Women in British Imperial Airspace: 1922-1937 9780773560512

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WO M E N I N B R I T I S H I M P E R I A L A I R S PAC E , 19 2 2 – 19 37

WOM E N I N B RITI S H I M PE RIAL AIRS PACE , 19 2 2 –1937

L I Z M I L LWA R D

McGILL- QU EE N ’ S U NIVERS IT Y PRES S MONTRE AL & KINGSTON | LONDON | ITHAC A

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2007

isbn 978-0-7735-3337-0 Legal deposit second quarter 2007 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp ) for our publishing activities. I have made every effort to identify, credit appropriately, and obtain publication rights from copyright holders of illustrations, scrapbooks, and letters in this book. Notice of any errors or omissions in this regard will be gratefully received and correction made in any subsequent editions.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Millward, Liz, 1966– Women in British imperial airspace, 1922–1937 / Liz Millward. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3337-0 1. Women in aeronautics – Great Britain – History. 2. Women in aeronautics – New Zealand – History. 3. Women air pilots – Great Britain – History. 4. Women air pilots – New Zealand – History. 5. Aeronautics – Great Britain – History. 6. Aeronautics – New Zealand – History. I. Title.

tl 526.g 7m 54 2008

629.13082’09171241

c 2007-905018-2

Set in 11.5/14 Perpetua with Gill Sans Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

for

BETTINA

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1 The Very Idea of Airspace 17 2 Private Airspace: Women and Light Aeroplane Clubs 30 3 The (In)competency of Commercial Women Pilots: The “B” Licence Ban 53

CONTENTS

4 The Empire Takes Flight 82 5 The Godwit Flies Home 117 6 Challenging Heteronormativity: The Pilot’s Body as Breadwinning Commodity 151 Conclusion 179 Notes 185 Bibliography 227 Index 245

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my immense appreciation for Bettina Bradbury’s support, enthusiasm, and thoughtful questions. Without her, I would never have ventured to New Zealand or considered how airspace might have differed between the Antipodes. Linda Peake provided much practical assistance and introduced me to the world of feminist geography. Wenona Giles encouraged me to think hard about nationalism. Thank you. This book has also benefited from the generous comments of three anonymous readers for McGill-Queen’s University Press. I have incurred many far-flung debts. At York University in Toronto I would like to thank the Women’s History Reading Group and Kathryn McPherson for comments on earlier versions of this book. Thanks also to the staff in the Cartographic Office, Department of Geography – to Carol Randall for drawing the maps and to Carolyn King for preparing them for publication. In New Zealand I would like to thank Rosie White and Sue Cooper for letting me stay with them, driving me around Auckland, putting me in touch with the staff at the Auckland War Memorial Museum Library, and taking me to see Jean Batten’s kahu kiwi in the cloak store. I would also like

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

to thank Dr Ian Prior, the late Elespie Prior, and Matt Henry for wonderful conversations, hospitality, and much assistance and Pam Collings for tracking down and sending me a copy of the Ministry of Transport’s “Review of Policy on Assistance to Aero Clubs.” I very much appreciated the assistance of the staff at the Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand Parliamentary Library, the Leo Walsh Memorial Library at the Museum of Transport and Technology in Auckland, and the Auckland War Memorial Museum Library as well as the staff at National Archives of New Zealand, particularly for finding the files on Jean Batten on the third attempt. In England I would like to thank Peter Elliot and the staff of Department of Research and Information Services (dor is ) at r af Hendon, the staff at the Public Record Office at Kew and the British Library at Colindale, and my family in Suffolk and Lincolnshire. Over the years since I started working on this book, Katherine McKittrick has challenged me with her sparkling intellectual conversation and continuous encouragement. Sarah Paquin has sustained me and kept me laughing; she deserves my extraordinary gratitude for typing every single change to the original manuscript while I sat beside her nursing a broken wrist. Many thanks to Jonathan Crago, Joan McGilvray, and Robert Lewis at McGill-Queen’s University Press for all their hard work. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Ontario Graduate Scholarships, the Willi Fels Memorial Trust in Wellington, York University, and the University of Manitoba. Material from files on aeroplane clubs and Jean Batten in New Zealand reproduced with permission of Archives New Zealand. Excerpts from letters by Jean Batten and Charles Ulm reproduced with permission of Auckland War Memorial Museum. Excerpts from letters by Alan Cobham at Cobham Archives and r af Hendon reproduced with permission of Cobham plc. Correspondence from Daily Mail to Amy Johnson reproduced with permission of the Daily Mail. Excerpts from letters by Amy Johnson reproduced with permission of her neices. Material from scrapbook of Rito McKinnon and Aero-gram reproduced wtih permission of the Alexander

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Turnbull Library. Cartoon by Sir Gordon Mininnick reproduced with permission of the New Zealand Herald. Excerpts from C.C. Wakefield & Co. reports and correspondence reproduced with permission of the Castrol Archive.

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WO M E N I N B R I T I S H I M P E R I A L A I R S PAC E , 19 2 2 – 19 37

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INTRODUCTION

In 1936, after the New Zealand pilot Jean Batten had become the first person to fly direct from England to New Zealand, a London newspaper leader remarked that “Miss Batten must be a most extraordinary young woman. Is she human or superhuman? Are her nerves made of steel or reinforced concrete? The dream of physical isolation for nations will become more than ever a dream if she and others like her continue in this vein. Perhaps it is time we ceased squabbling about sex equality.”¹ These were crucial questions that in turn raised others. Were modern women more machines than mortals? Why did Batten’s flight, and others like it, threaten dreams of national isolation, and why did it matter that they did? What were the “squabbles over sex equality,” and why did these extend into airspace? Did her resounding success inspire other women to reconsider their gendered aspirations? The years from 1922 to 1937 delimit the key period of interwar development of gendered airspace within the British Empire. Batten’s recordbreaking flight came at the tail end of this period. Airspace had opened to occupation as soon as the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon ascended into the skies over French soil in 1783. By the 1910s, after the development of the

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aeroplane in the 1900s, it was a busy space in which men and women jostled for access to the best machines and the best practices for staying aloft. The First World War irreparably bifurcated this space. Flying, the process of occupying the space, was defined as being for military or civilian purposes, and all civilian flights were grounded for the duration in most combatant nations. British authorities did not permit women to fly in military capacities, and four years of European warfare provided men pilots with numerical and experiential dominance in the sky. The new military space had become, de facto, a masculine-defined and male-dominated territory, and after the Armistice civilian airspace was in danger of being colonized too. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 the International Commission on Air Navigation (ican ) was formed. It drew up regulations governing airspace, licences, registration, and other controlling elements of international aviation. In 1922 its members began to deliberate on the place of women in commercial airspace. Fifteen years later, in 1937, Jean Batten completed the last of her long-distance record-breaking flights, from Australia to England, and was acclaimed as “the girl who has beaten all the men.”² These two dates were crucial moments in the gendering of British imperial airspace. The first began the process of determining whose bodies should occupy which forms of airspace, and the second ended the era of long-distance record-breaking British imperial flights by women. Over this fifteen-year period the civil aviation industry underwent dramatic changes. Aeroplanes developed from small, sometimes unreliable, open-cockpit wood, wire, and canvas biplanes with tiny payload capacity that cruised at about 90 mph into huge, closed-cabin, streamlined, fouror twin-engined monoplanes with all-metal smooth skins, large payload capacity, and cruising speeds of up to 200 mph.³ Airline companies changed from being small, local, underfunded, and owner-operated to vast corporations, which provided regular scheduled national and international services, enjoyed major state subsidies, particularly for carriage of airmail, and oversaw huge infrastructural arrangements with airport authorities, hotels, oil and petrol suppliers, aeroplane manufacturers, pilots, and engineers. These rapid and disconcerting changes in the aviation industry were mirrored by ongoing conflicts over new social relations in other spheres of life.

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The interwar period was a window of possibility for many young white women in the British Empire. The First World War had undermined powerful old certainties. Women who were determined to learn the lessons of the past turned to internationalism, pacifism, nationalism, and fascism as they looked for ways to control the future. Some eschewed marriage because of its customary restrictions, while others took several male lovers or one companionate husband and experimented with the birth control information circulated by Marie Stopes. Some embraced the idea of women’s maternal power and turned childrearing into a science that required governmental support. Some embraced each other, the relatively new terminology for their desires, and the social acceptability of “surplus” women setting up home together. Others recoiled in horror from the sordid connotations placed on their love for other women. Women formed groups, committees, and professional associations and published magazines. They flexed their consumer muscles, voted, and worked. Above them all arched the deep blue temptation of the sky, filled with the ever-multiplying drone of aero engines. Civilian airspace was still in formation, its contours unknown, its possibilities apparently limitless. Flying was considered dangerous, glamorous, and retained some of its prewar aura of magic. If women in the British Empire building on feminist successes wished to further destabilize gender and construct new social relations, one logical place to enter was this nebulous airspace. As Stella Wolfe Murray, British journalist and aviation proselytizer, argued: newly made women voters should also realise that they have the right to impress upon their representatives in the House of Commons that they will not suffer the power of flight, achieved after centuries of effort, to continue to be degraded into a weapon for the bombing of innocent babes. And after woman has flown from country to country, from continent to continent, not singly, but in battalions, and after woman has seen for herself the petty little barricades that man has put up; the tariff and other walls with which he has hedged himself about; his fortifications that are so futile a defence from air

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attack; she will realize that she should not have let him have a free hand in aviation all these past twenty-five years.⁴ This book is about the struggles of women pilots to produce, define, and gain access to civilian airspace. It is also about how their struggles contributed to and were constrained by the division of airspace into five complex and overlapping forms: the private, the commercial, the imperial, the national, and the body of the pilot herself, each of which contained particular relations of gender, class, race, sexuality, nationalism, and imperialism. These five forms of airspace were new types of space, and the five did not develop evenly throughout the British Empire. During the interwar period the Empire was at its most bloated. In 1931 it covered about a quarter of the globe and contained approximately a quarter of the world’s population.⁵ A study of this length cannot be comprehensive, so although women pilots flew within or across most regions of this unwieldy empire, this book concentrates on just two geographical locations: England and New Zealand, or “Home” and the settler society farthest from the seat of the empire. Settler societies were part of imperial “circuits of power [that were] vastly more complicated both globally and in specific locations than any binary division [between metropole and periphery] allows.”⁶ Forms of gender inequality and other social relations of power changed as each type of society interacted with and influenced the others. Britain, for example, had far more women pilots than New Zealand – a result of the difference in population size and wealth and also of differential application of flying training subsidies. But New Zealand was not simply the poor relation, pathetically copying Britain’s lead. For example, New Zealanders boasted distinctive gender, racial, and class relations. Women there gained the vote in 1893, long before their metropolitan sisters, and their status affected British suffragists’ demands.⁷ New Zealand offers a way to consider how gender relations, understandings of modernity, class divisions, and the significance of racial relations in airspace were played out in a settler society that, to a greater extent than either Canada and Australia, for example, maintained strong economic and social ties to England even while it also developed a national culture of its own, organized, at least in part, around the effect

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of geographical distance. Located at the Antipodes, New Zealand was the uttermost point of the British Empire, the place that tied all the imperial threads back together. It was also peripheral and always in danger of being disregarded. Since flight reduced the amount of time spent in travelling between places, it altered the connotations of distance for the periphery as well as the centre. In this context New Zealanders engaged with women pilots in ways that reflected and furthered their own concerns. Comparative studies are crucial to unsettling the dominance of the centre and its claims to be representative of anything – feminism, socialism, lesbianism, nationalism, progress. They challenge the assumptions and arrogance of the powerful. They insist on alternative epistemologies and alternative geographies. Studies of single peripheral locations may present a history and set of concerns at odds with those of the centre, but comparisons highlight the interrelations of centre and periphery. The purpose of this comparative study is to contribute to what critical geographers Lawrence Berg and Robin Kearns call “decentred geography.”⁸ This is a geographical practice that attempts to develop understandings of knowledge as relational and as formed through interconnections between multiple historical contexts and geographical locations rather than being transmitted from the centre of an empire to its peripheral colonies and dominions.⁹ In common with other interdisciplinary studies such as those by Anne McClintock on gender, sexuality, race, and commodity culture in the relationship between Britain and South Africa, Katherine McKittrick on the specific geographies created by black women in Canada and the Caribbean, and Angela Woollacott on the differing forms of modernity produced by Australian women travelling to Europe and then returning to Australia,¹⁰ this study is grounded in historical research but contributes to a feminist poststructuralist understanding that both centre and periphery are constituted in relation to each other. Comparing gendered airspace in New Zealand and Britain illustrates the reciprocal creation of women’s claims to new careers, independence, self-definition, and geopolitical significance. Understanding the complexity of the linkages created through airspace dissolves any temptation to see in British imperial airspace simply the story of technological diffusion, a temptation made seductive because the British government donated war-

