>> welcome you to a virtual evening with julie cooke, to discuss her new book, "come fly the world" the jet age story of the women of pan-am. a riveting complex portrait of the adventurous lives of pan-am stewardesses during aviation's golden age. july. >> host: cooke is a journalist and travel writers whose future

tiers and personal essays have been published in "time," smith sewn unanimous, conde naste traveler. she is the author of the other side of paradise, life in the new cuba. the daughter of a former pan-am executive, she grew up in the pan-am family, a still strong network across the globe. she now lives in vermont from where she joins us today julia is going to fly solo for their presentation but we'll have time for audience questions at the end. so please post your questions anytime during the broadcast in the ask a question button at the bottom of the screen. i'll take a moment to remind you that you can order your copy of "come fly the world" from books and books below by pressing the green button on the screen. question appreciate each and every order and generous donations. now without further adieu i'd

like to welcome julia to the statement. >> thank you for being here. >> thank you for having me.it's a little different from the last time i was at books and & books for a reading and also fitting to be virtually in miami on international women's day. miami was ground zero for pan-am where the airline began in south florida, so it feels right. i'd like to talk, i have one short reading i'll get to after introducing the book a little bit. and then i'll talk about my research and then i'd love to have questions from you guys out there. if other events have been a guide we have a fair amount of real stewardesses or more recent flight attendants in the audience. i hope so. i'd love to hear from you, too, what airline you worked for, what years, where you were

based. it's been fun at other events to hear about that. so, broadly, "come fly the world" is bowels he international tudors of panna. i use the word because it's out to be women who worked for the scale a couple of airlines in the era in which that was the word thatas used. in its day pan-am was the only american airline that flew exclusively international routes, which means that if you get on a pan-am plane you would be getting off in a foreign country. so that was so exciting about pan-am. what also was incredibly exciting about pan-am to the women worked 0 on the airline. the book is about the places these women flew to, about the way they moved through the world, the work culture of the airline, and also the largely unseen world of women played in the vietnam war. more specifically come fly the

world is about the lives of five women and their time flying. it's about how flying impacted the choices they made, it's about how it impacted the lives they led. it's also about the fun they had, the challenges they failed, and overcame, the places they visited and what they did in those places. one reviewer of the book in an early review said it reads like a novel but it was important the book would be about real women doing real things backed up by real research and put in the context of an indecreed by tumultuous time in american history. i came to the book in an interesting way. my dad worked for pan-am but i hadn't thought a huge amount about the airline until i was walking down the street in new york and chatting with my husband about pan-am, and he said, you know, maybe you should think about what is going on with pan-am now, where are these

people? so i looked up the pan-am historical foundation, i hadn't really had anything to do with them prior to that. i saw they were hosting an event at someplace i always wanted to tour, the twa terminal at jfk in new york. the papam terminal was torn but but the twa terminal is still standing and now it's hotel. so i had been living in new york and writing about art and architecture and was excited to go tour thele twa terminal. i wanted to see it. build in the '50s, beautiful, beautiful structure. i went too this event and i met these two women who were magnetic, former flight crew, they were stewardesses they told me. not flight attendants and i was incorrect by that correction. i thought it was telling. it seemed to me to be pinning

them to an era and a job that was important and was very different from the role of flight attendant today. so that difference i found really compelling. i was also incredibly dish found them magnetism they were lively, they were funny, they talked about events geopolitics and global history with a casual intimacy as if they'd conferred with prime ministers or had martinis with spies and to be honest, some of them had. i found them fascinating and i wanted to know exactly why they had -- how they had become who they were. i wrote the book because the more of these women i met, i started going to pan-am historical foundation events and meeting more and more of these former stewardesses, and the more i met, in that first phase

of research, the more i sensed these women were never really given their rightful place in the history of restless world change women large bily because the pop culture of the image, they were trail blazing women who lives reflected the changes the era and changed the era in a lot of ways and i didn't feel like that had been truly understood. i am a restless woman. i like to travel. i love traveling. find it -- it's where i feel most comfortable, and i felt a kinship with these women and they had really opened doors for me on a generational level and i wondered why that had never really been credited. so, the book explains in a lot of ways why that is. and attempts to place them where the belong in history. so i'm going to do a little

