Duke University Press Log

Christine Yano on the Premiere of "Pan Am"

ABC-TV’s new series Pan Am is generating a high level of buzz.  Entertainment shows preceding the premiere featured not only clips of the show, but also interviews with former stewardesses, infamous author Donald Bain (Coffee, Tea, or Me), and others from the generation characterized as the “swinging 60s.”  What these previews suggest is an amalgamated, nostalgized view of an era when – as they say – people knew how to dress, knew how to travel, knew how to treat the service providers.  Many Americans of a certain age can sympathize with the source of the nostalgia, given the demeaning experience that commercial air travel has become these days.  However, this is nostalgia for specific class and race experiences that many could not share. The nostalgia of Pan Am positions the 1950s and 1960s as an era of domestic “innocence” – when women could still be women and men could still be men.  This is painted as an era when lines and lives were more clearly drawn, etching in gender roles as clearly as racial roles.

The innocence does not extend to the international scene.  Pan Am situates itself within the Cold War era of espionage, political intrigue, and the airline’s (and some of its personnel’s) role within these.  What the show does not depict are the incipient seeds of domestic social change.  With black-white race relations simmering not far from the surface, with ethnic revitalization movements waiting in the wings, with feminist movements just underway, the “swinging 60s” of Pan Am skirts the deep national contradictions of the era.  Here were working women in that very modern of industries that relied upon them playing traditional hostess roles, even while traveling the world.  This included women of Asian ancestry who I wrote about in my book Airborne Dreams.  While stewardesses were getting their hair coiffed and girdles checked, other women were beginning to reject those very bodily accoutrements as symbols of patriarchal control.  Indeed, the so-called swinging era was riddled with numerous contradictions and ironies if we take off the spectacles of nostalgia.

I was fortunate enough to watch the premiere of ABC-TV’s Pan Am with a group of people (147 strong) whose ties to the era and this television show are extra special – the Pan Am Association - Aloha Chapter in Honolulu, Hawaii.  Gathered at the Hawaii Yacht Club for the occasion (some in uniform!), they relished those spectacles of nostalgia affording them yet one more occasion to shout out, “Pan Am lives!” “Gone but not forgotten!”  They scrutinized ABC-TV’s show for inaccuracies (color of uniform, length of stewardess’s hair, use of a Jetway during that period).  They cheered at depictions of bygone icons – the Pan Am building in New York with its rooftop helipad, even the pilfering of fancy food and drink in First Class by stewardesses (one overheard comment: “Now it’s getting real!”).  Pan Am reassures them all that at least for one television season on Sunday nights, their display of loyalty to the airline of a past era – “the best years of their lives!” – may be shared by viewers nationwide.

New ABC Series on Pan Am Will Focus on Glamour, Not Reality

Variety reports today that ABC has greenlighted a new series to revolve around the pilots and stewardesses of 1960s Pan Am. Reporter Michael Schneider writes that the show will focus on "what it meant to be a flight attendant in the go-go days of flight travel." We wonder if it will reveal the ugly sexism and racial stereotyping behind the glamour. In her book Femininity in Flight, Kathleen Barry revealed the many indignities that women working in the airline industry had to endure in the 1950s and 60s: weigh-ins, forced retirements upon marriage, skimpy uniforms and sexual abuse by passengers. She details the important role of unions in changing most of these policies and turning the sexy stewardess into the safety-conscious flight attendant. In her forthcoming book Airborne Dreams, Christine R. Yano tells another Pan Am story, that of second-generation Japanese-American women ("Nisei") recruited to staff Pan Am's Asia routes. They were ostensibly  hired for their language skills, but since many of them hardly spoke any Japanese, their more important role was to bring an "exotic" appeal to the routes and play into stereotypes about Asian women. They endured all the same indignities of other flight attendants; one woman Yano interviewed remembered the pilot-conducted girdle checks. Now there's something that should be featured on the new show!