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surplus aeroplanes to the dominions and colonies in order to jump-start airmindedness and local aviation initiatives. Instead, the approach situates gendered airspace within a network of imperial power relations. The comparative approach also complicates the analysis of women pilots within the empire. Other than through biography, women pilots have been analyzed in three main ways in English-language studies: the role of women in “domesticating” aviation; the idea of the spectacle that women pilots present; and the concept of women pilots as exemplars of mobility. Most analyses of women pilots start from Joseph Corn’s 1983 study of the meaning of aviation for Americans, The Winged Gospel. Corn’s study analyzes the relations between aviation, industry, popular culture, and popular discourses of progress, particularly prevalent among white people in the interwar United States. He includes a chapter on the role of women pilots in “domesticating” aviation, and this is the chapter on which most subsequent analyses draw.¹¹ Corn’s thesis is that women pilots were employed by aeroplane manufacturers in order to demonstrate their machines. The rationale for assigning them this task was that prospective purchasers would think that if a woman could fly an aeroplane, it must be safe. Aviation was thus made to seem unthreatening, or “domesticated.” Both its prewar legacy as a dangerous stunt-ridden sport and its wartime function as harbinger of death through bombing were displaced as the technology was brought into civil capitalism. Corn’s argument is very convincing for the United States. The difficulty in attempting to export his thesis as an explanatory paradigm to other nations is that conditions in the United States were unusual. The US did not have state-subsidized airlines, very few of its airlines flew outside of the nation’s borders, its airmail services did not carry passengers, and it was not a signatory to the International Commission on Air Navigation. A second way that scholars have analyzed women pilots is through the notion of spectacle. Spectacle itself is a concept with multiple meanings in critical analyses. One of these is the idea of an event, or spectacle, as disruption, as the carnivalesque inversion of hegemonic social relations. The 1930 flight from England to Australia by the English pilot Amy Johnson has been interpreted using this notion of spectacle to consider how the

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flight as spectacle and Johnson’s public persona as signifier contributed to Australian discourses of nationalism and gender relations.¹² But a focus on this form of spectacle entails risks. It can isolate an event, take it too far out of the context that made it meaningful, and perceive it too simplistically as an oppositional moment that is either a successful inversion of the existing hegemonic order of power relations – be they centre-periphery, or masculine-feminine, or mobile-static – or a co-opted failure. A third way that women pilots have been analyzed is through their mobility. Any discussion of women in airspace tends easily to lead to questions of emancipation as transcendence of gender incarnated as earthy. In her study of Amelia Earhart, for example, Susan Ware presents the US woman pilot as an exemplar of postsuffrage liberal feminism, a paragon of liberated individualism.¹³ Women pilots transcended the domesticity of their gendered roles through the freedom of flight. Yet, as Mary Russo argues, the aerially inflected “image of freedom as limitless space, transcendence, individualism, and upward mobility of various kinds” should be treated with caution.¹⁴ Before flight as freedom can provide a metaphor for feminist practice, she suggests, it needs to be embodied and its assumptions about the desirability of transcendence questioned. In addition, most of these analyses of women pilots attend only to public representations of women pilots, such as books written by them and magazine articles about them. This emphasis on representation alone (with the occasional nod to women’s struggles to obtain training or employment) stalls the analysis and can lead to assumptions that the woman pilot as representation carried a cultural and political charge that was transnational, almost ahistorical.¹⁵ However, this book argues that the aviatrix, as a material being and as a cultural representation, was always context specific in terms of where she was, when she was flying, and which forms of airspace she occupied. To situate her in context and not to remain transfixed by representations alone, this study draws on a range of sources. These include novels, newspapers, magazines, and visual material such as cartoons but also archival sources such as letters, scrapbooks, government reports, and minutes of meetings. Although in a poststructuralist sense all are in the realm of representation, the archival sources deal less with the public per-

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sona of women pilots and more with the concrete concerns of controlling airspace and finances. Through this use of varied sources, the book connects discussion of broad discursive questions about representation, such as narratives of imperial adventure, with more material concerns, such as licensing requirements. To this extent, then, the book forms part of the growing feminist literature on the history of gender and transportation. This literature, which includes studies by both Georgine Clarsen and Laura Doan on women and automobiles, Lorraine Coons and Alexander Varias on steamship travel, and Barbara Schmucki on tramways,¹⁶ couples questions of mobility and gendered culture to the material constraints and possibilities of new forms of transportation. In common with these other studies, this book fleshes out the complex context in which women pilots flew. It situates their struggles in relation to tensions over nationalism, imperialism, and embodiment not as they were played out through abstract notions of modernity but as they were written into a specific space in particular ways – through permits and flying training subsidies, for example. To produce, define, and occupy these airspaces, women had to negotiate the processes through which any space is produced. Spaces are products of human activities. Airspace is the result of productive activity undertaken by women and men flying for a combination of ideological, personal, and commercial motives. It combines material space (the air, aerodromes, airways, infrastructure) with the discourses interwoven through it (of vision, power, technological prowess, gender, and youth). If one looks closely at the space, the social relations that were in place in order for it to be produced, as well as the motives and meanings attached to it, will appear.¹⁷ The idea that social relations, particularly of gender, are written into spaces is nothing new. Certain social spaces are constructed as feminized or masculinized, and certain bodies, therefore, are either in or out of place in spaces such as the home or the street.¹⁸ The struggles of particular women to gain access to particular spaces, such as middle-class English women to colonial space,¹⁹ through which they could expand or transgress the limits of their gendered, racialized, and class-bound lives are well documented. Changes in the workplace, in the home, and in leisure activities over time also opened up and closed down particular spaces for women.²⁰

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It is through the production of new spaces that new forms of social relations may become possible. As Henri Lefebvre asserts, “a revolution which does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential; indeed it has failed in that it has not changed life itself, but has merely changed ideological superstructures, institutions or political apparatuses. A social transformation, to be truly revolutionary in character, must manifest a creative capacity in its effects on daily life, on language and on space – though its impact need not occur at the same rate, or with equal force, in each of these areas.”²¹ Airspace, as a new space, created the possibility for women to change the daily conditions of their lives and ultimately to change the position of women. But this would not happen if airspace simply replicated existing (which in this context were capitalist) spacial forms. The dominant orientation of capitalist nations is toward “abstract space.”²² Abstract space is intended to reduce impediments to accumulation and to the exercise of state power. It consists of three elements: the geometric, the visual, and the phallic. The geometric element homogenizes space through reference grids, such as maps. The visual element insists that only what can be seen matters. Other forms of knowledge based on nonscopic regimes lose their power. The phallic element symbolizes male power and “masculine violence,” which is dispersed via the police and military.²³ This phallic element also naturalizes territorial conquest as a masculine activity.²⁴ The imposition of abstract space on any preexisting, nonabstract space is attempted through three processes. One is commodification, or turning spaces into “things” that can be bought and sold. The second is bureaucratization, in which the state stakes out the administrative borders of spaces and then maintains surveillance over them.²⁵ The third is “decorporealization,” in which the longstanding, tight relationship between human bodies and the spaces that they generate is displaced until, eventually, the organic link between the body and the world around it is destroyed.²⁶ Immediate postwar airspace had the potential to become an abstract space par excellence. Aviation promised to be faster than surface transportation and to reduce the impact of space on time and therefore on accumulation. Airspace was already associated with phallic, state-sanctioned violence through its wartime uses. As aeroplanes flew ever higher, into and

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above cloud and out of sight of the ground, airspace required of its occupants an almost geometric knowledge based on calculations of airspeed, windspeed, drift, and distance to destination. Airspace facilitated elevation and privileged surveillance. One of the aeroplane’s earlier military functions was to reconnoitre. Airlines attempted to commodify airspace, and the ican developed bureaucratic boundaries around it. The bodies in it were, apparently, decorporealized. They relied on flying machines and on the laws of aerodynamics to keep themselves aloft. Decorporealization is crucial to understanding how airspace was gendered. The Enlightenment legacy of a discursive dichotomy between masculine disembodiment and feminine embodiment has been extensively documented by feminists.²⁷ The easy association between decorporealization and airspace naturalized it as masculine. Women who wished to secure a position in the air faced a choice: they could insist that women were just as disembodied as men claimed to be, or they could challenge the idea that airspace was naturally decorporealized and reinsert embodied pilots into it. Some women utilized the notion of embodiment to stake their claim to an airspace that they attempted to feminize. Other women pilots also used their embodiment to claim that they had a rightful place in imperial skies by virtue of their “classed” or “racialized” bodies. All these women, however, had to contend with heteronormativity and the corresponding damning possibility that women pilots were “unnatural” or “abnormal.” Heteronormativity is based on the idea that there are only two genders, male and female, and that gender identity corresponds with sexual identity. That is, masculine men want heterosexual relations with feminine women, and vice versa. Heteronormativity presumes that this rigid and naturalized binary is a cornerstone of stable social structures. The family, government, religious institutions, education systems, and the nation may all crumble if the binary is unsettled. Surely the skies will fall. The concept of heteronormativity gained momentum in the interwar period when existing social structures had been destabilized and threatened by the effects of the First World War. Two scientific discourses contributed to the momentum. These were sexology, associated in England with Havelock Ellis, and psychoanalysis, associated in Europe and the United States

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with Sigmund Freud. Both discourses linked heterosexuality to “normal” gender identity and gained renown through magazine articles and popular novels. “Normal” gender identity presumed that independence signalled masculinity and dependence signalled femininity and furthermore that the possession of so-called masculine characteristics such as decisiveness, clear thinking, and rationality indicated that a woman was failing in her gender role. The discourses of sexology and psychoanalysis permeated England and the US during the interwar period.²⁹ These discourses began to cast a pall of “abnormality” over women who were independent, women who loved women, and women who appeared to be “masculine.” The “masculine” woman was a relatively common figure on the English interwar scene. British culture in the 1920s “was familiar with an astonishing range of masculine and feminine dress for women. The styles of the twenties extended to fashion-conscious and ‘masculine’ women alike an irresistible invitation to experiment – in terms of dress and manners – with near impunity.”³⁰ “Masculine” women moved through fashion-conscious English society without being castigated as deviant in the 1920s, but this was not the case by the 1930s and may never have been the case at the edge of the empire in New Zealand.³¹ After 1928 the “masculine” (in terms of dress or behaviour) women fell under more suspicion. That year Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness, which employed sexologists’ categorizations, was banned as obscene, and the publicity surrounding the case tended to solidify the image of a masculine woman as a lesbian. In this atmosphere heteronormativity was reinforced through the increasing denaturalization of “masculine” women and the new links forged between single women and lesbianism. These discursive connections provided means of discrediting feminists in Britain, some of whom felt the need to distance themselves from the taint of “abnormality.”³² The discourse of heteronormativity complicated and constrained the form of airspace that women were able to produce, as indicated by the running thread of questions throughout the period over whether these women were masculine or feminine. If they were masculine, they could occupy the airspace as lesser men who did not represent the typical woman, but if they were feminine, they were dangerous, capable of

