woman can
run to get a taxi in a short skirt and still look elegant, but if she runs in a long skirt, she
looks gauche’.36 When author Marilyn Bender summarized Pucci’s importance, she focusedon jet technology. Noting that the early 1960s was ‘the threshold of the Jet Age’, sheclaimed: ‘the Pucci dress was both symbol and passport of the new era. Fragile-looking but
indestructible, chic and sexy, it was the capsule wardrobe for the mobile woman glorying
in the body beautiful’.37
For Pucci, the embrace of psychedelic color also stemmed from his passion for aviation.
In his World War II piloting missions, he would fly at low altitudes to avoid enemy radar.
‘Pucci clearly recalled the constant movement and the kaleidoscope of colors that spreadout before him on these long missions’. For the women who were wealthy enough to buy
his dresses, however, there was a different impulse tied to this color rush. The vibrancy—
still sophisticated, thanks to Pucci’s following among the Euro-American Jet Set—was alsorisqué. It made some women feel uninhibited: ‘How did women dare go around city streetsin the 1960s’, asks Kennedy rhetorically, ‘wearing very bright, short, sexy, tight, clingy,
wildly printed clothes?’38
Yet, Pucci’s personal ambivalence about feminism belied a multivalence regarding his
fashion innovations: they could indeed be perceived as liberatory, but they could also
reinforce male dominance. Pucci himself strongly disavowed any advocacy of a moreradical feminism. When interviewed in 1964, he started with a sentiment that radical
feminists might applaud, advocating a subtler form of feminine beauty: ‘America has beenleft with the idea that a woman is sexy if her bust sticks out or if she has a thin waist’.
Holding up the petite and androgynous Audrey Hepburn, Pucci instead insisted, ‘It’s not
the inches of bust that make the difference, but what is inside’. As for Hepburn, Pucci
35 Ibid., p. 46.
36 As quoted in: Ibid., p. 139.
37 As quoted in: Ibid., p. 46.
38 Kennedy, Pucci, p. 9.

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insisted, ‘Everything she has is fire inside’.
At the same time, however, Pucci attacked women’s aspiring to equality, especiallythrough work. He continued, ‘What is natural to the American woman is to compete withthe man in all fields. I think this makes her unhappy. If the end of man is work and creation,
the end of woman is home, children, friends, and culture, things that man hasn’t time topursue’. He admitted that ‘American women won’t accept’ his views, steeped in the
traditional ideology of separate spheres. But, it was women’s naïve efforts to enter men’s
spheres and vacate their own, in Pucci’s view, that prevented certain American womenfrom attaining happiness.
Pucci then added a short sentence to the interview that warrants closer analysis. In
detailing the undesirability of mixing spheres, he theorized about an unhappy woman: ‘This
girl becomes a secretary, goes to dinner with the boss, gets married, gets pregnant, lives insuburbia and joins women’s clubs’. Clear in this account is Pucci’s scorn for women who
refuse to accept the incompatibility of a career with women’s happiness found in family
life. The inferiority a woman experiences at work—her diminished role as secretary—leads
her to desire the power and wealth of her boss and allow the work relationship to become
something erotic. The man and woman—boss and secretary—then go through theostensible steps leading to a woman’s fulfillment: dinner, dating, marriage, pregnancy, andsettling down in the suburbs. Yet, Pucci’s concern is that this domestic life fails to content
some women; they end up ‘join[ing] women’s clubs’ in search of fulfillment, involving
themselves in the world of feminist activism. While Friedan encouraged housewives topursue their yearning for something more, Pucci sees this discontent as absurd: ‘Somethinghas been missed over there [in America]’.39
Stewardesses were much like the secretaries Pucci attacked. Each struggled to be treatedas career professionals and instead was expected to find a wealthier man to marry and thenquit work. For stewardesses, these men typically came from the pilot corps, airline
management, or the airplane’s First Class section. To facilitate such, Pucci, in his designs
for Braniff, adapted the cuts and colors of social clothing—the cocktail dress—worn toaccentuate roles like hosting, socializing, and sparking attraction in men. Of course, theseroles undercut women’s aspirations to be treated as professionals, while instead enhancing
their desirability as future spouses.
