Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-r5zm4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-05T12:37:05.388Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“A Spontaneous Loss of Enthusiasm”: Workplace Feminism and the Transformation of Women's Service Jobs in the 1970s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2001

Dorothy Sue Cobble
Affiliation:
Rutgers University

Abstract

In 1972, a group of tired stewardesses tried to explain their concerns to the incredulous male transit union officials who led their union. No, the primary issues were not wages and benefits, they insisted, but the particular cut of their uniforms and the sexual insinuations made about their occupation in the new airline advertisements. Their words fell on deaf ears. Despite their commonalities as transportation workers, the gender gap separating the two groups was simply too wide to cross. Indeed, male subway drivers could not understand why the stewardesses would object to their glamorous sex-object image. Deeply held gendered notions of unionism and politics also stood in the way of communication. For even if the complaints of stewardesses were accepted as “real,” to many male union leaders they seemed petty: matters not deserving of serious attention, let alone concerted activity.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1999 The International Labor and Working-Class History Society

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The author wishes to thank Louise Tilly, Michael Merrill, Dee Garrison, Nancy Hewitt, Jennifer Pettit and the Women's History Group at Rutgers University for their helpful and illuminating comments on successive drafts of this essay.