Women and the Jet Age is a global history of postwar aviation that examines how states nurtured airlines for competing political and economic goals during the Cold War.
An account of the rise of air travel and of early feminist strivings among air stewardesses, Phil Tiemeyer's book is one of the first histories to place such developments – political, economic, and feminist – in dialogue with each other.
While previous histories almost exclusively stress US and Western European aviation progress, Tiemeyer examines how smaller, poorer states in socialist Eastern Europe and in the postcolonial Global South utilised airlines of their own to forge rival pathways to modernisation.
Part of this modernisation involved norms for working women. Stewardesses at airlines around the globe encountered novel threats to their dignity as the Jet Age approached. By the late 1960s stewardesses endured harsh objectification, with high hemlines, tight uniforms and raunchy marketing being touted as modern and liberated.
These women, whether from the West, East or South, forged their own pathways to achieve greater dignity at work.
Phil Tiemeyer is Associate Professor of History and Director of Security Studies at Kansas State University. He is the author of Plane Queer, cowinner of the John Boswell Prize for best book in the field of LGBTQ history.
Cornell University Press, 324pp 15cm x 23cm, illustrated paperback, 2025
