Fly Girl by Ann Hood

Author:Ann Hood [Hood, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

UNBELIEVABLY, the final sexist restriction for flight attendants—weight—was not lifted until 1991, twenty-three years after the age ceiling was removed. In 1979, we were all very afraid of that scale waiting for us in crew scheduling. One day, a month before our probation ended, I worked a nonstop flight from San Francisco to Boston, which meant the full transcontinental service. By the time we landed late that afternoon, I wanted nothing more than to kick off my shoes, take off my stinky uniform, and plop down somewhere with a good book. I walked in the door of our Harbor Towers apartment to find all of my roommates standing around Maureen, crying. Maureen’s crew kit and boxes of her belongings were piled up in the hallway.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“They fired me,” Maureen managed to say. “For five pounds.”

“No!” I said. “They wouldn’t do that.”

“Well, they did,” she said.

She wanted nothing more than to go home, and who could blame her? Here we all were with our pagers and our trips and our uniforms—with our jobs. Home would be its own source of embarrassment. Like all of us, she had long dreamed of being a flight attendant, and she had survived the most difficult interview and training processes in the business. She had flown for months, with her big smile and big blue eyes, loving the passengers and the travel.

Once she’d come home all excited. “I had a movie star on my flight,” she said.

“Who?” we wanted to know.

When you worked a Boston-to-L.A. flight you almost always had a celebrity on board. I’d served Diana Ross, Richard Gere, F. Lee Bailey, Ryan O’Neal, and countless others.

“Benji!” she said. “The dog!”

Benji was a golden mixed-breed dog who starred in five films throughout the ’70s, with titles like Benji: Off the Leash! and Benji the Hunted.

“He was in first class!” Maureen said, falling into uncontrollable laughter.

Now she was fired and going home.

The first weight-discrimination suit had been filed by the union against American Airlines just five years earlier, in 1974. That was followed by another in 1988, and still another in 1990, when the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) joined the union’s discrimination suit and finally won. San Francisco attorney Kathleen S. King told the Chicago Tribune, “This is a victory for all working women. Weight is a ridiculous standard that has nothing to do with job performance.” When Maureen got fired from TWA, we were still almost fifteen years from airlines finally agreeing to abandon weight charts and substitute a performance test requiring flight attendants to show that they can move comfortably down the aisle and fit quickly through the cabin emergency windows.

Nancy Segal, attorney on behalf of the Association of Flight Attendants told the New York Times, “A lot of women went through indescribable psychological agony knowing that if they gained a pound, they could lose their jobs.” Even flight attendants returning from maternity leave as recently as 1986 had to weigh in before every flight and lose one and a half pounds a week to meet their hiring weight within twenty weeks or get fired.

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