reading, very short reading from the book, this is from chapter 1 can in which readers will meet a woman named lin. lin is fin i issuing up her last year at as week be a, going to graduate with a science career, working in a couple of labs but is not loving it. not because she doesn't find the work interesting. she fines the work very compelling but being' labs is not thrilling. shows more of an extrovert than that and also vaguely intimidated by the men in the lab. doesn't really love being the only women or one of two women in the science labs. so, she also starts to learn about the vietnam war via a boyfriend of hers at the time, and starts to get a little more politically engaged. her last year of college the goes to rome, and when she gets

to rome it's like her world explodes. she decided she wants to be out in the world. so, she comes back home and has an idea that she floats to her parents and she wants to become a stewardess, and this section i'm going to read right now is -- explains why that was such an exciting job for her. >> working as stewardess gave a woman the able to see different places and also to experience who she could be against those very backdrops. this vicinity addition to try out an unfettered version of ones self somewhere else had appealed to enormous numbers of women from the start of the commercial airline industry. sadie in new york in h read a 1986 profile in the "chicago tribune" of a who had beaten out other women on the unite shuttle was very different person from sadie in chicago. in chicago sadie lived, quote, life of

considerable dash. biking, swimming, roller skating and shopping. but twice a week her job took her to new york and new york sadie was a different woman. signs she arrived there she bought two books, one fiction, one nonfiction, and a supply of magazines did stocked her hotel room with a pound of chocolates and apples and had her meals sent up as she read stretched across the hotel room bed in her dressing gown. a decade earlier, when air travel was raw and knew, cabin attendants in he established model of train stewards had been men but in 1930, a nurse and trained pilot approached an airline executive to didn't vince him nurses would make better cabin crew. the pitch worked. a nurse could more naturally reassure a fearful passenger, the executive wrote in a memo, or minister to air sick men. quote, the passengers relaxed, reported an airline -- atlantic monthly righter. if a mere girl isn't worried why should they be? and the mid-1930s a stewardess

dragged two passengers from the burning wreckage of a pennsylvania crash that killed 12. she was injured but she ran four miles for help. front page articles celebrated her as a heroine "files other women and crews and friendships and labs appeared in newspapers and magazines. quote, air host cities finds live adventurous read one front page head in "the new york times." sadie ericson was a model of the duality expected of stewardesses. she had social skills and self-determination, glamor and grit, the petite blond looked, quote, like a captivating french doll and was, quote, almost magnetic include entoday by looks, temperment and education to be outstanding in a profession that required, quote, poise and fearless capacity for action and grim courage. the next two decade consolidated the view of the job as women's work. during the second world war women took cabin positions

across airlines as men served never military. passengers began to favor air travel over ocean or whale in the post 1950s due to technological advantages such as the jet plane which sliced the flight to down to six or ten hours, and airlines compete for passengers by touting technical innovation and only so many customizations to the new jet plane existed. prices' stabilizes by the government at $400 or $500 to cross the atlantic to flying was too expensive to be a regular undertaking for anyone but the rich. each airline tried to convince ump kerred it hat the highest level of luxury and service and the women who served a predominantly male client telebecame a material selling point. then there are couple of pages detailing the glamor of the era, of air travel, some of the big -- two designed uniforms,

the gold carpet on the tarmac and more and also details the contradictory danger that these stewardesses were placed in, hijackings and war flights, and then it returns a little bit to the women and concludes this section. in the united states, the cabin of an international airplane was a south after work place for young unmarried, mostly white women. airlines in the 1960s hired only three to five percent of an mix can't, base pay was commence rat with other accept by fem nip roles, nurse, teacher, librarian, secretary, cooks included insurance, free air travel, paid vacation, and stipendses on layovers. layovers in themselves were extraordinary. a decade earlier solitary international travel was rarely undertaken by a woman who could not leverage high social status to excuse their no chaperone and

most women married long before their 20s and only a third of american women were sing at age 24, some years more teenaged girls walked down the aisle than attended prom. the women applying for stewardess position nets 1960s hat in the 1950s been forbidding to wear pants in high school and sometimes even in college. now during layovers a stewardess could all off the skirt of ueurope form, put on slacks slad do museums. wear jeans and wander through mexican markets. flight routes experience and expertise varied by airline. but having a job on any plane was a reason for a woman to roam. what was revolutionary was a lack of should in this job, but plenty of could. so that complaints a little bit of why the role was such a sought after position for the