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disrupting and denaturalizing the paradoxically decorporealized masculinity of all forms of airspace. The division of civilian airspace into five forms provides the structure for the following chapters. The first chapter examines the construction of the idea of airspace through the discourse of “airmindedness.” Airspace could be physically occupied only by someone flying in a machine: whether balloon, powered aeroplane or airship, or unpowered glider. The latter three were new forms of transportation that demanded new skills, altered relationships of space and time, and suggested new ways of being in the world. The new space and the new forms of transportation together required a new type of “airminded” person. Airmindedness was the discourse created and circulated to persuade people how to think about airspace and how to position themselves in relation to it. Only the airminded were fit to occupy airspace, and the airminded were youthful and forward-looking. They were the iconic figures of the interwar age: airminded women combined glamour with “streamlined body, speed, and mechanical precision.”³³ They dismissed prewar gender norms, sought new careers and opportunities in the unstable interwar world, struck out for the colonies with their wideopen skies, or determined to define themselves afresh as proud nationals instead of colonial subjects. The first chapter explores the means by which airmindedness was promoted and women’s conviction that the discourse of airmindedness addressed them. The subsequent chapters are organized around each form of airspace: the private, the commercial, the imperial, the national, and the body of the pilot herself. Chapter 2 deals with private airspace and the context in which women pilots in England and New Zealand secured flying instruction in the interwar period. Through a discussion of the debates over government subsidies to light aeroplane clubs, it shows how women pilots claimed the right to occupy private airspace. It also explores men’s hostility to women pilots as well as arguments between Amy Johnson and the British Air Ministry over whether her flight to Japan in 1931 produced merely private airspace. The ican banned women pilots from holding “B,” or commercial, pilot’s licences between 1924 and 1927, defining commercial airspace as masculine quite literally. The ican resolved that a “B” licence candidate “must be of

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the masculine gender.”³⁴ Medical debates over women’s bodies, menstruation, pregnancy, and the “racialization” of European women pilots were utilized as a means to justify this definition as well as to express interimperial rivalry between European and Japanese powers over commercial airspace. Chapter 3 argues that discussions within the ican over the ban were haunted by the premodern spectre of female power, a power located in the female body and disruptive to definitions of airspace as abstract. Chapter 4 examines imperial airspace, comprising geographies of adventure and markets. Women pilots undertaking long-distance, transimperial flights utilized these elements and helped to reproduce the British Empire as an imaginative and economic unit, challenging ideas about how gender fitted into it. However, as women they were constrained in particular gendered ways by the negative meanings associated either with being adventurous or with selling themselves, which complicated their ability to define imperial airspace and to attain respect or payment for their aerial mastery. Although the Englishwoman Amy Johnson and the American Amelia Earhart are perhaps the most famous of the English-speaking interwar pilots, on pilot in particular was the quintessential occupant of both national and embodied airspace: Jean Batten, who was young, glamorous, and attractive to women and men. She negotiated gender limitations and expectations and demonstrated her technical prowess and resilience. Achieving fame as a British imperial subject, she nonetheless insisted on her national identity as a New Zealander in a changing empire. Although there were many other women pilots, by the mid-1930s her story captured the essence of women’s attempts to secure their place in airspace. The final two chapters interrogate the relationship between gendered airspace, nationalism, and imperialism in the context of New Zealand through a discussion of Batten. Chapter 5 examines the national tours that Batten undertook in 1934 and 1936. It argues that these tours contributed to the ongoing development of a distinctive national identity, the first through a process of internal cohesion and the second in response to external threats. Batten created national airspace in conjunction with nationalist myths. Chapter 6 focuses on the reaction of women in New Zealand to Batten’s embodied presence and unmarried status. It suggests that the timing of Batten’s two tours was

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crucial to her significance because she toured the nation during the Depression. This was a period when women’s roles within the nation were increasingly defined by state policies as roles based on economic dependency. In this context certain New Zealand women used their skills as consumers to appropriate the meaning of Batten in such a way as to challenge the national discourse of heteronormativity that they increasingly encountered and to express lesboerotic desire for the body of the aviatrix. In 1937 Batten landed at Croydon Airport, England, at the end of her world-record-breaking flight from Australia to England. Croydon had been the scene of departure and arrival for many record-breaking flights as well as for scheduled airliner services. It was used to public displays of excitement over aerial activity. Batten’s reception, however, was extraordinary. It provoked the “most amazing scenes that have ever been witnessed at Croydon. The crowd went wild ... It is estimated that 8,000 people joined in the rush.” In response, the police charged, “scattering people in all directions ... Pandemonium broke loose, hundreds taking part in what might be described as a mad hare and hounds race, with Miss Batten as the hare, running every way, colliding with each other, and shouting directions as to where Jean was departing. Women were knocked down and walked on as a kind of frenzy seized the spectators.”³⁵ Although there were few women pilots compared to men, these frenzied scenes occurring as late as 1937, when flying was commonplace if not yet undertaken on the mass scale of the jet age, indicate just how much such pilots provoked powerful passionate reactions. It is the argument of this book that the strength of these reactions came from a sense of the enormous transformative significance for gender and imperial relations if women were at home in the newest form of space.

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Spaces have to be imagined, discussed, defi ned, and mapped in addition to physically occupied. The very idea of airspace – what it was, whose rightful place it was, who should control it, what it meant – was developed through the discourse of “airmindedness.” Airmindedness and its equivalents in German, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and so on were terms that circulated widely during the interwar period. Airmindedness had been promoted before the war, but afterward the number of devotees grew. They had to counter the prevailing image of aircraft as harbingers of death and convince war-weary populations to “be up to date and aviate.”¹ It was promoted through state policies, books and articles, joyriding fl ights, and light aeroplane clubs. Airmindedness was forward-looking. The airminded nation and its airminded citizens were the epitome of modernity. One of the central struggles for women was over what role they were expected to play in this new order. Was the airminded nation militaristic, even fascist? Was the airminded empire a man’s adventure playground? Was the airminded body by defi nition a masculine one? And what, exactly, was airspace? Airspace was produced. It did not pre-exist its articulation in culture or its delineation through techniques of territorialization such as mapping,

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defining, observing, writing about, and occupying.² Spaces are produced by processes that appear to respond to spaces that are assumed to occur naturally, to pre-exist the processes. Thus airspace appears to exist (as the sky) and then simply to be occupied by flyers who make use of it as a naturally occurring space. But it is the processes and actions of developing the technology, infrastructure, training, finances, legislation, goals, and so forth that together produce what is then conceptualized as airspace. The conceptualization is also an ongoing process of imagining and reimagining as the interlocking elements of airspace are rearticulated into new configurations. There were many debates during the 1920s and 1930s that indicate airspace was being produced. These included debates over who would control which routes, or airways; over developing airmail services, crucial for imperial connections and commerce; over government subsidies; over what types of aircraft should be researched and developed, and at whose expense; and over regulations to govern flying. The dominant modes of producing space created a pressure to mould airspace into an abstract space, a commodified, bureaucratic, and decorporealized “thing” that served to replicate existing power relations. But as with any new space, this dominant approach was not the only one in circulation. The interwar period was full of competing ideas about what airspace was and what it meant. Infused with the spirit of the age, women embraced both airmindedness and airspace. The British pilot Amy Johnson asserted that it was precisely because she was a woman, not a man, that she had to look for adventure in airspace. In a 1938 autobiographical sketch, she remarked that “[h]ad I been a man I might have explored the Poles, or climbed Mount Everest, but as it was, my spirit found its outlet in the air. Everything in my life since has spelt adventure and I hope always will.”³ Johnson’s confident assertion that airspace was the appropriate realm for an adventure-seeking woman made sense because discourses of airmindedness promulgated the idea that airspace was gender neutral. Books promoting airmindedness routinely introduced the idea of flying with reference to both men and women as potential occupants of the space. “Men and women are lifting up their eyes to the sky”; “I want the reader to imagine that he or she is in the cockpit of the aeroplane, that I am the instructor,

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and that we are flying together”; gliding is “so valuable in teaching young men and women those elementary principles of flight which are essential to real ability in the aeroplane pilot.”⁴ Some commentators, such as Stella Wolfe Murray, argued that women had a special role to play in promoting and improving the frustrating experience of international travel by air. “Already,” she wrote, “it is confusing enough to fly several days on end, landing in a different country each day with a different language, different money, and different regulations to cope with, to say nothing of a different cause of delay in each. It should be part of woman’s mission to help sweep away this confusion, and her wider one to use aviation for peace instead of war.”⁵ The desire to fly was laden with meanings for both men and women. Flying fulfilled multiple functions. One was economic. By the early 1920s the aviation industry had a huge earnings potential. The demand for airlines, airmail contracts, manufacturing and supply contracts, radiotelephony, airfield construction and maintenance, petrol and oil supply, and training all seemed to promise possibilities for employment and profit generation. Another function was cultural. Aeroplanes and flight were intensely symbolic in the Western world. Aeroplanes represented freedom as both physical and imaginative escape. For women aerial freedom could suggest escape from their domestic responsibilities and the narrow confines of gendered bodies. Louise Thaden, an American pilot, asserted that “flying is the only real freedom we are privileged to possess.”⁶ At the opposite extreme, for certain men, such as the self-styled Futurists in Italy, it represented a vicious denial of female flesh and cloying sentimentality. Contemplating the takeoff of a Blériot monoplane in the prewar period, F.T. Marinetti suggested that “we strong Futurists have felt ourselves suddenly detached from women, who have suddenly become too earthly, or, to express it better, have become a symbol of the earth that we ought to abandon.”⁷ The cultural meanings attached to aeroplanes extended beyond these gendered possibilities. Aeroplanes also signified death and destruction through the bombs that they dropped – the end of the illusion of safety away from battle zones. Surveillance from above had multiple meanings. It was benevolent when used for fire spotting or search and rescues but

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malevolent when used to track, watch, or bomb people. Aeroplanes promised rapid responses to insurgency or conflict. They changed relations of time and space, made possible connections between innumerable people, yet removed a crucial element of such connections: the experiential process of travelling through a land and its culture. They created the illusion of absent distance as miles could be measured in the dramatically reduced units of time that aeroplanes took to cross them.⁸ Aeroplanes also represented modernity through pristine mechanical power. Sometimes this translated into a misogynist rendering of masculine power over the fertile female earth and sometimes into a degendering impulse that enclosed both male and female in a machine aesthetic, a movement fostered by the lack of muscular strength required to master this mechanical horse. A third function was political. After all, “aviation is not simply an inspiring story about the release from earthly bounds. It is also a rough chronicle about state building and nationalist ambition.”⁹ Aviation bolstered nationalism in several ways. Above all, the aeroplane was the quintessential vehicle of modernity. It was mechanical, apparently free from earthly restraints, and epitomized speed. Nation-states were the political units of modernity. They did not pander to the whims of divine rulers; instead, they were to a greater or lesser extent secular, democratic, and bureaucratic. Aeroplanes first flew at the beginning of the twentieth century – officially in 1903 although their real development stems from 1906¹⁰ – and so were the defining modern transportation technology of the new century. Aeroplanes were increasingly seen as indices of national military might and therefore of international clout. In addition, they were expensive to research, design, and build, symbolizing national wealth in terms of financial vigour and technological prowess.¹¹ Airmindedness, then, was a way of thinking about airspace that simultaneously created the very idea of this space and responded to the contours of the space as it was produced and developed in its economic, cultural, and political dimensions. Airmindedness was promoted along one of two lines that tended to be separate but sometimes were interwoven: internationalist communication and imperialist defence and control. The state of internationalist airmindedness was that of “having enthusiasm for airplanes, believing in their potential to better human life, and supporting aviation development,” which 20

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reached its apex in a faith in the “winged gospel.”¹² This faith assumed that flying facilitated better connections between disparate parts of the globe. Better connections would improve cultural understandings and ultimately stamp out warfare, which was presumed to be the outcome of misunderstandings. Stella Wolfe Murray took this notion one step further, arguing that a woman could be “an aerial missionary, not merely for the gospel of flight, but for the gospel by flight.”¹³ She wrote about spreading the Christian gospel by air and carefully noted all the Biblical references to flight: “two women, and the wind was in their wings.”¹⁴ This spiritual internationalist dimension was also apparent in people’s desire to write on Mary Bruce’s Bluebird as she visited various parts of the globe on her circumnavigation in 1931. As Bruce noted when interviewed in Tokyo, “of fascinating interest is the way people all over the world have plastered my plane with inscriptions of all sorts and descriptions and in all languages ... they carved hieroglyphics on my plane in the jungles of India. A Persian chief in the desert wrote ‘God save you. He will help you.’” She claimed that there were more than six hundred inscriptions.15 Airminded nonpilots wrote themselves into airspace in this way, connecting themselves via their inscriptions to all the other people and places that Bruce encountered on her flight. The internationalist creed was spouted by establishment elites as well. Lord Londonderry (1878–1949) was British under-secretary of state for air from 1920 to 1922 (first under Sir Winston Churchill and then Captain Frederick Guest) and secretary of state for air from 1931 to 1935 with Sir Phillip Sassoon as his under-secretary. He also owned the Percival Company¹⁶ and wrote the foreword to the 1938 book My Life, by Jean Batten. Rather disingenuously given his record – Londonderry was a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship, and he defended the bombing of Middle Eastern villages by the Royal Air Force (R AF ) when he appeared at the League of Nations’ disarmament conference in Geneva in February 1932¹⁷ – he wrote that “communications and transport operated by aircraft, its capabilities and possibilities so courageously demonstrated by Jean Batten and so eloquently described in this book, sound the note our ears are longing to hear, and in encouraging her and honouring her we are endeavouring to divert human mentality from the fear and suspicion of war waged on a hitherto unknown scale of destruction to the sunny highway of interna21

