Read My Life on the Road Online
Authors: Gloria Steinem
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Feminism, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail
Years pass, and I forget this weird guy. Then I’m in Detroit again and I get a rare woman driver in her forties, overly made up and drenched in perfume. As usual, I tell her I’m glad to have a woman driver. She says not a word. Only at the end of the ride does she ask: “Do you remember a young man who drove you long ago and wanted advice about lingerie?”
I say yes, I definitely do.
“Well, I was that miserable man,” she says. “Now I’ve had tops and bottoms done, and I’m a happy woman.”
I congratulate her on what has become a choice. A growing number of people have been able to match their inner sense of self with a place on the continuum of gender that wasn’t assigned to them at birth. But hearing the same voice, I have a sense memory of sitting in the same position and feeling this driver’s pleasure in dominating me. One can change gender, but what about character?
·
As I get into a taxi to Friendship Airport, not far from Annapolis, the driver puts a textbook back on the stack next to him. Clearly, he’s been using every moment to study. He’s moonlighting from his food service job at the Naval Academy, as he explains, and is studying to be an engineer.
For me, this is a big déjà vu. Long ago, in 1972, one of my first lectures with my speaking partner, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, was to the more than four thousand cadets at the Naval Academy. We were the only women in a lecture series that otherwise included a quarterback from the Dallas Cowboys, the novelist Herman Wouk, and a deputy secretary of defense. The cadets themselves were all male, and only about eighty of the four thousand were other than white. We did our best to introduce the women’s movement to this huge crowd seated far away from us in regimented rows, but we couldn’t tell whether the roar of response was approval or disapproval. Some cadets carried oranges from dinner and tossed them at the stage. We weren’t sure whether this was the equivalent of roses or rotten eggs.
Just before that lecture, there had been a seated dinner at the home of Admiral James Calvert, the Naval Academy superintendent. Dorothy and I were surprised that only Filipino men were serving us. For many years, assigning this domestic role to male Filipinos had been the navy’s way of getting women’s work done without women, yet I thought the 1960s and the civil rights movement would have changed all that. When we asked, Admiral Calvert assured us that Filipinos were happy to get these jobs. Dorothy replied, “Like my folks in Georgia were happy to be picking cotton?” I could see the admiral was relieved when we returned to arguing about Vietnam.
During dessert, the naval cadet sitting next to me whispered that one of the Filipino servers must not be all that happy. He had asked to borrow that cadet’s engineering books.
Now I tell my Annapolis driver about my memory. “I can’t believe it,” he says. “I think that guy serving you was my older brother. He did become an engineer—and he helped build the Folk Art Theater, one of the biggest arenas in Manila.”
As I head into the airport, I look back to see the driver in his taxi, overhead light on, studying. If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel.
M
Y TWO LONGEST-LASTING TAXI
stories are ones that I owe to friends as well as drivers.
·
In our co-lecturing days, Flo Kennedy and I were sitting in the back of a taxi on the way to the Boston airport, discussing Flo’s book
Abortion Rap.
The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!”
Would she have wanted to own her words in public? I don’t know, but I so wish we had asked her name. When Flo and I told this taxi story at speeches, the driver’s sentence spread on T-shirts, political buttons, clinic walls, and protest banners from Washington to Vatican Square, from Ireland to Nigeria. By 2012, almost forty years after that taxi ride, the driver’s words were on a banner outside the Republican National Convention in Tampa, when the party nominated Mitt Romney for president of the United States on a platform that included criminalizing abortion. Neither Flo nor the taxi driver could have lived to see him lose—and yet they were there.
·
Years ago, when I was often staying with a friend in Brooklyn, I began to use Black Pearl, a car service in that oldest borough where residents are more than a third African American. Because Yellow cabs in Manhattan often avoid black neighborhoods and also refuse long trips to other boroughs—though by law they are required to take passengers wherever they want to go—many gypsy cabs and car services have sprung up. Among the oldest is Black Pearl. Its slogan has always been “We’re Not Yellow, We’ll Go Anywhere.”
Every time I called the dispatcher, a driver showed up within minutes, always in a big old low-slung American car with such comforts as incense, seats covered in fake fur, surround-sound music, and no safety barrier to interfere with talking to the driver. It was like riding in a placenta with Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, or Chaka Khan—listening to anything from the oldest blues and reggae to the newest dance or rap music.
The first time I thanked a driver for this peak experience—I’d been blissed out and unaware of traffic—he just smiled. “One day I turned around,” he said, “and a couple on the backseat were—dancing.”