young women who applied for the job. an pamam the requirements were physical. between 5'3" and 5'9", a certain weight and had too be quite pretty. they were subjected to pretty excruciatingly detailed assessment of if the appearance by the interviewers. they also had to be quite smart. they were college educated, spoke two languages, so this was a pretty select group of women. people who like lynne who parents may not have reacted with plush when they told them they were going to become airline stewardesses. people withouts parents thought they wanted them to be more. they wanted them to pursue perhaps professional degrees, but for the women who took the job, they were really -- the world beck conned and the -- beckoned and the opportunity to get out it in was just huge. too much of a temptation.

so, over the course of writing and researching this book i learned a lot. i learned packing tips, which are in the book. i learned what foods for a dinner party fly the best across the atlantic ocean and across the african continent. i learned how the lawsuits that stewardesses brought forth against the airlines that hired them, set the legal precedence for what -- for the employment law that my generation of women enjoys. i learned about how airlines constructed the glamor of the jet age. how we -- why we consider the jet age so glamorous, some of it was constructed by the way that the airlines hired these -- served the food on pan-am in

particular, menus were designed by maxines of paris, and the food was quite good. they had airline terminals and corporate headquarters that were designed by the best architects of the era. but a lot of the glamor was the women would wore those uniforms. i think that what -- the conclusion i came to over the course of the book was they really didn't fit any kind of stereotyped mold. they existed in the middle ground between fem him in -- fem him in and feminists, both things at once in a era that was not very legible. . they really did enjoy the new freedoms of the day. all of them. and that was remarkable. they -- the conclusions i came to and this is what compelled me so much about them, was that

they anticipated a lot of the change that would happen much later. they anticipated a global marketplace, they were buying their shoes in rome and hose in paris and pearls in hong kong in an era in which it was only they who had access to those things from those places. they could go to a department snore new york and buy the same things at the same prices from the same places. they anticipated third grade feminism. they really seemed like third wave feminists in a second wave era. they anticipated the soft diplomacy of a much later era. they were cultural diplomats everywhere. and they were fascinating. so, that's why it was so important to me to focus on real women and to do that i focused

on specifically five women, three women stories formed the backbone of the book and they all meet at the end of the book for operation baby lift which was a refugee flight in 1975. one of them began her career with the u.s. army as well, as being on these vietnam war flights she worked at a service club in germany, and the american in the peacetime army, so she -- i'll show you a couple of things i leaned on, when i was doing my research. this is karen in her army uniform. and these are some of the letters that karen sent me from home to her family.

so i got to look at all of her -- she sent me all of the letters her mom saved from tee era. letters date from 1965 through the '70s. she sent her tons of letters. i have this huge stack right here which i found fascinating and incredible to read through. so i got to interview karen but also see exactly what she was thinking and -- if not thinking, what she was telling her parents from each one of these places which was incredible to be able to ask her -- to jog her memory to her questions about different places and what she was doing when and also to see how she was presenting what she was doing back then. these were letters -- some letters written in the second chapter that focuses on karen when she begins to fly and starts moving around the world immigrant have letters from israel, from rome, from lebanon,

from hong kong, from all over the place, and some of those letters were written in the bath towns of hotel rooms. i you're a former flight crew and the audience you know what i'm talk us about, before the women got their own hotel rooms. they shared with other women, and karen would go into the bathroom and write letters home. and anyone the last section, about karen, the second to last -- the one in which the women all meet, this is karen on operation baby lift. these are photos she took. she had always dreamed of becoming a writer and a journalist, and she did. she -- in fact operation baby lift. this is the clip from the newspaper from 1975. and she wrote about the experience for her newspaper

which kick started a second career for her. she both flew and wrote for a couple of years and then she was able to quit flying to pursue writing full-time. so, i leaned on that for the personal side of things and then i look at books like this book, the false saying gone by david butler. it's pretty doggeried and has a ton of post-it notes from the sections i looked at harder to help bolster what i was hearing about -- i felt very strongly i wanted everything that i included in the book to be verified either at the scene with -- i would include something only as it was told to me by two different women in the same way, the same memory of the same event from two different people, or if i could confirm the details that someone told me via a book like the butler book.