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tional co-operation through an agency which can be said to be only in its infancy to-day, but which holds out blessings and benefits of incomparable value.”¹⁸ If sentiments such as these epitomized the internationalist airmind, airmindedness could also have a more sinister imperialist pallor. To the Nazis, for example, “aviation became a congenial allegory ... that gave broad technical and geopolitical legitimacy to the National Socialist order at home and to revived imperial ambitions abroad.”¹⁹ To ensure that the population would be able to read the allegory correctly, the Nazis developed a comprehensive system of educational materials, air raid drills, films, publications, and deceptive cartography through which airmindedness could be fostered. Airmindedness, then, “was an ideologically inflected diagnosis of danger and opportunity and an ideologically inflected prescription for Germany’s survival in the twentieth century.”²⁰ This second, imperialist, version was the form of airmindedness widely promoted by British Air Ministry officials and wealthy airminded elites. The Master of Sempill wrote of the need to give “to the Empire a consciousness of unity – and that can be achieved only by speeding up transport.”²¹ This sentiment was frequently coupled with a call for improved aerial defences, and the first Air Annual of the British Empire provides a series of typical imperialist airminded statements by some of the most significant figures of the British aerial establishment. Leo Amery wrote that air transport “must ultimately become of greater value to the British Empire than to any other nation or group of nations.” Charles Wakefield claimed that “we do need to consider the patriotic reasons for encouraging air progress within our great Empire ... air services between Great Britain and the Overseas Dominions cannot fail to strengthen every part of our now closely-linked territory and to make all its constituent peoples more conscious of the unique place of the British Empire in the society of nations.” Harry Brittain attempted to generate anxiety over the slow progress in establishing British air routes in India and Africa. He noted that “delay in this matter might prove dangerous from the British point of view, for the foreigner is continually casting covetous eyes on this great region and its innumerable air possibilities.” In explicitly military terms, Norman Leslie suggested that “it is the advent of

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air power which enables the British Empire to meet its enhanced commitments, to police its vast and varied possessions, and to keep watch over its peoples and ward over its frontiers.”²² In addition to issuing these statements, imperialists undertook practical projects to promote airmindedness. The fascist Lady Houston was a benefactor of two prestigious British aviation projects. She donated £100,000 to back the Schneider Trophy team in 1931 and supported the Everest flight team. She also offered “about £200,000 to the British Union of Fascists” and was publisher of the Saturday Review, a mainstream weekly, in which she supported the policies of Mussolini and later Hitler.²³ Other right-wing pro-air people included Lord Rothermere, the proprietor of the Daily Mail and cofounder with Lord Beaverbrook of the United Empire Party in 1929. Lord Rothermere created a National League of Airmen in 1935 and spent up to £50,000 on an airmindedness campaign that “was part of a larger imperialist programme which was deeply hostile to the League of Nations.” Oswald Mosley, the former Royal Flying Corps (R FC ) pilot and leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF ), organized Fascist flying clubs, including a special one for women in Gloucestershire, in 1934 and numbered A.V. Roe, the designer of the Avro line of aircraft, among his “prominent financial and moral supporter[s].”²⁴ Rotha Linton-Orman, founder of the British Fascisti in 1923 (Britain’s first fascist organization) numbered Amy Johnson among her heroines. For British fascists, “flight was a very pervasive metaphor for the fledgling movement, enforced by the living memory of Mosley as R FC pilot, realized by the BUF ’s defence policy which called for rapid air rearmament, and materialized by Lord Rothermere’s christening the bomber aircraft he had designed and then donated to the nation ‘Britain First,’ after the BUF slogan.” Mary Allen, a former suffragette who developed links to the fascists, learned to fly in 1924. In July 1938 “Action celebrated the accomplishment of the women aviators Amelia Earhart, Jean Batten, and Fraulein Hanna Reitsch.”²⁵ Where right-wing elites clustered, pilots were sure to be found. Indeed, in Italy Mussolini’s biographer went so far as to claim that “every airman is a born Fascist.”²⁶ These links between the ruling elite with their interest in aviation and the recent military uses of aircraft tended to foster a right-wing perspec-

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tive in the British aircraft industry as a whole. In 1920, for example, Lord Trenchard drafted a paper suggesting the use of air power to suppress uprisings in “settled countries such as India, Egypt, Ireland and England.”²⁷ During the General Strike in England, between 4 and 13 March 1926, the R AF provided transportation to strike-breaking workers as well as airmail and newspaper distribution services.²⁸ The industry’s “leading trade paper, The Aeroplane, which was also read by many enthusiasts, was quite openly pro-Nazi, pro-fascist,” and “support for the dictators, anti-Bolshevism, strong rearmament in the air, and a gross anti-semitism were the consistent policies of [Charles] G. Grey,” who was editor from 1911 to 1939.²⁹ Perhaps not surprisingly, Grey was also virulently misogynist.³⁰ British airmindedness, then, was being fostered by the pro-German Air Ministry, fascist elites, and a right-wing magazine. They exercised “conservative modernity,” or a “peculiarly English ability to straddle the modern and the reactionary.”³¹ This still-powerful aristocracy leapfrogged over bourgeois pretensions to modernity and insisted on their own class-based control of the aerial domain. If the metropole accented imperial strength, the periphery emphasized communications, combining internationalism and imperialism with its own brand of nationalist airmindedness. The concern of New Zealanders was not with imminent threats. Isolated by more than 1,200 miles of water from Australia and much farther away from their potential enemies, imperialist Japan and communist China, they did not worry that aircraft could attack them before the (imperial) British Royal Navy, stationed at Singapore, steamed to their rescue. Instead, they saw airspace as a place for communications.³² In particular, New Zealanders insisted that the geography of the country made aviation the perfect transportation system of the future. It was a country where natural events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis could have disastrous consequences, and airlifts might be the only practical way to reach a devastated area, assess damage, shift supplies, and evacuate people. This sense of the possibilities of aviation gained power particularly after a catastrophic earthquake razed the town of Napier, on the Bay of Plenty in the east of the North Island, in 1931. William Edward Barnard, MP for Napier, raised this point in a debate in the House of Rep-

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resentatives on 29 October 1931. He noted that between 4 and 15 February that year, twenty-two light aeroplanes had flown approximately 45,000 miles “carrying mails, urgently required stores, and passengers to and from the devastated area” in addition to a “complete chlorinating plant.”³³ In addition to improving internal communications, airspace also promised a challenge to shipping interests and a speedy link with the rest of the British Empire once airmail services extended across the Tasman Sea to Australia. “This country was at the mercy of the Union Steam Ship Company and other monopolist shipping companies, which bled the nation white during the Great War,” Robert Semple, MP for Wellington East, complained during the second reading of the Local Authorities Empowering (Aviation Encouragement) Bill in the House of Representatives on 9 August 1929.³⁴ A state-funded airway across the Tasman would challenge such private monopolies, but support for it would depend on encouraging airmindedness. In an effort to promote airmindedness in both nations, exceptional flights, races, competitions, and mundane aerial activity received column inches. In 1930 the New Zealand Herald included an “Aviation World” section that provided world, but not local, news about aviation.³⁵ By the mid-1930s it was running an “Auckland Aero Club News” column, while the Saturday edition of the newspaper had an aviation section on the children’s page. Auckland held an Aviation Week, during which, according to Iris Wilkinson – the journalist, poet, and novelist who wrote under her own name and also her pen name of Robin Hyde – there was “aerial publicity of every kind adorning Queen Street, [and] the Civic Theatre was lucky enough – or wise enough – to ‘click’ with the general Auckland air-mindedness by screening an English picture, ‘The Flying Fool.’”³⁶ Flying rallies, held by aero clubs, helped to foster airmindedness too. The Wairarapa Aero Club held a rally in June 1934, for example, that included skill competitions not restricted by gender. Thus Eva Parkinson, of the Western Federated Flying Clubs, came joint first with E.F. Hardie of the Auckland Aero Club in the Landing Competition and second in the Message-Dropping Competition.³⁷ Airmindedness in Britain was promoted through the proliferation of organized air displays, air races, and flying meets. The annual R AF Pag-

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eant at London Aerodrome, Hendon, was first held on 3 July 1920³⁸ and was enormously popular, but of far more importance were commercial air display companies because these reached so many more people throughout the country. From their inception aeroplanes were associated with sport, and while organized races for substantial purses, such as the King’s Cup Air Race (the Circuit of Britain Race) and the Challenge Cup, continued this tradition, growing numbers of men and women in the postwar period began to contemplate the idea of experiencing flight. Joyrides, initially given by ex-servicemen in surplus military machines but later offered by air display companies, provided the public with opportunities to fly. There were a number of these companies, but two of the most successful were Sir Alan Cobham’s air display company and the British Hospitals Air Pageant. Cobham had toured Britain between May and October 1929 in his aeroplane named the Youth of Britain, visiting 110 cities and towns while attempting to foster national airmindedness with the slogan “Make the Skyways the Airways.”³⁹ He went on to create his air display company. From 1932 to 1935 it toured Britain each summer, between April and September or October, and in 1932 also toured South Africa during the English winter. The company formed part of what Cobham had designated National Aviation Day displays as he attempted to boost airmindedness along with his own income level. Cobham claimed that between 3 and 4 million people came to see the displays during their four-year run and that his company carried 990,000 passengers on “five-bob flips” in mainland Britain.⁴⁰ Cobham’s main rival in the air display business was the British Hospitals Air Pageant, which, unlike Cobham, employed women. Pauline Gower flew for them, as did Mary Bruce briefly, and Dorothy Spicer worked as one of their mechanics.⁴¹ In 1933 Pauline Gower, flying with the Pageant, carried 6,000 joyriders, after two seasons working for herself.⁴² In addition to these air display companies and the annual R AF pageants, there were special events designed to generate airminded enthusiasm. Just as Auckland held an Aviation Week, Britain had an Empire Air Day. “A great national fete is being arranged for May 24. Ambitious plans are being made to provide programmes of educational value at aerodromes throughout the country ... a limited number of free flights will be one of the attrac-

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tions, and arrangements are being made for short air trips at prices as low as 1s.6d. for children and 2s.6d. for adults .... the Air League of the British Empire, which is arranging the Empire Air Day, is also planning a big poster and leaflet campaign to make Britain more air-minded.”⁴³ As if such practical efforts were not enough, pilots promoted airmindedness through books and articles. Cobham produced a number of books on aviation in the late 1920s, and these were joined by, for example, Heath and Murray’s Woman and Flying (1929), Sempill’s The Air and the Plain Man (1931), Brittain’s By Air (1933), Gardiner’s Skyways of Maoriland (1934), Gower’s Women with Wings (1938), and two books by Jean Batten, Solo Flight (1934) and My Life (1938). Johnson also wrote weekly articles on flying in 1934 during her six-month term as aviation editor for the Daily Mail newspaper,⁴⁴ and in 1939 she wrote a book, Sky Roads of the World. By promoting airmindedness some of these pilots hoped to generate employment for themselves. Cobham, for example, noted that his various flying schemes were not matters of “pure dedication to the cause.” Instead, he had realized that if he “could persuade a number of towns and cities to establish their own aerodromes, I might be retained as an adviser in certain cases at least, and so build up my business as an aviation consultant all round the country.”⁴⁵ Concern over making money permeates Gower’s account of her struggles as an air display pilot, Johnson constantly schemed to raise funds, and the letters that Batten wrote to her contacts at C.C. Wakefield & Co. Ltd reveal as much anxiety about income as they do about the logistics of long-distance flights. Pilots might well have wished to spread the winged gospel, but, male or female, their motives were often prosaically about employment. Airmindedness, then, represented a state of comprehension toward which citizens should strive. It also had material effects through the demand that it helped to create for aviation. The demand could not be controlled anymore than the contents of an airminded mind could be delimited. Airmindedness attracted both women and men, girls and boys, and they embraced it without necessarily making gender distinctions about the possibilities that it promised. Indeed, women were often central to airminded promotions, although the figures of women pilots were utilized symbolically for different purposes in different national contexts. In Nazi Germany,

