Desirable Dress: Rosies, Sky Girls, and the Politics of Appearance

Abstract

Desirable dress on the job, whether pants, sweaters, or mini-skirted uniforms, contains symbolic meaning, but whose sexual subjectivity it expresses is not always clear. Appearance may be a proxy for other forms of contestation or just be a conveyer of pleasure that makes work just a little more humane. This essay rethinks two cases where issues of self-fashioning, appearance, sexuality, employer strictures, and state policy intertwined: the shop floors of the Second World War and the flight cabins of postwar airlines: the first, male dominated manufacturing in which women labored “for the duration”; the second, a prototypical female service industry in which fierce competition led to selling sexual allure along with comfort and safety. However mediated, voices of wage-earning women in both the 1940s and 1960s announced new expectations of womanhood, beauty, and sexual expressiveness. But while management attempted to suppress women's bodies in the shipyards and other wartime workplaces, by the 1960s airlines promoted the body of the flight attendant. In both examples, state mediation—through sources available as well as actual public policies—complicates our attempt to unravel pleasure and constraint in dressing, grooming, and sexual presence on the job. Whether or not dress requirements disciplined employee bodies, served as a guarantee of efficiency or a check against accidents and the expense of worker compensation, or opened new possibilities for sexual or gendered identities was hardly predetermined. Employers could demand slacks, women could wear them, but what dress was desirable varied with the beholder.