Flight Attendants Still Stereotyped in Media

In the news, we read about flights all over Europe delayed by striking British Airways flight attendants, but in popular culture, people seem to long for the old days. We all know not to call them "stewardesses" anymore, right? Apparently not, according to a new reality show on the CW network called Fly Girls. The show follows five Virgin Atlantic flight attendants who share a "crash pad" in Los Angeles. In one scene they roll their eyes at who call them "air hostesses," but reviewer Hank Steuver believes overall the show reinforces old stereotypes of "airheads" in the air. The New York Times Magazine focuses on fashion rather than hard work and safety, with a slide show of Delta uniforms over the last sixty year. For insight into the history of flight attendants, check out Kathleen Barry's Femininity in Flight. Barry traces the evolution of their glamorized image as ideal women and their activism as trade unionists and feminists, helping us to understand both the struggle of the British Airways crews, and our own nostalgia for the bygone era of beautiful young women in chic dresses.

Sammond on new Disney Museum

The Chronicle Review examines the new Walt Disney Family Museum, which opened in October in San Francisco. The museum's focus on a single person makes it unusual, reporter Randy Malamud writes. He interviews Nicholas Sammond, author of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960, who says the museum does not challenge Disney's self-creation narrative, in which the founder is "an American genius, a born tinkerer and inventor, like Henry Ford or Thomas Edison," with a dash of "the qualities of Horatio Alger (entrepreneurial determination) and Abraham Lincoln (humble origins and hard work)." The museum will also have an archive, but scholars Malamud interviews seem skeptical that they will have complete access to its treasures. Disney is protective of its corporate image, and much scholarship, including Sammond's book, sometimes presents a bit too much complication for them. Still, Malamud concludes, "the museum energizes the fascinatingly charged scholarly debate that the Disney phenomenon has provoked, shaking the worn, staid, sometimes cynical images we have of Disney and his empire, bringing to them renewed color and motion."

Brenda R. Weber tackles Makeover TV

Check out our new YouTube video! Brenda R. Weber, author of Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (2009), answers questions about her new book, the makeover tv genre, and the influence the concept of makeovers has on popular culture and thinking.

Weber's Makeover TV featured in Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Chronicle of Higher Education chose Brenda R. Weber's Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity for their "Nota Bene" feature this week. Reporter Kacie Glenn finds that "Weber was drawn to the subject when, watching an episode of Extreme Makeover, she was puzzled to hear a young woman who had just undergone cosmetic surgery declare, 'I just don't care what people think of me anymore.' . . . Weber argues that it described a logical, if paradoxical, state of mind. She theorizes that the woman, like many makeover participants, felt empowered even as she submitted to society's ideals, because of the show's insistence that until that moment, her true self had been suppressed." In the book Weber is critical of the makeover shows, but remains a fan. "Call me a sucker," she writes. "But I like the quirky joy that's represented in such hopeful statements of transformation."

Lauren M.E. Goodlad on Goth and Mad Men

In today's Chronicle of Higher Education, Lauren M.E. Goodlad, co-editor of Goth: Undead Subculture, reviews the television series, Mad Men. While Goodlad looks at why audiences love Mad Men, she primarily focuses on the character Don Draper. "I have been intrigued by the mysteries of culture before. In the 1990s, I was writing on gothic subculture and the phenomenon of 'men who feel and cry'...all of whom beckoned young men to dramatize emotion in ways that previous generations had scorned as unmasculine. Alongside those men in black were harsher specimens of masculinity in crisis.... While superficially different, both kinds of men were desperate to feel, through catharsis or brutal violence. Yet most of these tales focused on men's relationships with one another.... They were men searching for their feelings in the company of other men. And now comes Don Draper, icon of masculinity-in-crisis for the 21st century. Don is in pain, yes, and hurting himself, too (for all his spectacular emotional reserve). But he is also different. No tears or blood on that impeccably pressed suit. No close ties to other men. What is it that makes this odd blend of Jay Gatsby, the American Gigolo, and the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit so captivating a figure for today?" To read more of the article, please visit here.