so, that is how i tried to make it as sure as i could that everything in the book is factually accurate. of course nothing is perfect. and i did the best i could. so, with that, i would love to hear what some of your are think can and if there are any questions i'd love to hear them. kristina? >> that was fascinating. i have some question. there's one here waiting. it's from pat and she says, i used to fly more years ago, and all the night attendants i met were really great people. was that your experience? looking forward to reading the book. >> thanks. honestly it was. i got a question a little bit ago which remind me that my -- i had a real ulterior motive when

i started doing the work. i wanted to know how they had done it. these women -- one of the women i met at the twa term until a, she said she never bought a return ticket home because you never know. she was so spontaneous, and so interesting. they seemed to have really lived their lives so fully and they were -- their friendships were incredible. they haven't these bonds that are really amazing. they still travel together. they visit one another. they're god parents to each other's children. it's remarkable to look at them. and coming from the perspective of -- i was in my early 30s now my late 30s and i wanted to learn from them how to get older , and i think i did learn a lot. it's certainly really impacted

my friendships. invest a lot more in my women friend than i did perhaps. think i took them more for grant and now i think i try a little harder and i make time for trips a little more than we otherwise would have. it's hard. but we work at it. but the point is that they were -- yes, i found them so many of them had these incredible back stories and continue to live these incredible lives and were really remarkable people. >> so here's a question from katrina. and she would like to know how did the women feel about their beauty requirements? did they resent the standards or saw them as a ticket to something big center. >> almost neither. i think the took them for granted, and for the most part the women i talked to understood that they were -- they were just

part of the deal. what they did chase at was when the airlines began to really overtly sexualize them and pan-am was not that sort of -- pan-am had some added that were a little sexist, an ad that has picture of an airline tail and says grab life by the tail or something, and a little enwindow there but some of the airlines were really overred. the national airlines fly me campaign . braniff had a ad campaign that was the air industry they had their stewardesses getting on a plane wearing multiple layers and over the course of the flight they would take off their one layer of clothing in flight until they were wearing pretty

scanty outfits. and-0 southwest they were fame newsily wearing hot pants and served love possessions and love bites instead of drinks and meals. which when their beauty was kind of weaponized in a way or come come mod -- commodified for corporation corporate gain some had an issue with and that some of them enjoyed it in a way. and again, is this is not my field of expertise, not the focus of the book because the book focuses on pan-am stewardesses and pan-am -- part of the reason why pan-am never -- their uniforms were always pretty conservative but they didn't show to a lot of leg or -- they wore jackets and blouses and skirts because pan-am was flying internationally so the cultural -- the sexual cultural

more yays were not loosening all around the world and all of the places that pan-am was flying to. so outfits that were scanty would not read the same way in paris or tehran or new dehli. so pan-am's women were generally pretty modestly dressed and on the so airlines, some of the women enjoyed wearing mini-skirts. they felt like it was part of an era and was brand flu to be able to wear something short for yourself, to date and have sex for you and not for trying to find a husband or trying to pin someone down or whatever. it was new. and so that was one of the things that i found so compelling about not only pan-am

stewardesses but everyone, all of them who took the job. they were really -- they weren't coffee, tea or me women. not that stereotype by any stretch but wouldn't prudes either. >> well, sounds like must have been such fun job. i am old enough to remember -- wanting to be a stewardess. so, here's a question from rita. when did the flight attendant job become open to men and how did that happen? did it start in the u.s. or in other countries? did the salary become more competitive when men also bake flight attendants? >> so, it had been open to men until the mid-6. so in the mid-60s that across all airlines they basically understood that women were going

to sell more, women could become a selling feature of the airlines and that is when they stopped hiring men, and then in '72 when a lawsuit was decided that a man brought against pan-am in fact, and that changed it. so, again, men had to be allowed to be hired from then on out. i don't think it had any impact on the salaries. just -- you know, some men, very few, had been being hired throughout. it was never -- at least on pan-am wasn't ex-miss siltly stated only to -- explicitly stated to only hire women bit was rare. >> a question from tk who wanted to know why did you decide on the subject and how did your find your main interview subjects. >> so, i decided on this subject