I discovered from drivers just how important this car service was. Not only did many Yellow cabs bypass black people on the street—or say, “Sorry, I don’t go to Brooklyn”—but black women close to giving birth couldn’t count on a taxi to take them to the hospital, and had to find a car service in advance. Then an African American man named Calvin Williams returned to Brooklyn after serving in the Korean War and invented Black Pearl. It became so popular that voters elected him to the New York State Assembly, where he served two terms.
Within Black Pearl, every driver has a story. After getting the same one on a couple of trips, I asked why he had the only venetian blinds I’d ever seen in a car.
“Around here,” he says, gesturing to the streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, “money is easier to come by than privacy. You can borrow or steal money, but you can’t find a private place. When I was coming up with seven brothers and sisters, I met my girlfriend under the stairs, dodging rats and winos, or I froze my ass off on street corners with my buddies. Even when I went to the Brooklyn Fox to see Little Stevie Wonder—he was a little kid then—security guards would shine flashlights up and down the aisles. All I wanted was to be cool in summer, warm in winter, and listen to music—to have just a little private space for happiness.
“So when I retired from my city job and started driving for Black Pearl, I thought,
This is it! I’m a rescuer! I’m a Black Knight in Silver Armor!
I always make sure nobody has guns, drugs, or alcohol in my car. Then I turn up the music, turn down the blinds, and drive around for as long as my customers want.”
Among his regulars were girls from a local Catholic school who rode around with the boyfriends they weren’t supposed to have, a Black Muslim father of five whose wife wouldn’t let him listen to sinful music, two male firefighters who rode home together after work in the most famously homophobic agency in the city, a single mother who needed time away from her job and kids, and an elderly unmarried couple who held hands where their children and grandchildren couldn’t see them.
“Only food and water are more important than music and privacy,” he says seriously. “I’m a rescuer.”
Taxi drivers are entrepreneurs of the road. Like my father, they drive and dream. But flight attendants experience work as a group.
When I first began flying a lot in the early 1970s, planes meant only mindlessness, escape from phones, maybe a movie, and most of all, sleep. Even if I took work on board, I nodded off as soon as we were aloft. Like a flying version of Pavlov’s dog, just being carried through space made me feel I needed to make no further effort.
Once when I stayed awake long enough to admire the olive twill pants of a flight attendant’s uniform, she let me order a pair at her discount, thus combining shopping with travel. It was the beginning of a lifetime of finding girlfriends in the sky.
I noticed that stewardesses were all young—and all female—but I assumed they wanted a few years of travel before doing something else, or this was an entry-level job and a pipeline for airline executives. I only began to pay attention when I was shuttling constantly between the start-up of
Ms.
magazine in New York and the organizing of the National Women’s Political Caucus in Washington. Once when exhaustion caused me to fall asleep with my credit card in my hand, a kindhearted stewardess removed the card, ran it through the onboard ticket machine—the way one paid for the shuttle in those days—and put it back in my hand without waking me. Neither she nor others knew who I was or why I was such a frequent-flying oddity among the mostly male passengers going to our nation’s capital, but we seemed to share a sense of being outsiders.
On longer trips with various airlines, I began to hang out in the galley, where I could ask questions and listen. I learned that the first stewardesses had been registered nurses hired to make passengers feel safe at a time when flying was new, airsickness was frequent, and passengers were fearful. Some pilots resented this female invasion of their macho air space so much that they quit. Like the first American astronauts who compared sending a Soviet woman into space with sending up a monkey, the presence of any woman devalued a masculine domain.
Once male business travelers became the airlines’ bread and butter, everything changed. Stewardesses were hired as decorative waitresses with geishalike instructions. There were even “executive flights” for men only, complete with steaks, brandy, and cigars lit by stewardesses. Though they still had to know first aid, evacuation procedures for as many as seventy-five kinds of planes, underwater rescue, emergency signaling, hijacking precautions, and other skills that took six weeks of schooling—not to mention how to handle passengers and fend off some—their appearance was prescribed down to age, height, weight (which was governed by regular weigh-ins), hairstyle, makeup (including a single shade of lipstick), skirt length, and other physical requirements that excluded such things as “a broad nose”—only one of many racist reasons why stewardesses were overwhelmingly white. They had to be single as well as young, and were fired if they married or aged out at over thirty or so. Altogether the goal of airline executives seemed to be to hire smart and ornamental young women, to use them as advertising come-ons, to work them hard, and to age them out soon. Flight schedules were so merciless that on some airlines, the average stewardess lasted only eighteen months. As one United executive famously said, “If a flight attendant was still on the job after three years…I’d know we were getting the wrong kind of girl. She’s not getting married.”
