I became interested in this book as the story of a profession that started from scratch in the 20th Century, whose ranks grew from a population of a social minority - women in the workplace. In many ways, the story of flight attendants parallels the stories of other health professionals, including physicians and nurses. In my own medical school, which opened for business in 1967, you could walk along the “wall of fame” and at a glance see how the number of women in each class grew from year to year. It was only in the year after mine that there were as many women as men in the entering school class.

I have also grown up in the Jet age, and in an era where a lot of legal rights that minorities now have, have been in place. I recently visited the National Partnership for Women and Families, where I saw legislation that that group helped to enact, including the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the Family Medical Leave Act. When I saw the physical representation of these laws, and the years that they were enacted, it was a powerful reminder to me that a lot that we take for granted today took a lot of work by dedicated individuals to make them part of society.

It was with this interest that I learned about the history about the flight attendant profession.

Read the rest of this entry »