Barry, K: Femininity in Flight

Kathleen M. Barry has a doctorate in history from New York University. She has taught American history at NYU and the University of Cambridge.

"Femininity in Flight is outstanding. It is the most thoroughly presented book on femininity, work, and pink-collar activism to date. It expands the contours of the women's rights movement and complicates the grounds on which women make demands for better working conditions." Eileen Boris, author of Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States "Femininity in Flight is the first book that tells the story of the flight attendant occupation as a whole and gives us the history of the occupation in so compelling and rich a fashion. Kathleen M. Barry offers us an entertaining and witty account of how flight attendants embodied changing notions of femininity, and then she boldly challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that it was those very cultural constraints that in part spurred flight attendant activism." Dorothy Sue Cobble, author of The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Justice in Modern America "One of the great strengths of Femininity in Flight is the broad context within which Barry views flight attendants' struggles, in terms of women's work, union organisation and second-wave feminism. By contextualising her study so well and drawing out the parallels between stewardresses and other pink-collar workers, Barry has produced a book with wide appeal and relevance to many interested in labour history, the women's movement, and the growth of service work."--Rosie Cox, The Times Higher March 23 2007 "In the early chapters of Kathleen M. Barry's excellent study, Feminity in FLight, she explains why airlines went with pretty young white women, many of them trained nurses, rather than, say, the middle-aged African American men who acted as stewards on Pullman cars; cutting-edge modernity in the 1930s colour-coded itself white... Barry's well-documented history spends more of its length on union charters and test cases than it does on hemlines One of its strengths is a demonstration that cultural history does