‘A Moment of Pleasant Indecision’
August 11, 2025 at 10:24PMFor the The New York Review of Books, Lora Kelley visits “Dining in Transit” at the New York Historical museum, an exhibit that highlights the fancy food that companies used to attract ship and train passengers before the advent of air travel, as well as the emotional and physical labor that went into serving those aboard.
About two years ago, Nazionale told me, as preparations for the show were underway, someone happened to reach out to the New York Historical to share that her mother, Shirley Kubik, had been an air hostess with TWA and that she had some items to donate. The objects on display from her time with the airline become a case study for the labor the show foregrounds. In addition to her air hostess hat, one of Kubik’s employee evaluations is on display: on September 3, 1957, a few months into her job, she flew on a Martin 202 to Saint Louis. The copilot evaluated her performance at duties such as giving “deplaning passengers the impression that [she] really enjoyed having them aboard.” (She got a “Yes.”) So thoroughly were flight attendants expected to make passengers feel liked and appreciated that it was to describe their jobs in particular that the sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/11/a-moment-of-pleasant-indecision/
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