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for example, discourses around modernity included the figure of the “new person,” described as “a woman ... distinguished by protective leather and metal gear and helmets. Able to soar in the air, dive to the ocean floor, and explore new chemical wonderlands, the new person expertly handled postwar technology.”⁴⁶ In the US, by contrast, the role of women pilots was to make flying “thinkable,” thereby boosting demand for civil airline services among the general and presumably male public, which supported the corporate modernity of that particular nation.⁴⁷ Despite the complexity and reach of airspace, the promotion of airmindedness appropriate to each function of flying, and the apparent gender neutrality of the airmind, not everyone could embody airmindedness equally. The airminded were youthful and forwardlooking: they were modern. After all, “the air was to be the pathway, or at any rate much of the pathway, to the future.”⁴⁸ Pilots were naturally the true exemplars of airmindedness, and their traits of “youthful energy, skill, fitness and the capacity to overcome exceptional physical strain” were emphasized. Although the different types of airspace required different skills to negotiate their differing contours, most pilots were considered daredevils who carried an “aura of immortality” and who “pursued their careers at the height of their physical powers.”⁴⁹ The combination of youth, technology, and spectacle created by media reports of their flights also linked pilots to the other modern figures of the age: film stars. Publicity images of women pilots in particular “utilise[d] the imagery of more conventional glamour, in turn derived from the fashion and film industries.” Although individually women pilots had to negotiate their own relationship to the glamorous image, which in Britain was complicated by the concurrent image of the sporty aristocratic pilot, collectively the women were represented as “streamlined athletes and symbols of modernity.”⁵⁰ This image became significantly embodied during debates over the competency of women to be commercial pilots and over the commodity status of pilots such as Batten. Although pilots occupied the pinnacle of airmindedness, the discourse did not need to create a nation of would-be pilots. “By the word ‘airwoman’ I do not necessarily mean pilots,” Murray wrote, “I mean any girl or woman who is airminded.” She went on to clarify what she meant by “airminded.”

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“Even if she has never flown it is enough that she should want to, that she should gaze upward with longing when she sees an aeroplane in flight and that she study the question enough to develop the air mind.”⁵¹ A typically airminded response to women’s flying was the one accorded Mary Bruce on her arrival in Japan during her round-the-world flight in 1930.⁵² When Bruce flew into Tachikawa in Japan in November 1930, the Japan Times remarked that “Japanese women, though, see something more in Mrs. Bruce’s adventure than does the lady herself. To them she has achieved the impossible. Few Japanese girls have ventured into the air. Fewer are licensed pilots. Japanese women are not encouraged by their men-folks to seek the limelight. But Mrs. Bruce had started something. She has brought it with a thud. She has proved to them by her Far Eastern flight ... that what a western woman can do, eastern women might do, and many a kimono-clad maiden today dreams of soaring in the clouds.”⁵³ A leader in the Japan Times remarked that Bruce’s presence in Tokyo “should also spur the women who are now clamoring for suffrage rights, to new activity.”⁵⁴ Women’s flights, especially long-distance ones that crossed international borders, inspired international comparisons and spurred airminded women to new efforts in more than just aerial arenas. In both Britain and New Zealand the methods of promoting airmindedness were similar even if the motives were not. The Aero Club movements and the Defence Department (in New Zealand) and Air Ministry (in Britain) had to increase publicity around flights, increase the public’s understanding of flight through air shows, and generate national pride in aerial achievements. To achieve all of this, nations required aeroplanes, pilots, landing facilities, navigation aids, and meteorological information, which together produced airspace, or in the language of the time, airways. In other words, airmindedness was a discursive construct that needed a material infrastructure and a unique space in order to perpetuate itself. Airmindedness could not just circulate through stories and magazine articles but needed aeroplanes, airfields, and events where people could see aeroplanes and pilots in flight. And pilots needed flying clubs where they could learn to fly.

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Introduction For some women the air was a space of possibilities during the 1920s and 1930s. Airspace offered an alternative to the domestic sphere of women’s responsibilities. In 1929 Stella Wolfe Murray argued that “I do not advocate neglecting your parents: honour and succour them, especially in their old age, but don’t stay at home and do housework when you long, body and soul, to fly to the uttermost ends of the earth, there to fi nd your mission in life and your gift to the world.”¹ Before women could take advantage of any aerial possibilities, however, they had to learn to occupy the space. They had to learn to fly. During the interwar period civil aviation changed in two ways in both Britain and New Zealand. First, pilots, politicians, and business people developed the material infrastructure of aviation. This included aerodromes, airports and airfields, aeroplanes, trained pilots, flying clubs and schools, navigational and meteorological aids, and regulations – some national, some international. Second, the same set of actors, with assistance from the media, elaborated the discourse of airmindedness. The production of both

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infrastructure and discourse was, however, uneven. While the two nations utilized similar legislative solutions to problems of financing and licensing, in the latter case – because licensing was covered by international convention – the actors responded differently to the question of how accessible civilian flying training should be. Although International Air Navigation Regulations stipulated minimum standards for civil aviation, which encompassed both private and commercial aviation, they did not provide blueprints for organizing civil aviation in signatory nations. As a result, Britain’s and New Zealand’s systems were both broadly similar but with notable differences. One of the most significant similarities was in the problematic connection between Departments of Defence and civil aviation. Responsibility for civil aviation in Britain lay with the Air Ministry, a branch of the armed services, and this pattern was adopted in New Zealand through the Defence Department. The problem with this structure was that military departments had sets of priorities at odds with the demands of commercial and private aviation. In both nations, citizens interested in civil aviation called vociferously and persistently for separate controlling bodies – neither with much success until so late that war almost immediately intervened, rendering civil-military distinctions largely meaningless for the duration. Private flying in both countries was dominated by light aeroplane clubs, and in both countries these bodies struggled for state funding in order to survive. They had to present a case for themselves based on their utility in time of war since their funding came out of the same budget as the Air Force. These military connections redoubled the difficulty that women had in carving out a place in airspace since they were officially debarred from martial arenas. Private, as opposed to commercial or military, airspace was developed in part through the policies around private pilot training, or flying training schemes, run through light aeroplane clubs in Britain and New Zealand. Private airspace was the space occupied by the holder of the “A” licence, the private pilot’s licence. She could fly for pleasure, and this licence could be endorsed to allow the carriage of passengers. The other type was the “B” licence, the commercial pilot’s licence. This permitted the holder to charge for the carriage of passengers and cargo. The pressure on women

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to restrict themselves to private airspace suggests obvious parallels with the pressure on middle-class women in the 1920s to return to the private, domestic sphere – a pressure that they resisted in droves. Even the division of airspace into different types – private, commercial, and military – through licensing and the role of the military replicated existing (but fracturing) socio-spatial and ideological divisions between the worlds of women and men. In both Britain and New Zealand women were interested in participating in flying training schemes as a means to strengthen their claim to both private and, by building up experience through the clubs, commercial airspace. Women had been involved in aviation from its inception. The Royal Aero Club in England was established in 1901 by Vera Butler, her father Frank Hedges Butler, and the Honourable Charles Rolls, of Rolls-Royce fame. The club, set up as a ballooning club, was open to women and men, although women’s membership had restrictions.² On 29 August 1911 Hilda B. Hewlett, who later emigrated to New Zealand and was elected president of the Tauranga Aero Club, became the first British woman to gain her pilot’s licence, number 122.³ A smattering of women followed her example, but by 1927 only nine women had obtained pilot’s licences. Prior to 1919 a pilot’s licence was not required in order to fly, so this figure does not necessarily represent the actual number of women who were able to fly. Britain was not alone in producing women pilots during the pre-1919 period. Among the panoply of women aviators from other nations a number stood out. France had Raymonde de Laroche and Marie Marvingt; Belgium, Hélène Dutrieu; Russia, Lidia Zvereva; Germany, Melli Beese; Italy, Rosina Ferrario; Japan, Komatsu Imai; and the US had Harriet Quimby, Bessica Raiche, Matilde Moisant, Blanche Stuart Scott, Katherine Stinson, and Ruth Law. After 1919 the more famous included Amelia Earhart, Elinor Smith, Viola Gentry, Pancho Barnes, Bobbi Trout, Louise Thaden, Bessie Coleman (the first African American woman pilot, trained in France), Mary Riddle (the first Native American woman pilot), and Ruth Elder in the US; Anesia Pinheiro Machado in Brazil; Tadashi Hyodo in Japan; Millicent Bryant, Nancy Bird, and Lores Bonney in Australia; Ruthy Tu in China; Adrienne Bolland, Maryse Bastié, and Marie-Louise Hilsz in

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France; Sofia de Mikulska in Poland; Thea Rasche, Elly Beinhorn, Marga von Etzdorf, and Hanna Reitsch in Germany;⁴ Sabiha Gökçen in Turkey; Valentina Grizodubova in the Soviet Union; Rolie Moore, Canada’s first woman aerobatic pilot; and Jean Batten in New Zealand. Britain produced a number of women pilots who were both nationally and internationally famous, including Amy Johnson, Winifred Spooner, Winifred Brown, and Pauline Gower.⁵ Despite such luminaries, the overall number of licensed women pilots was insignificant compared to the number of men: the First World War and the formation of national air forces produced a substantial number of male pilots in the interwar period. One estimate put the number of women with licences at a mere 2,000 worldwide in 1932.⁶ In 1931, 996 new pilots gained licences in Britain. Only 49 were women. The total number of licensed women pilots in Britain at that time was 127,⁷ and as late as 1937 Lettice Curtis asked a male pilot whether women could even be pilots.⁸ (She would go on to become the first woman pilot to fly a four-engined heavy bomber in 1942, when serving with the Air Transport Auxiliary.) Between 1925 and 1939 fifty-two women earned pilot’s licences in New Zealand through New Zealand clubs. Others learned abroad, including Jean Batten and Hilda B. Hewlett, and are not represented by this figure. The first woman pilot to gain her licence in New Zealand, Gladys Sandford, learned with the New Zealand Permanent Air Force based at Christchurch, prior to the establishment of civilian flying clubs and schools, and gained licence number 18 on 22 December 1925.⁹ The next woman to follow her was Aroha Clifford, who learned with the Canterbury Aero Club and obtained her licence, number 51, on 16 September 1929. It is clear from these licence numbers that if no women had learned in New Zealand in the intervening four years, then very few men had either. The majority of pilots, female and male, were trained during the 1930s. From 1927 onward women in Britain started to gain pilot’s licences in much greater numbers than they had before. Whereas only nine held licences at the end of 1926, between the beginning of January 1927 and the end of June 1930 seventy more women gained pilot’s licences through the Royal Aero Club. Two developments may account for this sudden and

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dramatic increase. In 1927 the International Commission for Air Navigation (ICAN ) reversed its ban on women holding “B” licences, thus making it possible (theoretically) for women to get paid to carry passengers. The British government also instigated a subsidy system that, for those eligible, reduced the expense involved in learning to fly.