of -- i think you're referring to -- the women in general can because i wanted to know how they had acquired these incredibly sophisticated and knowledgeable attitudes that impressed me when i first met them. i began to focus more on war flights in part because i felt like that was such a -- the most drastic contrast you could find between the perception of the job, which is that it was for flighty women, who wanted to meet men and go on dates and go shopping. in reality, the reality was so far from that. and i felt like the war flighted, which were incredibly dangerous. these women were put in positions -- flying into active war zones, transporting soldiers to a really dangerous war, many of the soldiers did not want to go to that war. when the draft was still active

and happening, so they were really fraught and truly dangerous flights. and so to me, that was -- that contrast was really rich and that's what i wanted to explore. i found the women just one after another, start goad to pan-am historical foundation enter events and then world international e -- the association of former pan-am flight crew, and then when i met basically at these events it's really interesting them with would come up to me and say, you have to meet so and so. the has an incontribute story about whatever, and -- incredible story about what and he would met so and so and she would indeed have an incredible story and it would be amazing and then -- day would introduce know their friends and i

realized i wanted to find three 0 are more women who all worked on the same flight to triangulate that experience from their various viewpoints, and that was when i really dish sent out e-mails. had two at some point and then i sent out e-mails to everyone i knew, and said i'm looking for someone who is crewed on this flight, call me. who can you find and i found someone else. >> did you use the archives or anything -- at the university of miami. >> yes. a ton of time at the archives. i think -- >> i'm interesting in -- [inaudible] -- >> have been incredible. they were amazing. i had never done a ton of -- i'd done a little archival resnatch graduate school but wasn't my for more -- forte.

i would go to and take notes and talk to people and feel like i -- i would do some research for my previous book about youth cull noor cuba, a lot of historical research but mostly secondary sources -- actually all secondary sources. didn't go to any archives for that. so i spend some time in archives but -- i was pretty green. and christina was very gracious. >> we're talk about the special collections at the university of miami and kristina who heads the collections there. so, -- did you fly -- >> i did notice. was nine when the airline went under. >> she was asking what years did you fly for pan-am. >> zero. i flew on pan-am a lot. when i was a little kid. >> my god, that's great.

so, i would love to know more about martinis with spies. >> so, okay. at the end of the vietnam war -- all throughout the vietnam war, these women were in and out of saigon and that is a ripe with operatives, covert and -- army people and contractors and especially tend of the war, a lot of the women -- a lot of the flights were through hong kong and bangkok, and a lot of the people who were i guess the cia agents, but not necessarily overtly declared as such, were also in those places. so, the women who were spending

time -- you would just socialize around the pool or at the bar at the hotel and wind up meeting people, one of my main subjects told mow but -- well, there's also the fact that air america was a branch of the cia. the cia's airline. and air america operated -- the air american pilots were always around also, so they were just in the milieu. one of my main subjects told me about what she looked back on, understanding that she had been taking messages for a cia agent. she had -- she would socialize with them. they would get a drink when she was in hong kong, either hong kong or bangkok. -- bangkok, have drinks at the intercontinental hotel and he would say when you get to hong kong, go have a drink with my friend, he'll be is there at so

and. so could you just let him know i'm going to be a little bit late doing this. i'll do this at this time and'll meet him here and do this. and she would go and relay the message to this other person, and looking back she was like, huh, i think that was not what i thought it was. >> my god. how amazing. so here's a question about any stories about hijackings? >> yes. so, not -- i didn't have any -- none of the women i profiled were on a plane that was hijacked, but one of them, torre, she got to the airport and missed it by nothing. she got jfk. hijackings is a -- a little contest, high jack he can bag then the golden era of high jackings in the late 60s.

they were not -- for a brief period of time they happened with incredible frequency and no fatalities so they were kind of seen as a novelty. most of the time the people who their he hijackers would get on the plane and make threat and ask for the plane to go to cuba in a lot of cases. not always. but sometimes. a lot of times the planes would wind up in havana. and they would have to stay overnight, and so the passengers would be treated to a night in a hotel room and sometime this cabaret, the tropicana and people almost looked forward to -- for a very brief period of time the hijackings, "time" magazine published an amazing relic that everyone should google and read. what to do when the hijacker comes, a tongue in cheek travel guide to havana based on being

