Ruth Nichols, Sky Girl, and the Aerial Frontier

Ruth Rowland Nichols (1901–1960), one of the most prominent of Amelia Earhart’s flying contemporaries, knew the world of 1930s aviation at least as well as Earhart and wrote almost as extensively about it. She is today largely forgotten, overshadowed by Earhart’s fame; however, she leaves behind substantial evidence of her deep-seated engagement with American aviation of the Golden Age and her vigorous support for the greater involvement of women in professional aviation. Even more substantial, though, is the degree to which she, Eastern-reared, Eastern-educated, and writing in the depths of the Great Depression, enthusiastically spoke out for the myth of the American frontier. In her efforts at fiction, the power of frontier myth and the mythic aura of Golden Age aviation meld into a cohesive whole, creating a collaborative vision of life that is distinctively “American” yet unequivocally progressive.

Bookended by Charles A. Lindbergh’s dramatic flight of 1927 and the onset of World War II in 1939, the Golden Age, roughly the years between 1925 and 1940, was a time when aviation seemed new, exhilarating, and accessible to all. American readers of the 1930s, Nichols’s intended audience, considered flight a topic of extraordinary popular interest, with the transatlantic flights of Lindbergh and Earhart in 1927 and 1928, respectively, seeming epic achievements that confirmed the magic of the age. Coming as they did from the “West” of the American imagination (Lindbergh grew up in Minnesota, Earhart in Kansas), the two radiated a distinctive Americanness that made them the ranking celebrities of the time. Airplanes themselves, machines still new and novel to the general public, were objects of fascination in their own right, while the rapidly developing technology of flight seemed to augur an unstoppable national progress that might well extend even to expansion of the human psyche. Aviation promised a glowing future, and each new advance only confirmed the nation’s “unprecedented public interest in American aviation” (Gwynn-Jones 140).

Nichols’s several nonfiction writings about aviation are detailed and concrete, striving to heighten public awareness of aviation, to raise money for her own record-setting ventures, and to speak out for women in the profession. “Aviation for You and for Me,” for example, a 1929 article in the Ladies’ Home Journal, praises “the tremendous work that is right now going on in the aviation industry” and, asking “Why are people still afraid to fly?” goes on to detail the virtues and pleasures of civil and commercial aviation. “Behind the Ballyhoo,” published in 1932 in the American Magazine, traces how record-setting flights pay off for aviation in general, spells out the expenses involved in such flights, and maintains “that acceptance of the air as a commonplace highway has arrived.” A still later article, “You Must Fly,” appearing in the Pictorial Review in 1933, portrays “sport flying as a safe, an exhilarating, and convenient mode of travel” as accessible to women as to men (Nichols, “Aviation for You and Me,” 9; Nichols, “Behind the Ballyhoo,” 43; Nichols, “You Must Fly,” 48).

Her fiction, however, is another matter. In a 1933 interview, Earhart, speaking of women pilots as portrayed in film and popular fiction, observed that “the real romance of aviation is to be found—in the tale of its heroic beginnings and its growth and expansion—the way it has spread wings over America and dotted the country with airports and beacons.” She went on to remark that “the more progressive thing would be legitimately to feature women” in such tales, using them to present a realistic portrayal of women’s contributions to aviation. Nichols heard the call, in 1933 beginning a novel she titled Sky Girl, soliciting an introduction from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and seeking publication by the Putnam firm. The unfinished manuscript and a detailed synopsis for its completion are held in the Ruth Nichols Collection of the International Women’s Air and Space Museum in Cleveland, Ohio (Franklin 30–31; Nichols to Clarence Brown).

As an artifact growing directly from the world of the professional woman flier of the 1930s, Nichols’s...