Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922–1937 (review)

This is the best and most important book on gender and aviation to be written yet. We already have three excellent works exploring aspects of the U.S. experience (Joe Corn’s The Winged Gospel [1983]; Susan Ware’s Still Missing [1993]; and Margaret Weitekamp’s Right Stuff, Wrong Sex [2004]), but Liz Millward’s pathbreaking book is the first to study what was happening elsewhere. Not surprisingly, the analysis of “elsewhere” (in this case, the British Empire with special emphasis on England and New Zealand) yields critical insights that promise to reshape key aspects of our overall understanding of gender, technology, and culture.

Millward’s focus is on the invention of airspace, which she defines as “the result of productive activity undertaken by women and men flying for a combination of ideological, personal, and commercial motives” (p. 10). The Greeks may have believed the air was “female” but, right after World War I, the commonly held British notion was that airspace, like aviation, should be exclusively masculine. The story is complicated, not least because there is not just one type of airspace. Millward introduces five distinct forms: private, commercial, imperial, national, and the pilot’s body.

To begin, Millward focuses on the phenomenon of “airmindedness” that emerged globally following World War I. To have airspace, she points out, you have to have people flying about. Readers familiar with American accounts of this period will recognize the same frenzy of air shows, races, and record-setting flights that kept aviation in the forefront of postwar political, economic, and cultural developments. The British and European experience is not identical to the U.S. experience, as the harsh realities of strategic bombing, the alacrity with which fascist and communist movements embraced aviation, and the practical exigencies of empire and the small size of most nations meant that airmindedness needed to quell far deeper cultural anxieties. Thus, the “gendering” of airspace follows a different track.

Millward next looks at each of the five forms of airspace, beginning with private airspace. Right from the start, English women (but not women in New Zealand) undertook flying lessons at government-subsidized flying clubs. There was some debate about this, but a general sense that women pilots were making a positive contribution to airmindedness overcame the dissenting voices. Further, class was a factor because it proved politically difficult to place restrictions on women who were members of Britain’s privileged elite. From the start, then, private airspace was the most thoroughly integrated one.

It was when women wanted to earn commercial licenses that opposition became pronounced, and in 1924 the International Commission on Air Navigation passed a motion making women ineligible for “B” or commercial licenses. Millward tracks preoccupations with menstruation, pregnancy, race, and superstition that gave rise to this restriction. However, as the campaign for woman suffrage gained success in England (New Zealand had become the first nation to grant women the right to vote, in 1893), and as women began making extraordinary long-distance flights between the antipodes of the British Empire, the logic that biology was destiny was greatly weakened.

In the chapter on imperial airspace, Millward’s research will be of special interest to aviation historians, for here she discusses the diplomatic challenges created by the publicity-hungry long-distance-record fliers. For example, criticism of Amy Johnson’s solo flights to Australia and South Africa has been often dismissed as simple gender bias. Millward digs deeper and discovers that there was also criticism of male fliers who undertook such challenges. It is a deeply original analysis.

In her final two chapters dealing with national airspace and the pilot’s body, Millward gives special attention to New Zealander Jean Batten. Batten’s record flights between New Zealand, England, and Australia garnered her extraordinary fame in her home country and contributed mightily to the definition of New Zealand’s national airspace. Her physical attractiveness also created considerable public discourse about her sexuality. The fact that she was...