on hijacked plane. so, this -- so torry whereas flying in this other a out of jfk and the got to the airports and was told that she, the flight she was supposed to be on, she was width -- the shuttle bus as an hour late and she -- while she was in the air the pilot called her into the cockpit and said you were supposed to be on flight 21le, right? and she said, yes. and he said, lucky you, you weren't on it. we just heard it's just been heading to havana, and they said -- she said i wish i'd been on it because she always wanted to go to cuba. so, not everyone -- pretty soon the hijackings took a turn. they did become much more dangerous, and then no one

looked forward to them anymore. >> at what point did stewardesses become flight attendants? >> the '70s, early 780s. once it was no longer stewards and stewardesses they sought a more gender neutral term. >> okay. we have a question from karen. do you describe the women's personal lives outside of when they were flying? how they live or how they spend time during layovers? >> definitely. yeah. one of the things i found so interesting was the way that the women behaved so differently. they really wanted to do different things on the ground in these different places. so, for example, one of the women in the book really -- it's a very social creature. even to this day she has incredible network of friends. she is incredibly social.

so she would go to -- on guam, for example, she would go to the officers club for dinner, and she would play card games august night and go dancing and she loved crew parties. so that -- her experience of these different places was much more social. she was a tourist but with other people she would go places always in a group. not always but most of the time. and then another woman, also named karen, was -- she was much more of a -- she real use liked to do things by herself. she loved just walking around the different cities she complained so she had these routines she would follow in each city. and because she wanted to be a writer she would have her note pad with her and take notes. take herself out to lunch or dinner and be writing the whole time and taking notes and

reading books and her experience of the places is much more independent. they're both incredibly independent women so that's the wrong terminology but she was by herself. they really explored different cities in different ways. the book also does talk about the lives they lived around their flights. one thing that realin trying me was what was it like to be a woman whose job kept you away from home for so -- so much of the year, how did that shift or change or condition your percentage relationships back home -- personal relationships back home with family and others? so, it does include that as well. >> any plans for this to become a tv series or anything in the world? >> yeah. i'm starting to talk to people

about that. i hope so. it would be amazing. >> this is a fantastic book. i just want to remind everyone that is watching you can order it by just pressing the green button and we'll ship it out to you. if you're in miami you want to come by a one of our stores, we're carrying it as well. and then i have kristina, let are her know, please tell julia she is one of our favorite researchers. we brought her chocolates on top of being delightful in every way. so i think that is it for questions. if you'd like to say a few -- do like another reading or just wrap things up a little bit. that would be great. >> sure. yeah. i -- so, let me see. i'm going to -- i'm not sure

what to read. iago. >> i love the writing. >> thank you. it was really fun to be reading and researching about -- especially feminism and the way the fem feminist movement was move through and watching the changes overleather a, change these women's lives. it was a feedback loop. that the women's lives were changing even as they were changing -- they were propelling the changes in the broader public if that makes sense. they were choosing to be much more independent and to marry at later ages, and then i was looking at dish would look at the statistics for marriage and see they were part of a much broader, much wider -- a bigger

phenomenon that than they realized and they were making the changes happen. so that's what i found incredible. >> did the women have to retire at a certain age or was this a long-term career for a lot of them? what did they go on to do. >> a great question. i'm so glad you asked that. that is necessary for wrapping up this topic. i have to get to that before signing off. yeah, so, basically, this cohort of women who worked for the airlines in this era are the reason that it changed from being a really two-year stint in the airlines to a profession, job that women and men could hold for as long as they wanted to. what happened was that at the beginning in the '60s, the book's time period in the '60s, the rule was that you had to retire upon getting married or turning either 32 or

35 on the different airlines. pan-am didn't often anecdote include i heard they did not often use that option. didn't really opt to fire the women who turned 35 as long as the women continued performing their job well and looked good, they could keep working. even the phrase should reveal the truly sexist nature of that rule. the women were asked to stay young. they were required to stay young, both to keep appealing to the male passengers and also because it was cheaper. they didn't have dependents for their health insurance costs were low. they were single and young. three -there are the weren't necessarily speaking up for themselves or acting out on their rights. acting upon what they should -- what they really deserved. so, that's why the airlines wanted them to be young.