Meanwhile, Pucci’s commitment to separate spheres for men and women led him to erase
the military elements that marked stewardess attire from the beginning. Gone were the drab
colors and androgynous fits, as well as the decorative stripes and wings shared with pilots.
In justifying this overhaul, Pucci suggested merely that the uniforms were outdated, ‘Most
airplane stewardesses are dressed as if they are traveling by bus in the year 1925’.40 Yet,
Braniff’s copy writers elaborated more fully. They claimed the airline’s first stewardess in1937 was attired inappropriately, ‘looking as if she probably could fly the plane herself’,
and then credited Pucci with replacing ‘the severe, mannish uniforms’ with the feminine
touches of color and ‘culottes, leotards, wraparound skirts, scarf hats, derbies, serving
dresses’.41 Pucci added to this sentiment by jettisoning the term ‘uniform’ and instead
calling his Braniff creations a ‘couture collection’.
This ‘collection’ allowed stewardesses to sport four distinct looks on the same flight: anexterior layer anchored by a winter coat, a full suit with a wraparound skirt and zippable
blazer, then a lighter layer of culottes and a turtle-neck blouse. The fourth item, nicknamed
39 As quoted in: ‘Hero, scholar, jet-age Renaissance man, Italian style-setter: Pucci’ in Life, 16 Oct 1964, p. 70.
40 As quoted in: Kennedy, Pucci, p. 154.
41 BC, Box 27, Folder 3, Press release, ‘A Braniff International Hostess Is…’, undated.

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the ‘Puccino’, was a colorful smock worn when serving food. Each item embodied the
combination of elegance, casualness, and sophistication that made Pucci’s designs so
desirable among celebrities and the ‘single girl’ set: form-fitting, above-the-knee styles thatmade women attractive while in motion.
Pucci intended for his layered creation to express the wonder of jet travel. The way hesaw it, Braniff’s jets would enable a surprisingly quick half-day transition from the icy
climate of Chicago to the balmy beaches of Rio de Janiero. The stewardess, trying to work
hard and still look glamorous through these drastic climactic changes, would benefit fromlayering. She could embark with a thick coat, gloves, and even a space-age plastic bubble
helmet (inspired by astronaut gear) to protect her hair from rain or snow, and slowly
transition her outfit while in flight. When she landed a few hours and several costume shifts
later, she would be clad in culottes and a lighter blouse, ready to say farewell to herpassengers on a sweltering tarmac.
By employing form-fitting but breathable and easily washable fabrics, Pucci scrupulously
considered the demands of stewardesses’ nomadic lives. He was also particularly proudthat the entire ensemble fit into an overnight bag. ‘In the future’, he noted, ‘all aninternational traveler would need add to such an ensemble would be a dress or two andaccessories for evening occasions’.42 As women identifying with Helen Gurley Brown’s‘single girl’ became more prosperous, Pucci offered a way for both designers andconsumers to enable women’s Jet Age mobility. After all, by 1964, there were thirteen
million single women in the US and another 23 million married women working outside
the home.43 Air travel would inevitably increase, even for women unchaperoned by men. In
sum, Pucci’s layered ‘couture collection’ was an innovation closely aligned with women’s
Jet Age yearnings to move well beyond the home.
That said, when Pucci passed along his designs to Braniff’s lead ad executive Mary
Wells, she saw major potential for an alternative use for the layered collection, one that wasmore perniciously sexist than Pucci himself envisioned. Braniff’s most frequent fliers, whotypically paid for full-fare First Class tickets, were unaccompanied men flying on business.
These men also experienced the most fatigue with flying, so if the ‘End of the Plain Plane’
campaign was to succeed, they needed to shift their travel to Braniff. To this end, Wells
decided that stewardesses discarding layers of clothing as they flew southward should do
so in the aisles, in full view of passengers. She christened this attraction the ‘Air Strip’, andmade sure that it would be heavily promoted in Braniff ads.