Light Aeroplane Clubs in Britain In the early 1920s in Britain the Air Ministry instigated a “Policy of Encouragement and Assistance” toward the “Formation of Light Aeroplane Clubs.”¹⁰ On 8 August 1924 the Air Ministry “announced that the Air Council were prepared to help financially for two years the formation of ten Light Aeroplane Flying Clubs throughout the country.”¹¹ The impetus behind the subsidized clubs in Britain was in part the desire to generate airmindedness. “The country is not politically educated to the Air question,” Sir Samuel Hoare (later Viscount Templewood), the secretary of state for air, complained in the ministry’s minute file. He argued that too few opportunities to see aircraft left the population cold to the question of flying services. Aero clubs would counter such apathy: they would “become centres of air enthusiasm; inter-club competitions will take place and the seeds of the development of the true air sense of the country will be sown on most fruitful ground throughout the kingdom.” He wanted the parsimonious Treasury to take a long view. “We must move forward ahead of other nations in our enterprise and initiative in developing all the available resources of courage and love of adventure which the country possesses.”¹² This tendency, to collapse defence budget concerns and public relations campaigns with metonymic claims about the spirit of the nation, is typical of the material in the Air Ministry’s files. Similar links were made in British House of Commons debates and indicate the relationship between social policies and the signifying practices through which airspace is created and continually reimagined. The subsidy scheme itself covered a wide range of responsibilities and included approving ten clubs to qualify for the scheme and an Air Min-

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istry grant to each approved club of £10 “in respect of each member who qualifies for the issue of a private pilot’s licence (‘A’ licence) on club aircraft, subject to a maximum grant of £500 to any Club.”¹³ Clubs were also given assistance with the purchase of aeroplanes. Reflecting on his time holding office, Hoare claimed that “thanks to the stimulus given to private flying” by the development of the de Havilland Moth aeroplane (the DH 60 appeared in 1925) and by the subsidy arrangements, the “numbers of light aeroplane pilots ... increased from little more than a score in 1922 to five hundred in the next five years,”¹⁴ and he remarked that “by 1939 there were sixty-six clubs and scores of members, women as well as men, possessed of flying certificates.”¹⁵ Light aeroplane clubs, subsidized and unsubsidized, sprang up across Britain and became hives of activity. They were flying schools, attended by the constant drone of aeroplanes landing and taking off again. But they were also glamorous social clubs that promoted airmindedness, along with some elite networking, through aerial pageants and flying meetings. London Aeroplane Club, at Stag Lane, was one of the most famous in terms of its celebrated members, but Heston Air Park was able to draw in what C.G. Grey called “the better class.” “One learned,” he commented in 1929, “that the Air Park secretariat, which consists chiefly of Miss [Susan] Slade, herself a pilot of considerable ability who has her own Moth, had invited the entire House of Commons as guests, to teach them something about aviation ... the spectators were very much like an Ascot crowd.”¹⁶ Because these clubs could provide the infrastructure necessary for successful flying meetings, they also offered networking opportunities to women pilots who were geographically scattered. In 1931 Northhamptonshire Aero Club, located at Sywell Aerodrome, hosted the first all-women’s flying meeting, which forty women pilots attended.¹⁷ By creating an airminded population, the clubs would fulfil another function: they would “have the advantage of encouraging aeronautical ideas throughout the country, which would help the Royal Air Force considerably as regards obtaining officers and recruits. In addition to this, they may be a great asset for the training of reserve pilots, and they would build up

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a potential reserve of pilots who would be invaluable in the case of another great war.”¹⁸ The conflict between the role of light aeroplane clubs as nurseries for the wartime reserve and their apparent function as purely civilian endeavours perhaps accounts for why women were allowed to take advantage of the subsidy. Some men grumbled at this presumption. In the House of Commons the Conservative MP, R. Walter D. Perkins, who identified himself to the House as an owner-pilot, opposed grants to light aeroplane clubs during the annual discussion of the Air Estimates Bill. He protested that few club pilots would make service pilots, in part because “there is a very large number of women pilots,” and that a “large number” of them were “being taught to fly, largely at the expense of the State.” He went on to claim that “it is common knowledge among pilots that, with certain exceptions, women in the air are notoriously inefficient, and notoriously dangerous. Personally,” he continued to the sound of his colleagues’ laughter, “I would rather find myself flying in formation with a winged dragon than with a woman pilot.”¹⁹ Having dismissed women pilots’ abilities, he then argued that subsidizing their training was a waste of money because national conventions limited their possible wartime functions. In response, Oliver Simmonds, MP for Duddeston, criticized Perkins for his “narrow view” of the purpose of light aeroplane clubs, which Simmonds saw as primarily a “means of promoting airmindedness in this country” rather than as a pool of potential service pilots. He commented that he “was sorry to hear the remarks” of Perkins “about women flying, because they are playing their part in promoting airmindedness in this country,” and the nondiscrimination policy of the Air Ministry was, in his view, the correct one.²⁰ In the newspapers the next day Sir Alan Cobham jumped more vigorously to women’s and the policy’s defence. He remarked that “women were doing more to popularise flying than anybody else. They had been largely instrumental in building up Britain’s civil air strength. People who saw a woman flying were inclined to say, ‘If she can, so can I.’” Winifred Brown, the pilot, added her voice to the debate. She asserted that while

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“airmen trained in the Royal Air Force were better than women ... women trained privately were as good pilots as men similarly trained.”²¹ Whether Brown’s intervention was helpful is another matter. She was herself being “exploited” (Babington Smith’s term) as something of an oddity on the music-hall stage.²² During the Air Estimates debate the following year, Perkins once again made a plea that women pilots should be debarred from the subsidy if it was continued. This year he altered his approach. “I know that a large number of Members of this House believe that a woman’s place is in the home,” he argued, “but I dissociate myself from that view. I have no objection to lady pilots flying in the air.”²³ No longer characterizing them as dangerous, he now confined himself to the claim that they were of no use in wartime. They could occupy airspace as long as public money was not involved. The airspace that he was prepared to grant them was private, not public. No one responded to his plea, and women remained eligible for the subsidy. The initial subsidy scheme was due to operate for a limited period of two years and when it, and the revised scheme that followed it, were coming to an end, an ambitious new scheme was put to the ministry. Captain F.E. Guest, former secretary of state for air, proposed a national light aeroplane company (which would become National Flying Services) that would have control over aerodromes and clubs. Significantly, its draft flying rules referred in a number of places, although not consistently, to pilots as “he or she.”²⁴ This suggests, Perkins’s outbursts notwithstanding, that gender was not the most significant factor in the question of who should occupy Britain’s private airspace. It also indicates that Guest’s wife may have had an influence on Guest’s scheme. Amy Guest (née Phipps, from Philadelphia in the US) clearly had a practical interest in aviation matters, although she was dissuaded from flying in the Fokker Friendship that she had bought in order to become the first woman to fly across the North Atlantic in 1928. Her spot was taken by Amelia Earhart.²⁵ If gender was not the most significant factor in who should fly, class was. On 23 November 1928 the General Council of the Associated Light Aeroplane Clubs sent a deputation to the secretary of state for air (once again

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Sir Samuel Hoare). The council was concerned about Guest’s proposals to effectively take over the existing aero clubs. Lieutenant Colonel O’Gorman, spokesman for the council, complained about the scheme in strong terms: you must appreciate that this great economy of the State is uneconomical. It is a negative encouragement ... If flying is not now to be available to everybody, the money which provides the expense will be drawn from private pockets, and therefore the encouragement given to flying will be an encouragement not to flyers at large, but to flyers possessed of substantial private incomes as against flyers who may be brave fellows, admirable people, clerks who are in need of fresh air, but devoid of the necessary means, and you will be encouraging a class who are financially important as against that class who are devoid “means.”²⁶ Hoare was not persuaded, perhaps because flying really was for people of means. Wealthy fascists continued to fund various aviation initiatives, and the subsidy scheme came under fire from two directions in the House of Commons: on the one hand because it enabled men without means to fly, and on the other hand because it was a subsidy for the already affluent. Perkins, for example, added to his complaint about women pilots the complaint that “men who cannot afford to fly” were subsidized by the scheme and that they gave up flying after amassing only twenty or thirty hours in the air.²⁷ In contrast, the Labour MP for Westhoughton, John Rhys Davies, argued that the clubs were formed by the “very well to do” rather than by the coal miners or farm labourers that he represented.²⁸ The Labour MP for West Walthamstow, Valentine McEntree, disagreed with his colleague’s dismissal of the clubs’ composition. He argued: “They are not the aristocrats” that Rhys Davies “appears to think they are, many of them being ordinary working men who make a very considerable sacrifice to indulge their love of flying.” They were “better-paid artisans and betterpaid workers.”²⁹ He apparently regarded the existence of these pilots as a good reason to continue or even extend the subsidy. Later in the year, however, another Labour MP, Neil Maclean, asked the under-secretary of

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state for air, Sir Philip Sassoon, whether, “if he is going to find it possible in the present circumstances to subsidise a gentleman’s sport, he will also subsidise other sports in which the workers take part?”³⁰ Additional evidence that class rather than gender was the major factor in determining who should have access to private airspace is provided by the majority of women who made their mark on British aviation during the late 1920s and early 1930s. They gave the impression of being a critical mass. “After the war, thrown dizzily aloft by the same great wave of emancipation which did away with their skirts and breasts and hair, the sky became so full of Ladies that their names read like an astral presentation party.”³¹ They were certainly not devoid of the necessary means, any more than the early female members of the Royal Aero Club had been (founder members of the Royal Aero Club included Lady Lambart and the Honourable Lady Shelley-Rolls).³² Among the best-known women pilots of the 1920s, the “only common denominator was affluence.”³³ One example was the Honourable Elsie Mackay, whose father was Lord Inchcape, chairman of the P. & O. shipping line. Mackay, who gained her “A” licence in 1922, died in March 1928 while co-piloting an attempt to fly the North Atlantic from east to west in her Stinson Detroiter.³⁴ She left half a million pounds intestate. Her father presented this to the nation “to help pay off the National Debt.”³⁵ By 1934, of 470 privately registered aircraft in Britain, 10 per cent were owned by women, and aeroplanes were available for purchase at high-end department stores such as Selfridges.³⁶ To some extent these affluent women pilots circumvented their gender. While masculine definitions of danger and gendered limits created notions of the possible and the impossible, upper-class English and Anglo-Irish women such as Lady Mary Bailey, Lady Heath,³⁷ and Mary Pierce (the Hon. Mrs Victor Bruce) exploded these notions simply by ignoring them. By going out and doing what was supposed to be beyond the abilities of women, these women scoffed at their peers’ claims to masculine airspace. Their class positions, however, reinscribed limits around the imaginable and the possible. Affirming through actions that definitions did not apply to them was not so much a way of challenging the definitions as it was a way of asserting their own importance and difference. The British elites combined

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self-definition with exclusion in order to maintain classed boundaries and control over the machines of modernity. Thus within Britain it is possible to argue that membership in the upper classes could under particular circumstances mitigate against gender distinctions. Aviation policymakers were also titled (some hereditary, others not), and it was these intraclass connections that affected policy decisions around light aeroplane clubs. While Britons squabbled over the correct position of women and the lower middle classes within the flying clubs scheme, the idea of such a scheme was being promulgated around the empire.³⁸ The premiss of the scheme was taken up in New Zealand, but here the policy was expressly limited to men alone.

Light Aeroplane Clubs in New Zealand The antipodean subsidy system bore a close resemblance to its British progenitor. Initially, each of the approved aero clubs was to receive £25 for each pilot trained ab initio to “A” licence as against £10 in Britain, but in New Zealand training rates were higher. Clubs charged £3.10s.0d. an hour for dual flying and £2.10s.0d. for solo flying. Assuming one was not a slow learner, the cost of obtaining an “A” licence could amount to £52.³⁹ This represented a considerable outlay. For example, in 1928 the average weekly rental cost of a four-room house in Christchurch was 20s.6d., mutton chops were 8½d. per pound, women’s cotton crepe underwear cost 3s.5¼d. a pair, ladies stout shoes were 23s. 4d. a pair, and a journeywoman tailoress working in a factory earned on average a minimum of 50s. for a forty-fourhour week.⁴⁰ Spending £52 over a period of about a month on flying lessons (weather permitting) was clearly well beyond the reach of many women in New Zealand.⁴¹ Aero clubs themselves were not closed to women. A report in the Christchurch Press in June 1928 noted the rules adopted by the new Canterbury Aero Club. The rules specified that pilot, pupil, social, visiting, and honorary memberships were open to men or women.⁴² Yet in October 1929 the acting director of Air Services “announced to all Aero Clubs that no sub-