the women wanted to keep their job. they didn't necessarily have a problem with a certain level of -- it wasn't that they had an issue with the sexism or the object-ification that this entailed. that was not necessary even though some of them did that is not necessarily what the lawsuits were about. the lawsuits -- so interesting -- the lawsuits were about women not wanting to quit. just wanted to keep doing their job, keep flying, and so they took the airlines to court to dismantle to the age ceilings, and dismantle their regulation that had to quit if they got married, and eventually dismantled the regulation that stated they couldn't be pregnant. couldn't have children. also -- the assumption was you only get pregnant if you're married, so by not allowing women to get married they thought they were keeping women from getting pregnant also,

which is clearly not the case. but they soon -- if they were -- they've dismantled the regulation against marriage they also had to be allowed to have children, so this -- one by one these regulations were attacked and fell, and so that -- those lawsuits set the labor law precedent for a lot of the women's rights, women's employment law that followed it in the laterren 70s but to the women i profiled it american they could keep flying and meant they -- the job changed from being a two-year stint that women pursued for a little bit before settling down, to really -- a profession. >> that's very interesting when

you spoke about they're anticipating diplomacy or style of diplomacy, thaw they were cultural diplomats. >> they really were. so, basically -- because pan-am was this international airline that was really enter twined with the u.s. government, pan-am flew -- pan national was very involved with -- in world war to and air lifted ore owe fans the her tan war and flew soldiers to vietnam in the vietnam war. so, in part because of that and then in part just because over flight routes its -- as an international airline, it was -- and as somewhat would argue the premiere international airline of the era, that the passengers, the clientele was so veried -- speaking of the archives -- the

manuals in miami are absolutely amazing. they're incredible to look at. in part because they cover such a wide range of information. the women were taught in training to -- how to for example, the manual have representations of all the practice term organizations pins, the women were taught to look for mason pins, and if there are two two people on board wearing the same pin they were told to introduce them in flight. and they were taught to recognize -- taught the different culinary traditions of the different places they were flying to, and how they should be serving people differently on different flights. so, they were all of these -- the common thread in that section of the training really

was diplomacy and they were told they -- diplomats diplomats and representing the united states in the air and needed to behave has such, and they were expected to -- what we would call -- they were also told how to calm passengers down who were anxious at flying because flying was new. relatively new technology. new certainly for huge amounts of the public. so, they were told how to -- what is the best psychologists say that these are the best subjects to discuss when someone is nervous and this is how you should calm someone down. here's what -- the signs of anxiety to look for and also told -- they were taught the physics of flight because if people asked they wanted to the stewardesses to know how to respond. so, these training manual run

the gamut and then how to slice a rack of lamb and how to -- what ingredients to put into a high ball in what order. how to serve things. so it -- this -- >> had to be very smart. >> yes. had to think on their feet. >> well, this is so wonderful. thank you so much for sharing this stories. especially now when we all longing to travel. >> yes. >> i think it's really whet the appetites of all of us further. >> i hope though research took know interesting plays. >> how long did you work on the book. >> six years. >> may i ask what are your hopes for the book? >> so really it's a -- that's great question. i hope that it reshapes how people think of the job

honestly. really hope that on a more widespread level that the women can find their place in their really dignified and important history and the way they actually were. they were the job they were doing was dignified and important, and i think that it really -- i do believe that it paved the way for younger women travelers when they started flying in the early '60s it was bearingly acceptable for women to be traveling on their own, and ten years later it was much more common to see groups of young women in foreign countries, and i think this is because of them. >> wonderful. well, again, thank you. thank you for joining us in our little virtual book shop. and we'll get to see you in person at some point. >> i hope so too.

>> the next time you're in miami hopefully. >> absolutely. >> and just reminder to everyone that you can order the book at books and books and we wouldlift if you would, and again, thank you for watching from everywhere. stay safe. and fly safe. >> yes. >> thank you so much julia. >> thank you. >> next, on booktv, criminal profiler pat brown and her son, differ, discuss race in america. then joe want samuel gold bloom thought odden poverty in america

and later civil war historian brad leavine row count otherwise life of thaddeus stevenses. find more schedule information at booktv.org or consult your program guide. , high pat and dave brown's thoughts on race in america. >> hi, everybody. welcome back to the joe mob lowe show. our life callin interview of awe for offered black and white. mother and son duo, pat is an acclaimed criminal profiler and heir son dave is a business owner and they were unclosets and unashamed conservative. you're going do e joy this interview. >> holiday its go. >> hey, at and dave. how are you guys. >> good do be here. >> awesome. so, we are here