Business Week, one of the most-read publications among well-heeled men, offered astrong endorsement of the ‘Air Strip’. After first quoting Harding Lawrence, who notedthat Braniff was ‘adding sheer pleasure to the experience of flight’, the author then added
his own perceptions: ‘Indeed, a passenger might easily feel that he’s attending an airborne
striptease show when, right after takeoff, the hostesses peel off their pink uniforms toreveal the blue ones underneath’.44 A correspondent with London’s Sunday Mirror went
one step further, linking the ‘Air Strip’ with the recently released hit movie ‘Boeing
Boeing’, in which actor Tony Curtis secretly dated three flight attendants at the same time.
‘The things they get up to in the air these days!’ begins the article, ‘There was I, minding
my own business, 32,000 feet up on a flight from New York to Mexico when ... BoeingBoeing. She did it’. He continues, ‘The air hostess. She started to undress. Bang in the
42 AGA, Box ‘MAR 00105 D-4’, Folder ‘Girard Press - 01/1964 - 12/1965’, ‘World Fashion Press Acclaims
Pucci-Braniff Flight Fashions’ in The Braniff B-Liner, July 1965, p. 4.
43 Scanlon, Bad Girls Go Everywhere, p. 144.
44 ‘Braniff refuels on razzle-dazzle’ in Business Week, 20 Nov 1965, p. 110-11.

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middle of the aisle. Fasten your seat belts. There’s more to this than meets the eye. Because
four other hostesses were doing a similar air strip in other parts of the giant Boeing 720
jet’. Adding to his analysis, the author quotes a stewardess: ‘Said Carol: “It’s zip zip zip all
the way. The passengers seem to love it, and we think many fly Braniff just to see our act”’.
The author then concludes, ‘You could be right, Carol. You could be right’.45
Mary Wells made sure the ‘Air Strip’ received prominent play in the ‘End of the Plain
Plane’ campaign. She devised a media plan that involved a two-step placement innewspapers: on the first weekend, color ads boasting the ‘End of the Plain Plane’ would run
in 41 newspapers in 33 cities. Then, ‘A week later our second color newspaper ad will run
in the same 41 newspapers headlined, ‘Introducing the Air Strip’.’ To maximize Braniff’s
exposure to businessmen for the ‘Air Strip’, Wells followed up with TV ads during
American football broadcasts.46 The ‘Air Strip’ television ad begins with whistling music
common to striptease acts and then focuses on a stewardess, suggestively smiling at thecamera, in the process of disrobing through her various layers of colorful minis. It
concludes with a male voice-over—in the deep, slow tone of an emcee at a strip club—
exclaiming, ‘The Air Strip is brought to you by Braniff International, who believes thateven an airline hostess should look like a girl’.47
The debut of the ‘Air Strip’ found no serious opposition in the mainstream media.
Instead, it played a key role in fulfilling Harding Lawrence’s goal of filling seats on
Braniff’s new jets. By June 1966, the airline’s passenger traffic was up 48.7 per cent overthe previous year. Its revenue in the first full year of the campaign similarly rose by 42 per
cent.48 Meanwhile, the media’s only consideration of the ‘Air Strip’ from the perspective of
Braniff’s stewardesses fit the mold of Helen Gurley Brown’s ‘single girl’. The stewardessstressed a new-found freedom in Pucci’s clothes: ‘We love the new outfit. It makes you feellike a real female and not a busboy’.49

III Mary Wells Lawrence and the Classist Legacy of ‘Jet Age Feminism’
In a passage reminiscent of Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, Mary Wells
confessed in her autobiography that her work with Braniff inspired romance. She traced thespark to the very moment in mid-1965 that Harding Lawrence agreed to her plans to paintBraniff’s jets in a rainbow of colors. ‘That had to be the moment I fell in love with him’.
Married at the time to other people, Harding Lawrence and Mary Wells started one ofAmerica’s most high-profile office romances. As they worked their way through divorces,
they also worked together to mold Braniff into one of America’s fastest growing airlines.