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sidy would be paid in respect of women trainees.”⁴³ Part 4 of the Standard Conditions for Light Aeroplane Clubs and Associations stipulated that the “Defence Department [would] grant to each approved club or association the sum of £25 in respect of each male member thereof who qualified” for an “A” licence provided he was between the ages of seventeen and thirty when he was licensed and “fit for general service.”⁴⁴ The Canterbury Aero Club appealed the application of this ruling to Aroha Clifford since she had obtained her licence before the notice was received. On 13 September 1929 Major L.M. Isitt, director of Air Services, sent a memo about “Women trainees” to the secretary of the Canterbury Aero Club regarding the “question of payment of subsidy in respect of women trainees of your Club.” He informed the secretary that “This matter has been further considered and you are notified that no subsidy can be paid.” According to Lainé, an exception was made for Clifford but not for anyone else.⁴⁵ Iris Wilkinson drew attention to these gender injustices. In an article in the New Zealand Observer on 30 April 1931, she noted that “though men pilots when trained, get a refund of a part of their fees (£3/10/- per hour)⁴⁶ no such refund is made to girl flyers. The idea seems to be that men will earn their way in the event of another war, but that women are not so useful. As, however, it is almost certain that women flyers would be used for despatch work and other odd jobs should a war ever again eventuate, the distinction seems unfair.”⁴⁷ This discrepancy persisted, even though in 1936 the Labour prime minister, Michael J. Savage, remarked in the House of Representatives that Jean Batten’s England to New Zealand flight had indicated to him “that women can compare very favourably with men in most things that require ingenuity, skill, and daring.”⁴⁸ The Honourable F. Jones, the minister of defence, who was also responsible for civil aviation, made similar comments the following year in an interview with Aero-Gram, the newsletter of the Women’s International Association of Aeronautics. Jones asserted that “our women have not lagged behind the example set by women of other countries in the aviation field.” In addition to the example of Batten, he pointed out that “thirty-eight women have been awarded licences in this Dominion and have proved themselves to be very capable pilots. As many

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parts of our country are extremely mountainous, meteorological conditions change very rapidly and these circumstances make necessary a high degree of skill on the part of our aviators.”⁴⁹ The comments of both Savage and Jones indicate the paradoxical situation of New Zealand’s women pilots. Government ministers gestured to their abilities and to the unique geophysical conditions that further emphasized their skill, recognition that was presumably welcome. Yet the ministers also took national credit for what were, in effect, private initiatives by women who were ineligible for state financing. The reasons that Wilkinson gave in her article about the unequal application of the subsidy add another paradoxical element to the airspace that New Zealand women wished to occupy. She stated what appeared to be the taken-for-granted assumption that male pilots would form a reserve pool of servicemen, whereas women pilots could not be called up for service. This was the same assumption that Perkins had advanced against subsidizing women pilots in Britain. In her article Wilkinson did not question the role of light aeroplane clubs in providing reserve pilots, just women’s relationship to this military reserve. The airmindedness promoted in New Zealand was, as noted earlier, founded on a vision of connections both within the nation and across the Tasman. Unlike British airmindedness, it was not a vision based on military might expressed through control over imperial airspace. The role of light aeroplane clubs, however – or at least the role of the government in subsidizing them – did not necessarily foster this form of airmindedness. Instead, it reinscribed gender distinctions between its flying citizens on the basis of their ability to defend the nation. The subsidized seat in the light aeroplane cockpit was a space that signalled who was out of place and who was in place in New Zealand’s airspace.

Prejudice against Women Pilots The existence of any women pilots at all, however, muddied the waters over whether this was an activity that women could or should pursue, especially as many of the women who did qualify were heavily involved in promoting women’s aviation through words and deeds. Such women included Pauline Gower – who went on to run the women’s section of the Air Transport 42

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Auxiliary – and Gower’s partner, Dorothy Spicer, as well as the Duchess of Bedford, Lady Bailey, Amy Johnson, and Lady Heath. They all emphasized that women could easily learn to fly – although, as Lady Heath conceded, “at first one thinks, as when tackling the Charleston, ‘Oh, dear, I shall never do this.’”⁵⁰ Even small numbers of women pilots were significant because newspapers and magazines gave a disproportionate amount of space to women pilots. While some of this coverage remained marginalized in the specialinterest sections devoted to women, other material was in the main body of newspapers. Newspaper and magazine editors reported not only on the activities of their compatriots or on events that occurred above their own nations. The New Zealand Herald, for example, ran a picture of a woman pilot in a Saturday supplement in 1934. The caption identified her as “Miss Winifred Drinkwater, aged 20, a passenger pilot employed by the Midland and Scottish Air Ferries, Limited, the new international air service inaugurated at Liverpool last month.”⁵¹ Later in May the newspaper carried a short piece about “Lostia el Nade, a young Egyptian telephone operator and flier, who used her wages to learn to fly, and recently flew to England.”⁵² The Women’s World section of the newspaper printed a longer story in June about German women pilots, noting that there were then more than fifty with licences.⁵³ The news that Lores Bonney, the Australian pilot, had been awarded the Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE ) also received a brief mention.⁵⁴ It is not clear whether such reports were an attempt to generate an international sense of womanhood or national competition between women. What the reports do suggest, however, is that women were being encouraged to take an interest in airspace and that women in airspace were of interest. The appearance of women pilots’ activities in the dailies (and the weeklies and monthlies) embedded them firmly in the continual reiteration of private airspace. The existence of women pilots, coupled with the media coverage that they received, convinced women that flying was a realistic possibility, even if as individuals women did not necessarily possess the means to take flying lessons. They also had an impact on men’s perceptions. Some were undoubtedly delighted to see their sisters in flight. Abe Bailey, the husband of Lady Mary Bailey, joked that “air-women are contesting and 43

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questioning man’s efficiency and supremacy, and no doubt soon we shall be told a man’s place is his home, and that the hand-rocked cradle rules the world and must be rocked by him.”⁵⁵ The majority, however, fumed over the feminine threat to masculine control and definition of the aerial domain. Prejudice against women pilots took many forms. While women pilots spoke publicly and wrote widely on the importance of women learning to fly, they had to tread a fine line in order for their demands to remain acceptable. Heath, for example, campaigned vigorously against gender discrimination in flying and other sports. She was president of the Women’s International Aeronautical Association in 1930 and is credited as having been instrumental in overturning the 1924 ban on women holding “B” licences.⁵⁶ The press nicknamed her “Lady Helluvadin.”⁵⁷ Recounting an act of sabotage by a male pilot, Pauline Gower noted that “many had been unhelpful and unkind, mostly on account of the fact that we were women, and a lot of prejudice existed at that time against women pilots.”⁵⁸ Evidence of such prejudice comes from a number of sources. Lady Heath, for example, wrote in 1927 (as Mrs Sophie Eliott-Lynn) that some commercial pilots held a “feeling against women in aviation.” This “she attributed to the men’s fear that women would interfere with their ‘good times’ after a day’s work.”⁵⁹ In 1967 Sir Alan Cobham wrote a belated apology to Jean Batten, who was by then living in Jamaica. He referred to an incident during the 1930s when Batten had asked to join his Air Display company. “Thirty years ago men had distinct ideas about women pilots – they were all wrong of course! I allowed myself to be over-ruled by them and so we did not have the joy of your company on the Air Display. I am sure they would have loved you after two or three days.”⁶⁰ Pilots working for his company lived off their earnings during the summer months, so his pilots’ “distinct ideas” effectively shut Batten off from a major source of paid employment for British-based pilots. The rival air display company, British Hospitals Air Pageant, did employ women, including Pauline Gower and Mary Bruce,⁶¹ so the prejudice against women pilots came from other pilots, not from the paying public keen to take a joyride. In New Zealand women faced similar prejudice. Dorothy Field gained an “A” licence on 21 February 1930 with the Hawkes Bay Aero Club. She

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was married to a sheep farmer and had a two-year-old daughter when she took her first flight on 3 October 1929: “she was overwhelmed by criticism of a young wife and mother risking her life by taking flying lessons.”⁶² Few criticisms contrasted woman’s supposed natural roles with her irresponsible desire to fly quite so explicitly, but general resistance to female pilots was widespread. One male pilot, Hugh Gardiner, apparently felt obliged to challenge such resistance. He devoted an entire chapter of his 1934 book Skyways of Maoriland to arguing that female pilots were as good as their male counterparts. “There are many pilots who entirely disagree with woman’s advent into aviation,” he wrote. “Whether the dislike is one borne of professional jealousy or a general assumption that, irrespective of the sphere, whether flying, motoring or sports generally, woman is inferior to man is difficult to say.”⁶³ Nevertheless, since almost every flying club in New Zealand now had women pilots, and since “as a pilot woman has shown herself to be perfectly capable, and many notable achievements and honours have been won by her,” such prejudice, he argued, was pointless.64 In her biography of Amy Johnson, Babington Smith claims that the idea for Johnson’s 1930 flight from England to Australia, which made her internationally famous, came out of a conversation that she had while chatting with her flying instructor, Captain Valentine Henry Baker, at Stag Lane Aerodrome in London. In response to Johnson’s frustration over the prejudice that “seemed an almost insuperable obstacle for a woman who wanted to become a professional flyer,” Baker suggested that a woman who wanted acceptance would have to earn recognition by “winning her spurs.” She should fly to Australia, for example. Whether this was a flippant remark or not, Johnson took it seriously.⁶⁵ Johnson’s flying instructor may have believed that a significant flight by a woman would earn her the acceptance of her male colleagues, but the experiences of both Johnson and Batten suggest that this was not the case. At the end of her flight from England to Australia, Johnson flew on south across the huge continent to Sydney. C.C. Wakefield & Co. Ltd (her corporate sponsor) and the Sydney Sun newspaper jointly chartered an aeroplane and pilot, Charles W.A. Scott, to escort her on her journey. The escort aeroplane was a DH 50J with a cruising speed well in excess of what John-

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son’s Moth could attain. As they flew, Scott did not take the performance capabilities of Johnson’s machine into account, and consequently she had to fly continuously at full throttle to keep up with him. Given that the mostly admiring eyes of the British imperial world were on her, Scott’s behaviour seems odd enough, but in addition Johnson was menstruating. According to Babington Smith, she was therefore feeling very tired and ill. The C.C. Wakefield & Co. representative, Captain S.W. Bird, who was flying with Scott, had no sympathy since “she ought to be used to feminine problems by now – that’s her business.”⁶⁶ Batten too was not immune to hostile behaviour on the part of male pilots. When she was staying overnight at the Aero Club of New South Wales, she resorted to smashing the valves on the radio that some male pupils were insisting on playing while she attempted to sleep. “They retaliated by locking her in her room and playing the radio (duly repaired) full blast outside her door.”⁶⁷ In 1935 at an air pageant at Newcastle in New South Wales, two male pilots decided to “cut her down to size” while she was earning money giving passengers joyrides. “Every time she tried to land the two other pilots took it in turn to sideslip from above, straight into her approach path, forcing her, to her fury, to overshoot and make another time-consuming circuit. And when one or other of them wasn’t cutting in on her approach, they would taxi on to the runway and deliberately take off in the space she was about to land on. At one stage they kept her in the air with a bewildered passenger, doing circuit after circuit, unable to land for nearly half an hour.”⁶⁸ One of these two pilots, Jack Chapman, went on to become deputy general manager of Trans-Australia Airlines. Even international fame could not protect women from active and sometimes dangerous male hostility. Hostile men had no problem going on to hold positions of power within the industry, inserting their prejudices into the institutions for which they worked.

