Where American women’s ambitions took wing at midcentury

“Stewardess wanted. Must want the world,” read a 1967 recruitment ad for Pan Am. Women had limited options in those days, but two terrific books show how some made the most of what was available. Julia Cooke’s “Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am” follows several stewardesses (as they were then known) who put up with weight checks and other indignities to live and travel independently. Paulina Bren’s “The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free” is a history of New York City’s premier women-only residential hotel, which, for decades after its 1928 opening, served as home base for thousands who came to the city to chase their dreams.

The Barbizon was known for housing a particular kind of woman: young, attractive, and middle- to upper-class. (For most of its history, white went without saying.) Men were forbidden from venturing beyond the lobby, though many tried. J.D. Salinger was among those who frequented the hotel’s coffee shop trying to meet women.

The Barbizon’s clientele included models, aspiring writers, and students at the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School, which took up three floors in the building. For the “Gibbs girls,” a stint in the city as a secretary could provide an interlude between school and marriage. The hotel’s most storied relationship was with Mademoiselle magazine, whose prestigious guest editor program brought 20 college students from around the country to New York each June to shadow the magazine’s editors. During the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, the program was “the most sought-after launching pad for girls with literary and artistic ambitions,” writes Bren. Recipients of the coveted positions, all of whom stayed at the Barbizon, included Joan Didion, Ann Beattie, and Sylvia Plath, whose 1963 novel “The Bell Jar” is a fictionalized account of her 1953 summer in New York.

Bren elegantly weaves interviews with former residents and archival research with context on the social and political conditions that limited midcentury women. She devotes attention both to those glamorous residents who made it big, including Joan Crawford and Grace Kelly, and those who tried and failed to live autonomously. She finds evidence of a number of suicides that the hotel tried to keep under wraps.

Many of the traits Bren describes in the Barbizon residents – a yearning to do more, to see more, to be more – are apparent in the women that Cooke profiles in “Come Fly the World.” In the early days of air travel, their job had been done by men, but one 1933 article in The Atlantic Monthly approved of the shift from stewards to stewardesses, observing of nervous flyers, “The passengers relax. ... If a mere girl isn’t worried, why should they be?” The positions were competitive: The author notes that in the early 1960s, only 3%-5% of those who applied got the job. They were also held mostly by white women. Only 50 Black women were working as stewardesses across all airlines in the United States in 1965.

Much of Cooke’s engaging narrative focuses on the unheralded role of these women during the Vietnam War. Several of those she profiles – whose intelligence and bravery offer a corrective to the over-sexualized and subservient images then promoted in pop culture (and often by the airlines themselves) – regularly worked Pan Am flights that ferried soldiers to R&R trips in Hong Kong and other cities. The work was dangerous. The book culminates with a gripping account of the women’s involvement in Operation Babylift, which, at the war’s end, evacuated several thousand Vietnamese orphans from Saigon to the U.S.

What Bren says of the Barbizon residents who predated the women’s liberation movement is also true of Cooke’s subjects: “The rules were clear, and the expectations sky-high. ... Women should go to college, pursue a certain type of career, and then give it up to get married.” These were not merely conventions: legally, stewardesses could be fired when they turned 32 or 35, depending on the airline, or when they got married. 

The women who served on flights were able to see the world – while waiting until “the public position of women back home shifted enough to accommodate their ambition,” Cooke writes. Eventually, of course, it did, as masses of women organized to challenge gender discrimination in all aspects of American life.