When they wed in November 1967, Harding and Mary Wells Lawrence became one ofAmerica’s most high-profile ‘power couples’, each keeping their careers and pulling insalaries of over $100,000 per year, near the peak of executive pay scales at the time.
Mary Wells Lawrence thereby served as a corporate-class expression of Jet Age
feminism, which is both similar to and different from the working-class variety embodied,45 ‘The Air Strip’ in Sunday Mirror, 20 Mar 1966, p. 21.
46 BC, Box 34, Folder 2, Memo from Rex Brack to All Employees, 24 Nov 1965.
47 ‘Braniff International Presents the Air Strip’, Television Ad, December 1965. https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=7TZXryuhSMg
48 On passenger traffic see Newman, C., ‘Color It Colorless: Black and White Gain in Fashions and Homes’ inWall Street Journal, 08 Jun 1966, p. 1. On revenue see Loomis, C., ‘As the World Turns—On Madison Avenue’in Fortune, December 1968, p. 114.
49 ‘Wild Hue Yonder’ in Life, 03 Dec 1965.

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though imperfectly, by Braniff’s stewardesses. She wasn’t exactly a ‘single girl’ when she
met Lawrence, but she was still relatively young (aged 37) and very much a working
woman. In fact, she succeeded quite spectacularly in the otherwise male-dominated field of
advertising. She also exercised a sexual agency that would endear her to Brown, managing
the minefield of come-ons from powerful men in the office, and striving with both her firstand second husbands to make marriage work in a dual-career household.
Wells Lawrence was a polarizing figure in women’s liberation circles. She was at once
praised for her successful career in a male-dominated world and her bold reworking ofmarriage to accommodate her professional aspirations, while also scorned for building her
own success by promoting sexism in her various marketing campaigns. Amongst moreradical feminists, even her egalitarian marriage to Harding Lawrence constituted grounds
for attack. The famous author and activist Gloria Steinem quipped, ‘Oh, well, Mary Wells
Uncle Tommed it to the top’, attributing Wells Lawrence’s formidable career successes toher cozy relationship with men like Lawrence.50 Furthermore, in her assessment of Wells
Lawrence’s career, media historian Patricia Bradley finds that she, ‘took no position on
feminism, took no particular interest (judging by her memoir) in promoting professional
women’s careers at her agency, and was not involved in the push to change women’s
images in advertising’.51
Despite enjoying far more class privilege, Wells Lawrence still shared elements incommon with her working-class counterparts. She too experienced unwelcome come-ons
from men while at work. Indeed, one of her bosses hired her based in part on his attraction
to her, thereby copying a formula for success that Helen Gurley Brown introduced in Sex
and the Single Girl. This sort of wagering about the risks and benefits of her boss’s
attractions was all too familiar to Wells Lawrence’s working-class counterparts in the
stewardess corps. Those who were savviest could artfully negotiate flirtations from pilots
and customers. But, if the man’s unreciprocated interest escalated, stewardesses and women
executives alike were forced to manage an unwelcome and potentially dangerous workplace
distraction.52
Mary Wells Lawrence stayed on as Braniff’s account executive for about a year after her
marriage to Harding Lawrence. During this time, the couple moved Mary’s children to
Dallas to live with Harding, while Mary maintained her home and office in New York. She
flew back to Dallas most Fridays, often meeting the family at the airport, so they could allcontinue further southward on Braniff’s evening flight to Acapulco. Between homes in
Dallas, New York, Acapulco, Arizona, and the Cote d’Azur, the family led a decidedly nontraditional life: ‘Harding and I are both naturally nomadic and our timing was good’,commented Wells Lawrence. ‘The jet was cutting the world in half, in fact the world was
fast becoming small’. 53 As such, the Jet Age was stimulating the social forces that
unleashed not only new iterations of feminism, but new constellations of marriage andfamily.
