From Birdwomen to Skygirls: American Girls' Aviation Stories

2. Birdwomen Take to the Air: 1905-1915

C H A P T E R 2 Birdwomen Take to the Air: 1905 -1915
T he summer of 1911 found Margaret Burnham and Edith Van Dyne testing the winds of flying fiction for girls. Their pioneering books, The Girl Aviators and the Phantom Airship and The Flying Girl, respectively, both published in September 1911, were partly opportunistic and commercial, partly idealistic and forward-looking. By the time the two put pen to paper, the United States was in a frenzy of aeronautical enthusiasm . Burnham’s and Van Dyne’s stories were intended to capitalize not only upon that enthusiasm, but also upon the burgeoning popularity of two aviation series written for boys: H.L. Sayler’s “Airship Boys” books (1909-1913; eight titles) and Ashton B. Lamar’s “Aeroplane Boys” tales (1910-1913; seven titles). These two series created the aviation genre in the United States and established a format for similar works that continued until the advent of the First World War. Burnham and Van Dyne proposed to do for girls what Sayler and “Lamar” (Sayler writing under a pseudonym) were doing for boys—preach the gospel of aviation. They had, however, other intentions as well. The two recognized the social and educational limitations placed upon young women in the 1910-1913 period, yet they also saw evidence that attitudes were changing. In their books, they suggest that young women, given the opportunity, could acquit themselves admirably in fields not normally associated with female interests. Their accounts of teenaged girls’ taking to the air, the first “pure” aviation stories written for girls, capture the spirit of the times, tacitly speaking out in support of the progressively minded woman and demonstrating that the air held as much promise for women as for men. Called the fin de siècle in Europe and England and the Progressive Era in the United States, the thirty years from 1890 to 1920 were marked by sweeping changes in public attitudes toward government, social theory, and religion. Among the changes in the United States was an increase in public activism. Their concerns manifested in such organizations as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (1873), New York’s National Consumers’ League (1891), Chicago’s Municipal Voters’ League (1895), and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1904), citizens both male and female set themselves the mission of correcting abuses in politics , the workplace, and the home. Not the least of their efforts was an intensifying of the push for women’s suffrage and an expansion of women’s rights, leading at last to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920.1 Another was an explosion of progress in technology and the public’s consciousness of that technology. Social activism and the emergence of a new sense of womanhood combined with the coming of the automobile , the wireless, the cinema, and the airplane to give the era a pervasive sense of vital, progressive change, a sense that a truly modern United States was just around the corner.2 Yet two still larger changes were to come that would shape the course of American society and aviation. One was the growing feminine interest in airplane and aviation technology. American national interest in the airplane, spurred by well-publicized achievements emanating from England and France, came to life in 1908, when Orville and Wilbur Wright published their first extensive account of their flights in The Century Magazine. Perhaps the leading upper-middle-brow magazine of its  From Birdwomen to Skygirls time, The Century was an ideal forum for the Wrights’ revelation, presenting their achievements to the educated upper-middle class of the United States. This was followed by even greater excitement when motorcycle champion and engine-designer Glenn H. Curtiss took part in the world’s first international aviation competition, the Grand Semaine de l’Aviation de la Champagne, held in Rheims, France, in August 1909. There, before an audience totaling more than a half-million onlookers, Curtiss captured the Gordon Bennett International Trophy, besting French favorite Louis Blériot in a twenty-kilometer race against time, and the Prix de la Vitesse, achieving a speed of 47.73 miles per hour along a thirty-kilometer course. He returned home a celebrity, and the American public discovered the airplane.3 The financial success and the accompanying publicity of the Rheims competition were not lost on American promoters. Recognizing a way to feed...