2
Back in the galley, stewardesses were only too glad to tell me about the indignities, from ad campaigns with slogans like “I’m Sandy, Fly Me,” and “She’ll Serve You—All the Way,” to an “Air Strip” in which they were required to walk up and down the aisles while stripping to hot pants. Passengers were influenced by this image of stewardesses, and made them second only to farmers’ daughters as objects of sex jokes. This image was publicized by such X-rated pornographic movies as
Come Fly with Me
and
The Swinging Stewardesses.
Some pilots expected to be serviced sexually on layovers, and though the answer from stewardesses was overwhelmingly no, passengers assumed they must be saying yes. Airlines fended off sex discrimination lawsuits for refusing to hire male stewards by maintaining that the care and feeding of passengers was so peculiarly “feminine” that it amounted to a “BFOQ”—a bona-fide occupational qualification—otherwise reserved for wet nurses and sperm donors. Stewardesses could be “written up” for any infraction of the rules, including talking back to an obnoxious drunk passenger or refusing to sell more drinks to an already inebriated one. They were made to share rooms on layovers while male crew had private rooms, and they were definitely not on a job ladder to the executive suite.
But pilots, on whose physical condition much more depended, got away with many fewer physical requirements and weigh-ins, a fact visible in red faces and potbellies. They also earned an average of 400 percent more than flight attendants, and had a lock on piloting because the air force, which paid and trained almost all of them, hadn’t trained a woman pilot since World War II. Then, WASPs ferried planes across the Atlantic, but after the war, no Amelia Earharts needed apply.
The more I listened to all this, the more I admired the degree to which this group of women maintained their humanity, despite being regulated right down to getting demerits if they didn’t smile constantly. As one said to me, “Even my face is not my own.”
Of course, punished people sometimes pass punishment downward, especially to members of their own devalued group. Flying to Kansas for a campus speech with my speaking partner Dorothy Pitman Hughes and her newborn baby, a stewardess ordered Dorothy, who was nursing her daughter, into the lavatory, as if nursing were an obscene act. Only Dorothy’s fierce objection, my threat to write about it, and the anger of a nearby white woman passenger dissuaded her. When I was traveling with Flo Kennedy, a stewardess insisted that the plane couldn’t take off until Flo’s purse was stashed in the overhead bin. Flo pointed out similar purses on white women’s laps, flat out refused to remove hers, and asked the stewardess why she was oppressing other women when she herself was oppressed. In solidarity with Flo, I took my satchel out of the overhead, though it really was luggage, and put it on my lap. Neither Flo nor I would budge. Finally, the plane took off anyway.
We laughed about such scuffles later, and Flo kept reminding me that they gave us an opportunity to teach, though each one was also punishing to the soul.
Mostly, though, stewardesses were a revolution waiting to happen. When I was on a plane from St. Louis, long the airport nearest home for Phyllis Schlafly—a creation of the Fairness Doctrine, because she was the rare woman the media could find who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment—a flight attendant whispered to me, “I had Phyllis Schlafly on my flight, and I put her in a middle seat!” I knew things were changing when I got on a flight from San Francisco, and found a stewardess wearing a button,
I’M LINDA, FLY YOURSELF
. Then some flight attendants rebelled against having just first names on their identifying pins. Why should they be Susie or Nan while the pilots were Commander Rothgart or Captain Armstrong? (Eventually they also demanded last names preceded by
Ms.
so they wouldn’t be identified by marital status.) Their name demand was right up there with salary and safety. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “When the slave leaves bondage, his first act is to name himself.”
By the mid-1970s, a newly minted group called Stewardesses for Women’s Rights opened a small office in Rockefeller Center. I visited it and found women from many different airlines holding joint press conferences, pressuring in and outside their company unions, protesting their image in airline ads, and exposing such hazards as recirculated air that endangered them and their passengers. Knowing that the job would be more honored if men were doing it, too, they were making the integration of men into this all-female workforce as much a priority as integrating female pilots into the all-male cockpit. They pushed to change
stewardesses
to
flight attendants,
since even
steward
would mark a job description by gender.
As I learned from listening to these smart women who were treated as not smart, stewardesses of the 1960s had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), trying to change the “no men, no marriage” policy of their job. Aileen Hernandez, the only female or African American on the EEOC, supported them. Years later they finally won, but the airlines called the ruling “improper” because Hernandez, after leaving the EEOC, had become president of the National Organization for Women. A judge actually agreed. That’s why discrimination was still okay when I started flying a lot—and remained okay until 1986.
When corporate raider Carl Icahn took over TWA, he expected flight attendants to both take a pay cut and accept a work increase—unlike the (almost totally male) machinists and pilots. In 1986, flight attendant Vicki Frankovich led a strike of unprecedented length and unity—and campaigned for a public boycott of TWA because of its discrimination.