Brenda Weber's Makeover TV Reviewed in Publishers Weekly

Brenda R. Weber's Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity is reviewed in Publishers Weekly. According to the reviewer, Weber "offers a long-overdue analysis of what being made over means in American culture. . . her work is worthy of attention." The reviewer also calls Makeover TV a "dense and insightful critique." The book will be available in November.

Image: Marking the Site of Surgery. Brand New You. “Nicola,” September 4, 2005.

Buszek on Farrah as Last of the Iconic Pin-ups

CNN interviewed Maria Elena Buszek, author of Pin-up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, in a piece on the legacy of Farrah Fawcett. Buszek places Fawcett at the end of a long line of twentieth-century pin-ups. "The Farrah Fawcett poster really is one of the last iconic pinup images of the 20th century," Buszek said. "By the 1970s, because of the sexual revolution and mores about sexuality becoming looser in the west, the pinup does start to become more nostalgic."

Farrah: Symbol of Sex in the 1970s

A guest post by Elana Levine, author of Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American Television.

I gave up.  I decided I would be Jaclyn Smith’s Kelly instead of fighting with my friend and my sister to be Farrah Fawcett-Majors’ Jill.  Besides, I could play with my two different Farrah dolls when they weren’t around and would refuse to swap my Jill trading cards next time they wanted to do an exchange.  Maybe I couldn’t be Farrah that day, chasing down the bad guys as we rode bikes around the driveway.  But she could be mine—I could be her—at other times, in other ways.  Such was the life of a girl like me in times like those.  In the mid-1970s there was no greater symbol of non-threatening feminine attractiveness and power.  Farrah was it.
The simultaneous appearance of Farrah’s famous swimsuit poster and the debut of ABC’s new series, Charlie’s Angels, in 1976 made Farrah a household name, an American icon, and an object of widespread admiration and desire.  She was the first, and the most recognizable, of American television’s homegrown brand of female sex symbol for the post-sexual revolution era.  She would only remain a full-time Angel for one season, but her fun-loving, sporty, beach-goddess aura set the template for a number of TV sex symbols throughout the decade.  

It was easy then, as now, for pretty young women to get attention when they appeared on TV, the main stage of American popular culture.  But Farrah’s fame was assisted by a confluence of forces, making her symbolic weight all the greater.  By the mid-1970s, the women’s liberation movement had made clear that women and girls could do anything their male counterparts could do, not least of which were holding starring roles in action-oriented television series, wielding guns, and capturing villains.  Yet the forces of backlash were plenty vocal, as well, insisting that “women’s lib” was seeking to erase the fundamental, natural differences between the sexes to the great peril of society. Amidst such a climate, Farrah happily posed for a pin-up poster.  She reportedly had included in her Angels contract a provision that she be home in time each evening to make dinner for her “bionic man” husband, Lee Majors.  And she declared in the press, “One of the things women are blessed with is their femininity and their intuition.  Maybe we use it a little on the show, but I don’t think it’s wrong.” These dimensions of her star persona made her the ideal mediating figure for a time of confusion, change, and anxiety over gender and sex. Her Angels character could go undercover as a centerfold and fit the part beautifully, but would be most concerned with busting the crooked male owners exploiting the hard-working girls.  And Farrah herself could work full-time and engage in hard-line contract negotiations all the while playing the part of the traditional everywoman who, after a day on set, would come home and  “do women’s work . . . take off my nail polish, figure out a menu for tomorrow, maybe clean a room.” 

Farrah made comfortable and reassuring the landmark changes in women’s roles during the 1970s.  Girls like me could adore her for the promise she seemed to hold—the grown-up girl capable of daring adventure yet wildly desirable to boys, so pretty but so down to earth.  She was the perfect symbol of sex—the sex “roles” we might fill and the sex appeal we might covet—in a time of vast sexual change.