Come Fly the World Book Review

When I started reading Julia Cooke's Come Fly the World, I admit I had preconceived notions of what this nonfiction book would be about. The subtitle is "The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am". So I assumed it would be about the man-made requirements the women had to meet in order to become stewardesses and what it meant for them to be flying all around the world.

What I didn't realize was that I'd learn so much more about what these women were required to do, and what they did to aid U.S. troops, refugees, and their fellow women.

The book mainly focuses on the Pan Am airline because that was an exclusively international airline, so the women who applied for jobs were seeking a way to see the world. These were adventurous women by nature, women who didn't necessarily want to enter into marriage and motherhood right away. So being a stewardess gave them a way to explore and do so independently. 

However, there was a Catch-22 in that in order to keep their jobs, the women had to meet physical requirements (height, weight, overall look) and wear outfits designed to be pleasing to the mostly male clientele. They were treated as sex objects, but they also knew how to evacuate a plane in an emergency.

There's a quote toward the end of the book that really summed up everything I was thinking about it: 

It's too much effort to address the disconnect between the perception of the job as all glamour and access amid the optimistic globalism of the 1960s and its actual context, which also entailed objectification and misunderstanding, war and danger - the dark side of that globalist vision.

March is Women's History Month, and I urge you to consider reading this book and learning more about this overlooked group of women.

Come Fly the World is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and is on bookstore shelves today. I received a free e-ARC in exchange for this review.