Ms.
magazine named her one of our Women of the Year. Icahn had the support of the pilots and machinists and more or less won, but he was forced to admit that the striking flight attendants had cost him $100 million.
3
When I met him quite accidentally, I discovered he was furious about the
Ms.
article supporting Frankovich. He told me he didn’t discriminate against women. As proof, he said that if he needed one of his top male executives on a national holiday—and that executive spent the holiday with his family instead—he would fire him, too.
I could see what flight attendants were up against. By then, I’d been flying so much and listening to so many that I had to resist saying
we
when I talked about job problems. I also began to get the other end of women’s stories whose first chapters I had seen on earlier flights.
In the 1970s, on a flight to Milwaukee, for instance, a stewardess told me she resented feminists for saying that men could do her job, and that women could be pilots. “That isn’t the way the world works,” she said with energy. “You’re telling people to fight what’s in our nature and biology. You’re only making women discontent by telling them to do the impossible.” At the end of the 1980s, I ran into her again on a flight to Albuquerque. She was now the mother of two little girls, and giving out flight attendant’s pins and pilot’s wings to children on board—as airlines often do to welcome families—and offering either one to both boys and girls. She had discovered there were boys who liked her job of taking care of passengers, and girls who wanted to pilot the plane.
What had changed her mind? Two things, she said. Because her airline finally had been forced to democratize its hiring, she worked with male flight attendants and realized they could do the job because “people are people.” Second, she had read that Whitney Young, the late civil rights leader, confessed to boarding a plane in Africa and feeling an involuntary moment of fear when he saw that the pilot was black. He realized how much self-hatred had been bred into him by a racist culture. “I also mistrusted myself and other women,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I learned that from my mother—but I’m not going to pass it on to my daughters.” When I last saw her, she was standing at the front of the plane, giving out pilot’s wings to two little girls.
Some women were novels in themselves. Tommie Hutto-Blake was a flight attendant I saw in 1972 in a Manhattan church basement at the first meeting of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights; then again at the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977; then as an activist at a 1994 political event in Dallas; then in 2008 when she was campaigning for Hillary Clinton; then on a flight of American Airlines just before she retired after thirty-eight years as a flight attendant, thirty-five of them as a union activist, and took on political activism full time. That last time, she was a revered passenger. I was led back to where she was sitting by two younger women flight attendants, and one was a union vice president who was just finishing law school. It was a long way from lighting cigars and doing Air Strips.
In the 1970s, I had read a newspaper report of an African American stewardess who showed up for work with an Afro at a time when the few black flight attendants were expected to look as “white” as possible. She compounded the offense by carrying a copy of Eldridge Cleaver’s
Soul on Ice.
The pilot of the flight refused to take off until she was put off the plane. When I was back on the same airline, I asked a stewardess if there had been a protest. She said yes, but as far as she knew, the pilot got away with it. Like a captain of a ship at sea, he could do anything he wanted.
More than twenty years later, I was in a big-city radio station for a news interview, and a female station manager showed me around. She was a rarity in an industry where 85 percent of managers were males, so I asked how she had come to this position. She explained that after a divorce, she had gone back to school, started in radio at the bottom, loved its ability to create community, and discovered she had a gift for managing people.
“Do you happen to remember,” she asked me as we finished our tour, “a news story about an airline pilot who put a black flight attendant off the plane for reading Eldridge Cleaver?”
I said I definitely did. I’d always wondered what became of him.
“Well, that pilot was my husband,” she said calmly. “So I divorced him. That one true act was my beginning.”
Over the years, those stories in the sky would teach me more than I could have imagined: from deregulation, fare wars, and nonunion airlines, to post-Iraq fuel costs, hijacking fears, and bankruptcies that somehow required pay cuts for everybody except executives with golden parachutes. I experienced the kindness of flight attendants who brought me back a dessert or a meal from first class, or let me lie down in the middle of an aisle when I had a back spasm, or took the armrests out of three-across seats so I could sleep coast to coast, or illegally moved me up to first class when there was an empty seat, or sent me off with a split of champagne to thank me for supporting their job struggles. They still are not part of the job ladder into the executive airline ranks, and they still are far more likely to take pay cuts than the almost totally male machinists and pilots even though about a quarter of flight attendants are now men. But ever since they won the right to work beyond marriage and beyond thirty, I’ve seen more and more whose stories had begun on flights decades before. A modern airliner is very different from a timeless village in India, but it dawned on me one day that all my air travel has much in common with long-ago village walking. If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you.