(CNN) — “I came of age when the jet age came of age,” says Ann Hood, an American novelist and New York Times best-selling author, whose latest book “Fly Girl” is a memoir of her adventurous years as a TWA flight attendant, right at the end of the Golden Age of air travel.
As a child, growing up in Virginia, she witnessed the first flight of the Boeing 707 — which ushered in the era of passenger jet travel — and watched Dulles airport being built.
At the age of 11, after she moved back to her native Rhode Island with her family, she read a 1964 book titled “How to become an airline stewardess,” and her mind was made up.
“Although it was sexist as hell, it enticed me because it talked about having a job that allowed you to see the world and I thought, well, that might work.”
When she graduated from college, in 1978, Hood started sending job applications to airlines. “I think 1978 was a really interesting year, because many of the women I went to college with had one foot in old ideas and stereotypes, and the other foot in the future. It was kind of a confusing time for young women.”
“Flight attendant” was a newly minted term, a gender neutral upgrade from “hostesses” and “stewardesses,” and deregulation of the airline industry was around the corner, ready to shake things up.
But for the most part, flying was still glamorous and sophisticated and flight attendants were still “beautiful and sexy ornaments,” as Hood puts it, although they were already fighting for women’s rights and against discrimination.
The stereotype of stewardesses in miniskirts flirting with male passengers still endured, popularized by books like “Coffee, tea, or me? The uninhibited memoirs of two airline stewardesses” — published as factual in 1967, but later revealed to have been written by Donald Bain, an American Airlines PR executive.
Weight limits
Some of the worst requirements to be hired as a flight attendant — such as age restrictions and losing the job in case of marriage or childbirth — had already been lifted, but others remained.
The most shocking one, perhaps, was the fact that women had to maintain the weight they had at the time of hiring.
“All airlines sent a chart with your application, you looked at your height and the maximum weight and if you did not fall within that, they wouldn’t even interview you,” says Hood. “But once you got hired, at least at TWA, you couldn’t go up to that maximum weight. You had to stay at your hiring weight, which in my case was about 15…
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