From a Wall Street Journal review by Barbara Spindel of the book by Neil McShane Wulfhart headlined “The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet”:

Flight attendants in the 1960s were young, thin, single women. But did they have to be in order to do the job? When stewardesses, as they were then called, began appealing to the newly created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to challenge the airlines’ discriminatory hiring practices, the airlines fought back….They defended their right to hire only women and to fire them if they gained weight, married, got pregnant or entered their 30s, arguing that being a young, thin, single woman was, in fact, a “bona fide occupational qualification” for the position.