Desirable Dress: Rosies, Sky Girls, and the Politics of Appearance

Abstract

Desirable dress on the job, whether pants, sweaters, or mini-skirted uniforms, contains symbolic meaning, but whose sexual subjectivity it expresses is not always clear. Appearance may be a proxy for other forms of contestation or just be a conveyer of pleasure that makes work just a little more humane. This essay rethinks two cases where issues of self-fashioning, appearance, sexuality, employer strictures, and state policy intertwined: the shop floors of the Second World War and the flight cabins of postwar airlines: the first, male dominated manufacturing in which women labored "for the duration"; the second, a prototypical female service industry in which fierce competition led to selling sexual allure along with comfort and safety. However mediated, voices of wage-earning women in both the 1940s and 1960s announced new expectations of womanhood, beauty, and sexual expressiveness. But while management attempted to suppress women's bodies in the shipyards and other wartime workplaces, by the 1960s airlines promoted the body of the flight attendant. In both examples, state mediation--through sources available as well as actual public policies--complicates our attempt to unravel pleasure and constraint in dressing, grooming, and sexual presence on the job. Whether or not dress requirements disciplined employee bodies, served as a guarantee of efficiency or a check against accidents and the expense of worker compensation, or opened new possibilities for sexual or gendered identities was hardly predetermined. Employers could demand slacks, women could wear them, but what dress was desirable varied with the beholder.

‘I’m older but I can still do this job’: the experiences of mature women in an age-sensitive occupation

“…Age stereotyping of FAs is not uncommon (Whitelegg, 2007) and it links back to the 'golden age of flying' -the early days in the airline industry. Traditionally, older FAs were discouraged to stay in their roles for long (Boris, 2006;Whitelegg, 2003), at times being targeted for redundancies (Bajawa & Woodall, 2004). Occupational continuity was generally weak, as it was perceived to be easier and cheaper to train new FAs (Whitelegg, 2007), whose skills are relatively similar to mature ones (Weller, 2007).…”

Beards and Bloomers: Flight Attendants, Grievances and Embodied Labour in the Canadian Airline Industry, 1960s–1980s

“…FA work in particular has been analysed as an occupation in which cultural constructions of gender, race and sexual orientation intermesh closely with a history of changing union organization, employment and family norms, and feminist ideas. Often broadly social constructionist in tone, historical writing has paid particular attention to unions, organization and resistance, and to the use of women's bodies as marketing tools as their labour power and feminine image were packaged, commodified and sold as part of the airline image (Barry, ; Boris, ; Cobble, ; Nielsen, ; Tiemeyer, ; Vantoch, ; Yano, ).…”

Role of denim and jeans in the fashion industry

“…Large denim companies switched production to produce (non-denim) military clothing (Little and Bond, 1996). However, by the mid-1940s employee safety was the impetus to make it acceptable for women to wear pants in industrial settings (Boris, 2006). Wartime promotions portrayed denim overalls as glamorous, and companies such as Blue Bell created a dungaree style called 'the Jeanie' (Gordon, 1991).…”