When the first widely-circulated issue of the pioneering feminist magazine, Ms., hit newsstands in July 1972, it contained a small advertisement toward the back that most readers likely disregarded. That unobtrusive listing contained big news for its intended audience: flight attendants, or stewardesses, as they were then known. The ad announced an upcoming meeting to discuss forming a group focused on gaining workplace equality and respect for their profession. Stewardesses for Women’s Rights was born later that year.

SFWR’s founders were both former Eastern Airlines flight attendants. Jan Fulsom had quit her job after a drunk passenger tore her skirt off mid-flight, and the pilot, her immediate supervisor, laughed. Sandra Jarrell was fired by Eastern for being what its requirements considered overweight. (Nearly all airlines at the time required their flight attendants be weighed regularly; attendants who exceeded a carrier’s arbitrarily set limit, were put on probation or fired altogether.) Jarrell and Fulsom had had enough of airlines’ predatory and demeaning workplace culture, and knew other flight attendants felt the same.

At that first SFWR meeting in a church basement in Greenwich Village, women shared experiences and began to formulate goals and strategy. The flight attendants wanted to improve their working conditions, advocate for health and safety measures for passengers and crew, and, most vehemently, counter chauvinistic public perception of stewardesses. 

SFWR found common cause in a surprising, high-profile ally. Ms. founder Gloria Steinem had come to know flight attendants while shuttling back and forth between the magazine’s headquarters in New York and the National Women’s Political Caucus in Washington, D.C. “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,” Steinem would later write in her 2015 memoir, My Life on the Road. She began to spend time in airplane galleys on longer trips, in what became “a lifetime of finding girlfriends in the sky.” Steinem was at SFWR’s inaugural meeting, providing guidance and encouragement. “I’d been flying so much and listening to so many [flight attendants],” she later recalled, “that I had to resist saying ‘we’ when I talked about job problems.”

The alliance disconcerted some activists, who took at face value the derogatory portrayal of flight attendants in popular culture. For years, airline marketing had dealt in a range of fictional stewardess archetypes, from wife-in-training to sexpot. “Other feminists find it a little hard to take flight attendants seriously because of their image,” historian Kathleen Barry told American Experience. “Members of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights recalled being hissed at at a feminist convention they attended. They get a mixed response from feminists generally. So when somebody like Gloria Steinem supports what they’re doing, that's hugely important.” 

SFWR’s members moved quickly after that first meeting, putting together a press conference in December 1972. As reporters took notes, they called out ad campaigns with blatantly suggestive taglines—such as “She’ll Serve You - All the Way” and National Airlines’ high-profile “Fly Me” campaign —as well as taking on the broader misrepresentation of flight attendants in books and films like How to Make a Good Airline Stewardess and “Swinging Stewardesses.” (The former contained illustrations of dozens of flight attendants both in uniform and completely naked.) Such “annoying and degrading” treatment, SFWR told the assembled media, amounted to “making a dollar by slandering us.”

Word spread further after a feature piece on SFWR appeared in the January 1973 issue of Ms. The group held the first of several national conferences in March in New York City. Steinem spoke; joined by prominent feminist attorney Betty Southard Murphy, who also provided SFWR with pro bono legal counsel; Margaret Sloan-Hunter, founder of the National Black Feminist Organization; and Kathie Sarachild, a radical feminist activist. SFWR founder Sandra Jarrell gave the keynote speech, addressing the fraught topic of unions, none of whose officers were in attendance. While many stewardesses were members, union leadership was nearly always male and older, and often unsympathetic to the particular issues around flight attendants’ working conditions. “Unfortunately,” Jarrell noted, “unions do not have the reputation of representing the interests of women at the bargaining table.” 

Conference attendees were presented with the new SFWR logo, the gender symbol for female with wings extending out to the right, mimicking the wing pins that flight attendants received from their airlines. The new design dominated the first page of the inaugural issue of SFWR’s monthly newsletter, which talked about finding the best way to “fight sexism in the skies.” (Proving Jarrell’s point about the lack of union support, officials of the Transport Workers Union prohibited SFWR from distributing the newsletter via flight attendants’ airport mailboxes.)

Over the next several years SFWR grew to include 13 local chapters, and refined its methods for addressing flight attendants’ work and public image. At an individual level, members helped file discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board, as well as lawsuits against airlines. SFWR also took on another topic with far-reaching impact, focusing on a topic germane both to their profession and the greater public: hazardous cargo. Partnering with Ralph Nader’s Aviation Consumer Action Project, the group created a coalition called STOP, for “Safe Transportation of People.” SFWR arranged for 100 flight attendants to wear special radiation badges in-flight for two months to demonstrate that they—and passengers—were being exposed to improperly packaged, radioactive cargo. The group also protested at airports across the country. Their pressure yielded results: In 1975, the Federal Aviation Administration ruled that no radioactive cargo besides properly packaged radioactive pharmaceuticals could be carried on U.S. flights.

But SFWR’s predominant concern remained the fight for respect. In 1974, National Airlines announced it intended to take the “Fly Me” campaign to another level, with new marketing that featured swimsuit-clad flight attendants alongside the slogan, “I’m going to fly you like you’ve never been flown before.” SFWR mobilized, this time holding protests and partnering with the National Organization for Women to file complaints with the Federal Communications Commission and the National Association of Broadcasters. SFWR members wore and distributed buttons and bumper stickers bearing the slogans “Don’t Fly Me - Fly Yourself” and “National, your fly is open.” Once again, the group’s media savvy garnered coverage in outlets across the country. 

SFWR also created a “counter-ad” aimed to appeal, like its successful STOP campaign, to the general public’s sense of safety. An actor delivered her lines for the commercial from an airplane seat: “I’m a highly trained professional with a serious job to do. Should an emergency situation arise, I urgently need the respect, confidence and cooperation of all my passengers in order to minimize danger and accomplish what must be done.” SFWR organized additional protests, letter-writing campaigns, and boycotts against the most egregious airline marketing. 

By 1977, though, the organization had stagnated. Its funding dwindled, and members had conflicting ideas about where to place the group’s focus. Given the inherent flux in potential members’ schedules and their affiliations with different airlines, recruitment and cohesion had always been a challenge; SFWR never represented more than three percent of the flight attendant community in its five-year existence. But the group had articulated a feminist voice for the profession that was influential beyond its size. 

And as SFWR drifted apart, a new phenomenon emerged: Many of its former members ran for leadership positions in airline and industry unions. It was there, they had come to realize, that flight attendants were going to effect longer-lasting, material change—from the inside. Or as Gloria Steinem remarked 40 years later, “stewardesses were a revolution waiting to happen.”