Taking Flight: Career as Chronotope in the Professional Scrapbook of Stewardess Helen Jacobson Richardson, 1939-1989

This article contributes to conversations among feminist rhetoricians about the rhetoricity of work by investigating the affordances of “career” as a chronotope that both disrupts and reinforces sexist and racist hierarchies. A case study, this article focuses on a scrapbook assembled by Helen Jacobson Richardson, one of the first stewardesses hired by Northwest Airlines in 1939. Like most early stewardesses, Richardson’s employment ended when she married in 1942. This essay argues Richardson’s uptake of the career chronotope invested her work life with greater dignity and contravened assumptions about the inconsequential nature of women’s workforce participation in the mid-twentieth century.