A Scholarly Tribute to Bettina Bradbury, Feminist Historian of the Family

I came to Canada from England in 1995 to pursue an ma and then a PhD in Women’s Studies. Bettina supervised both my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation. The first compared discourses about women and aviation in Canada and the USA before 1920, and the second dealt with women in imperial airspace from 1922 to 1937, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between England and New Zealand. During my ma I wrote a paper on the pilot Katherine Stinson for Bettina for a graduate course in Women’s Studies that she was team teaching. Although aviation history is quite far from Bettina’s own areas of expertise, she was willing to take me on for the thesis. I think that she was up for the challenge in part because her own scholarship has been part of large shifts in the way history is done with its linguistic and spatial turns and because in her own research on family, widows, law, and empire she is constantly willing to ask new questions and to ask questions in different ways.

In the process of writing the paper on Stinson, Bettina pushed me to undertake two tasks. First, she wanted me to find newspaper accounts about Stinson in 1917 and 1918, so I had to learn to use microfilm. I spent hours after classes in the Scott Library at York University making my head swim as I toiled through the Manitoba Free Press, the Calgary Daily Herald, and The Globe. The second task she set me was to find out what happened to Stinson in the end: obviously, the newspaper accounts could not tell me. The only major book on the Stinson family, by John Underwood, was in the great tradition of aviation history. It focused on the family’s glorious youthful years because part of the mythology of flying is to be young, as Bernhardt Rieger demonstrates so well in his work.¹ So I had to learn how to trace a person once their early fame had evaporated. Bettina’s prodding, over the amount of detail that I needed to know in order to make any claims, completely changed my intellectual life. In the end, she showed me that my argument would begin to emerge from the welter of detail. Up until then my exposure to history had been reading textbooks for the history unit in my American Studies undergraduate degree. I therefore imagined that in order to write about women pilots (not something that any serious scholar was doing at that time) I would read histories of aviation (which were mostly histories of particular aircraft types or organizational or military histories) and try to add women in. I also thought I should note what their class status was and whether they were lesbians or Black women. And then I should stir.

Fortunately, Bettina had a different set of expectations, and these clearly came out of her own work. She encouraged me to understand that my job was not to just follow what previous scholars had said about aviation, as if their interpretations were sufficient or accurate; it was to find out what aviators themselves said about aviation, in context. This meant I had to go into archives. In explaining this to me, Bettina pointed out two perspectives on working in archives that, on the one hand, were so obvious that I should not have needed to have my attention drawn to them, and, on the other hand, radically altered my viewpoint. After all, I came out of a British education system which emphasized that the English brought civilization to all the “great races” of the world, and I had to unlearn those ideas and my own assumption that I automatically knew what was important. I had to decentre myself. The first perspective that Bettina presented was that people in the past were just as complex and led just as complicated lives as people do today. What she was saying, in effect, was do not be seduced by the myth of progress, or, in Foucauldian terms, always interrogate the “repressive...