In light of the new film I’m So Excited – which makes use of the gay flight attendant trope – Forrest Wickman provides a history of the profession and its relation to gender roles:
When commercial flight first started, the job of the flight attendant was thought to be appropriate only for (presumably straight) men. As Phil Tiemeyer points out in his book Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants, a new book which proved an invaluable resource for this post, the first flight attendants, in the late 1920s and 1930s, were actually men, and were expected to be traditionally masculine. Since aviation had been associated primarily with war and engineering, it had been considered a man’s industry, and the cabin crew, too, was expected to fit that role.
Because of this, early uniforms for crew and pilots were also often military-inspired, featuring stripes, pilot wings, and caps (some of these elements persist in uniforms today). The work was also often physically demanding, with the crew being asked to help haul luggage and row the passengers into shore from seaplanes. The first flight attendant for Pan Am was a man, Amaury Sanchez, and before the airline advertised stewardesses in miniskirts it advertised itself, in 1933, with “Rodney, the smiling steward.”
However, the responsibilities of the stewards in flight were often more stereotypically feminine—a steward might, for example, lend a hand in changing a diaper—and it was only a few years before it began to be seen as a woman’s job. The woman who broke down the cabin doors was Ellen Church, the first female flight attendant, who had been trained as a pilot but who only found work with Boeing Air Transport (the predecessor to United Airlines) as a stewardess. She was able to convince Boeing to hire her in part because she was also a registered nurse, and soon other airlines also saw nurses as ideal candidates, as long as they were also young, unmarried, and in possession of a dainty figure.
The Dish 