At the end of the first year of marriage, however, Braniff’s board of directors determinedthat the Wells-Lawrence marriage constituted a conflict of interest. Thus, somewhat
similarly to stewardesses, marriage led to an end of Mary Wells’ work for Braniff. In her
50 Raine, G., ‘Creative fizz: Mary Wells’ memorable ad campaigns for such clients as Braniff and Alka-Seltzer
helped make her the first woman to run a publicly traded company’ in San Francisco Chronicle, 30 May 2002.
51 Bradley, Mass Media and Feminism, p. 213.
52 For accounts of sexual harassment and other forms of abuse against stewardesses, see Panter Nielsen, FromSky Girl to Flight Attendant and Barry, Femininity in Flight.
53 Wells Lawrence, A Big Life in Advertising, p. 59.

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case, however, the exit was quite lucrative. She was resourceful enough to lure a rival
airline, TWA, to sign on with her ad agency. As TWA was a larger airline, the payout forthis exchange was impressive: ‘In economic terms, [Wells’] agency would give up about$7.5 million in billings…and take on $22 million’. 54 The day the deal was announced,
writes Wells Lawrence, ‘was the day some of Madison Avenue’s old guard decided women
were dangerous to the advertising community and that I was not only an arriviste but thequeen of black widow spiders’.55
For Wells Lawrence, marriage was, thus, an effective business tool, enhancing her handin the aviation industry by combining her impressive connections with those of her
husband. Rather than an off-ramp into a life as wife and mother, as was the expectation for
stewardesses, Wells Lawrence’s marriage propelled her career ever higher. She also
maintained her financial and personal independence. As Wells Lawrence explains, ‘In 1967
when Harding and I married it never entered his mind or mine that I would leave [my firm],
that we would have a traditional marriage living and working in the same town’. This
reality, for her, was vitally important to feminism, even to the radical feminists with whom
she often clashed:
Betty Friedan established NOW in 1966 and … the psychological shift that the
women’s movement brought to society had not yet changed it. Long-distance marriage
was major news, and we were forever being interviewed about the details of ours.
There was just enough awareness about what Betty Friedan called ‘the problem thathas no name’, the growing sense that motherhood and housework were not enough forsome women, that our marriage was examined with respect, if not awe.56
What is missing from Wells Lawrence’s assessment is a sense of cross-class solidarity.
She was proud that both her trailblazing career and her unconventional marriage opened
new pathways for women. Yet, her work for Braniff, especially the ‘Air Strip’ campaign,
only reinforced an already sexist culture in aviation. Working-class women at Braniff
thereby found no opportunity to emulate Wells Lawrence’s successes, whether on the job orin her marriage. As such, Jet Age feminism disproportionately favored women in thecorporate class.
Support for stewardesses ultimately came from radical feminists, including the National
Organization for Women. Already in 1965, as Wells was masterminding the ‘End of thePlain Plane’ and the ‘Air Strip’, NOW and other groups began to support stewardesses’
grievances from across the airline industry. Their fight boiled down to one central claim,
which even Braniff admitted but refused to fully accept: that flight attendants were first andforemost safety professionals. Over the next decade, this vision prevailed, as courts
ultimately ordered that flight attendants be endowed with fuller authority.57 Braniff andother airlines which had imitated them then jettisoned the colorful, sexy uniforms of the Jet
Age feminist era and replaced them with more professional attire. These activists also
forced airlines, including Braniff, to end bans on marriage or pregnancy and to refrain fromusing stewardesses’ bodies as marketing material. As such, Pucci’s and Wells’ efforts in1965 to stimulate profit by deploying sexual arousal would ultimately be superseded by amore profound commitment to women workers’ equality. But for the better part of a
54 Loomis, ‘As the World Turns’, p. 194.
55 Wells Lawrence, A Big Life in Advertising, p. 101.
56 Wells Lawrence, A Big Life in Advertising, p. 59.
57 See Barry, Femininity in Flight, pp. 144-73, and Tiemeyer, Plane Queer, 80-108.

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decade, their creations comprised one of the hottest trends in American and global aviation,
spreading the deeply compromised notion of Jet Age feminism widely.
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