A Woman’s Place Is in Private Airspace? Even when a woman pilot had achieved some measure of imperial success, she could find herself being pushed back into private airspace. After her

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record-breaking flight to Australia in 1930, Amy Johnson drew on the idea that “Amy Johnson” was an imperial figure in order to contest the notion that subsequent flights were undertaken by her as a private individual. Rather than exhibiting a typical “Queen Bee” mentality, a common criticism put forward about women pilots,⁶⁹ she was staking her claim to more than private airspace. In May 1931, in correspondence about her proposed flight to Japan, the British Air Ministry attempted to label her flights private efforts. She was therefore responsible for all payments associated with the flights. Johnson, however, insisted that her flights were imperial affairs that should therefore receive special treatment from the ministry. The ministry also attempted to bureaucratize the airspace that she produced by refusing to acknowledge that she might be pioneering a route, insisting instead that her flights could be slotted into their existing framework. Johnson resisted the bureaucratic demands of the ministry. She objected to the amount that she was asked to deposit for telegrams and provided only a “qualified undertaking” to pay for them, at day letter telegram (DLT ) rates (i.e., one-third of the full rate), and only after the ministry submitted a claim. The man at the ministry, one J.A. Weekly, asked his superiors whether he could accept Johnson’s promise in lieu of a cash deposit.⁷⁰ In a lengthy commentary on the minute sheet, W. Stevens gave his reply. He began by listing the exact amounts the ministry had incurred in telegrams on Johnson’s behalf, noting that she still owed the ministry £9.0s.11d. for the Australia flight and that although only £3.18s.1d. of her £10 deposit for the flight to Russia had so far been claimed, he did not know what further claims were still outstanding. He also had no intention of writing to the Foreign Office to ask what remained outstanding since his department had, he claimed, done this in the past over other flights: he had contacted the General Post Office, Colonial Office, and Foreign Office only to be erroneously told that nothing remained to be paid. The whole process of enquiring was thus, from his perspective, a colossal and expensive waste of time.⁷¹ Stevens decided that Johnson should submit an extra £20 deposit for the proposed flight to Japan. After all, the Air Ministry was charged not just

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for the telegrams that it sent but also for the replies. This meant that it was “quite impossible” to know how many and how expensive the telegrams the Air Ministry received would be, and “we should have thought that she would have appreciated that fact.” However, Stevens questioned whether telegrams, as opposed to letters, were always necessary, and suggested amending the form letter, which was sent to pilots regarding the cost of cables, to clarify that letters were the preferred means of communication. Finally, while he acknowledged that the public paid for the work involved in administering the paperwork associated with private flights such as Johnson’s, Stevens emphasized that the Air Ministry could not use its budget from the Parliamentary Air Votes to pay for cables sent by the Foreign Office, any other department, or any other foreign government. If Johnson thought that the cables sent on her behalf were “unreasonably long,” she “should make arrangements direct.”⁷² Clearly, Stevens and Johnson had very different ideas about what the public should pay for and about whether Johnson’s flights were, in fact, private. The difference in their positions is illustrated by a further note on the minute sheet, which pointed out that the ministry would ask other departments to obtain permissions without a deposit only in “exceptional” circumstances. The ministry anticipated “considerable difficulty” in recovering their expenditure from Johnson and did not regard her flight as an exceptional circumstance.⁷³ Johnson, on the other hand, appeared to attempt to present her flights as exceptional because her role within the empire was exceptional. Johnson wrote a carefully enumerated response to the Air Ministry’s demand for a further deposit of £20. In her letter she also expressed frustration over the inability of the Air Ministry, and perhaps of British imperial administrators more generally, to relate the abstract space delimited by “red tape” to the actual ground over which she flew. She drew attention to the fact that much of the documentation that the Air Ministry insisted she procure was meaningless on her flight because it had no effect elsewhere on the globe. She used the example of her Turkish permit on her Australia flight, which she suggested was a pointless piece of paper because “the Turks in Constantinople had never heard of me and had no idea I was making the

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flight.” Equally, her landing at the “tiny village of Bandar Abbas” in Persia, “where again I had never been heard of,” was not covered by the administrative requirements of the Air Ministry. The local people had no idea who she was, and all they required of her was a “clean bill of health, which no-one had notified me I should need.”⁷⁴ Johnson’s protests should be treated with caution since her preparations for the 1930 flight were at best skeletal, but her general point is important. Her claim to be producing imperial airspace is underlined by her question about the amount that the ministry now expected from her as a cable deposit. She asked why the ministry referred to £20 as the “normal” deposit for London to Tokyo flights. “I was suffering under the delusion that mine would be the first flight over this particular route,” she wrote. Her argument that she was producing imperial airspace was further supported by her final point. “For a long time it has been considered that flying was only for the rich, but now that people of moderate means are able to indulge in flying holidays, I think it is high time that pilots’ pockets were considered.” She explained that her letter was “on behalf of all these people, as well as for myself.” Her next set of statements, however, contradicted the idea that she was writing on behalf of the middle classes who could now afford flying holidays. She suggested that there should be a “clause in the International Convention” that covered permits for record flights. Instead of having to “satisfy one’s own Air Ministry that one is about to embark on a ‘record’ flight,” special ICAN permits would make provision for transit visas, and there would be no need to file proposed routes. The international routes would be foregone conclusions since “the points for crossing frontiers are compulsory ones.”⁷⁵ In her letter, then, Johnson made an argument that her flight would produce exceptional airspace, appealed to the rhetoric of her middle-class background to claim that she represented unexceptional pilots, and challenged the bureaucratic requirements of the ministry by indicating that routes through airspace were already rigidly demarcated, making the ministry requirements redundant. What Johnson and the Air Ministry officials argued over was the definition of the airspace that Johnson produced through her flights. She argued that it was a form of imperial airspace by virtue of the role that her persona,

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a national and public treasure, took in producing it. Because she was instrumental in producing this space, the public could pay particular expenses associated with its production. Bertram and his colleagues argued instead that they would not use public money, from the Parliamentary Air Votes, to help Johnson produce airspace through her flight. It was a private space, and Johnson as a private individual, just like all the other long-distance pilots, should pay the expenses. Johnson completed her flight to Japan between 28 July and 6 August 1931. She and Jack Humphreys, flying as co-pilot, landed at Tachikawa Aerodrome outside Tokyo on 6 August, departing on their return flight to England on 24 August. Her reception in Japan suggests that she was right to challenge the Air Ministry over what kind of airspace she produced through her flights. In Japan she was taken up as having not just British imperial but global significance. A despatch from Alvary Gascoigne at the British Embassy in Chuzenji to the Foreign Office in England applauded Johnson on her “tact and good sense” during her visit. The Japanese were, he claimed, impressed with her. He indicated the level of significance attached to her flight by explaining that in addition to a crowd of thousands waiting at the aerodrome to see her, “Japan’s premier aviatrix Miss Kei Gen Boku” flew out with five other Japanese aeroplanes to escort her in, and on the ground high officials of the Japanese Ministry of Communications, British Embassy officials, and many local British residents were all ready to greet her.⁷⁶ “As is usual on such occasions,” Gascoigne remarked, “the crowd burst the barriers and surrounded the machine,” and clearly her arrival was a major event for the elite of Japanese and British expatriate society alike. The minister of communications, Matajiro Koizumi, received her the following day and thanked her for her contribution “towards Japan’s progress,” which the interest in her flight would stimulate. He gave her a “large Japanese doll” and remarked that “she was no longer ‘Amy of England’ but ‘Amy of the World.’”⁷⁷ Thus, while Gascoigne claimed Johnson’s flight as a success for British diplomacy because of its favourable impact on the Japanese, the Japanese apparently claimed it as an event of international and national significance for them. They displaced her national scale of meaning (Amy of England) and replaced it with a global one (Amy of the World).

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That this flight had an international dimension rather than a private one was also indicated by the reactions to it by the Soviets and Americans. Johnson’s flight to Australia had been along Imperial Airways’ routes as far as India. Her flight to Tokyo, however, was not over British territory or possessions at all. She flew across the USSR , where, Gascoigne added in a confidential note, “the Soviet authorities went out of their way to be helpful during her passage through Russia and would not allow her to pay for anything.”⁷⁸ Babington Smith too noted that “the Russians in charge [of aerodrome facilities] – frequently women – were very friendly, and oil and petrol were supplied free.”⁷⁹ The Soviets therefore regarded Johnson’s flight as occurring in more than private airspace and as a result assisted her substantially. United States officials too apparently appreciated the potential value of the flight. Gascoigne reported that his United States colleague expressed the desire that if Johnson was in Japan she should greet Charles and Anne Lindbergh on their arrival at Kasimagaura on their flight to Japan from the US via Alaska.⁸⁰ If the US diplomat had regarded either Johnson’s or the Lindberghs’ flights as mere private matters, he would not have made the request, but the juxtaposition of the two sets of famous English-speaking aviators in Japan could create the illusion of international cooperation in their control of airspace.

Conclusion Becoming airborne was never a simple case of turning up at an airfield with sufficient pounds, shillings, and pence in hand. Women struggling to gain access to airspace had to ensure that their ideological – or, perhaps more accurately, geopolitical – functions in military terms did not marginalize them out of private airspace, the initial type of airspace that every wouldbe pilot had to master before he or she could command any other type of airspace. The discussions and debates over subsidizing flying training reveal the complex forces that affected women’s access to this space. While women negotiated masculinist prejudice, they also took an active part in developing airspace through their contributions to airmindedness. The extent to

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which this airspace was private, however, depended on the national context and on the determination of public servants to limit the interpretations that the women tried to put on their own actions. Their privileged class position must have provided some British women pilots with the means to maintain their hold on subsidized private airspace, as they had egress to the antechambers (if not corridors) of power. To this extent they helped to ensure that the state sanctioned the notion that private airspace was a realm of female possibility. In New Zealand women such as Iris Wilkinson expressed frustration with the decision to restrict subsidies to men alone, but they lacked the capital, infrastructure, or organizations to make a challenge successful. The vote was of little use without the accompanying power to influence policymakers, even as ministers used their achievements to promote national ideologies.⁸¹ Far fewer New Zealand women, then, would be able to claim even private airspace as their rightful domain. Although the British imperial government wished to prompt the creation of light aeroplane clubs and flying training schemes for private pilots around the empire, thus developing private airspace, for aspiring women pilots this development proved distinctly uneven.

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3 THE ( IN ) COMPETENCY OF COMMERCIAL WOMEN PILOTS : THE “ B” LICENCE BAN

Introduction Women pilots and their men supporters may have had a certain amount of success in staking a claim to private airspace through training subsidies, at least in Britain. But they were less successful at occupying commercial airspace. During the 1920s international committees divided civilian airspace into private and commercial forms. Private airspace was occupied by the holder of an “A” licence, but commercial airspace, which was the space for flows of passengers, freight, and employment opportunities, was limited to holders of “B” licences. This private-commercial distinction fragmented airspace and facilitated restrictive legislation. In 1924 the International Commission on Air Navigation (ICAN ) passed a motion that for a candidate to be eligible for the “B,” or commercial, pilot’s licence he had to be of the masculine gender. This was in response to a motion put forward by its Medical Sub-Commission that women should be deemed ineligible for the licence. The ICAN reversed its decision in 1927, but with such stringent riders that even with a “B” licence women would fi nd it exceedingly difficult to secure employment as commercial pilots.

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The initial “B” licence ban defined commercial airspace as masculine space by utilizing existing discourses of female inferiority. This definition protected investors, national identities, and the masculine role of breadwinner from feminine incursion. Discussions recorded in the SubCommission’s minutes over revoking the ban, however, drew on more complex discourses than simplistic masculine-feminine binaries. Instead, the discussions focused on two themes missing from the initial ban. One was the danger posed by the menstrual body, and the other was the racialized character of woman. The shift in the discourse used by Sub-Commission members to restrict women’s access to commercial airspace emphatically “embod[ied] the codes through which spatial control is maintained.”¹ Spatial control of newly defined commercial airspace was to be maintained by regulating it into a purely masculine and ultimately abstract space. This would be done by defining men’s bodies as rational and competent and women’s as irrational and incompetent. But bodies are the basic building blocks of space, the “geography closest in.”² Pre-existing spaces, prior forms of social space, do not completely vanish once new spaces are created. Instead, they “underpin” subsequent spatial forms.³ The corporeality of bodies necessarily challenges the processes of decorporealization that are essential to the production of airspace as an abstract space. Bodies retain traces of pre-existing corporeal social spaces, once organized at the scale of the human body. Discussions by members of the Medical Sub-Commission about menstruating women’s attributes signal the members’ attempts to negotiate the pre-existing social spaces of the body. In the case of menstruation the discussions arguably provide an example of ancient fears about women’s bloody and magical powers. Concerns over the relative abilities of menstrual bodies were connected to dominant natalist discourses of racialized European nations. Different women were more or less fit to fly on the basis of their racial identity. These distinctions, between female bodies as female, as menstrual, and as maternal, suggest that these medical men were unable to agree upon which women were capable of what. Thus they argued over how to contain them. Women challenged the “B” licence ban. They utilized two different strategies. One, exemplified by Lady Heath, simply asserted that women

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were as good as men. This tactic presumed that airspace was masculine and that women pilots could aspire to masculine status. The second strategy, employed by Stella Wolfe Murray, drew on complex ideas about female embodiment as maternal power to suggest that women were in fact better commercial pilots than men.

The (In)competency of Women Pilots Prior to the First World War commercial aviation was not heavily regulated beyond broad legislation delimiting the sovereignty of the skies. The immediate postwar period, however, was busy, as demobilized servicemen set up commercial aviation companies. The proliferation of companies and development of national and imperial air services created the pressing need for rules in the air. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919, therefore, instigated a complex series of licensing regulations that applied to all contracting nations. Conference delegates set up a regulatory body, the ICAN , which stipulated basic minimum requirements for such details as lights on aircraft and at landing grounds, emergency procedures, and aircrew competency. Eventually, thirty-eight states were party to the ICAN.⁴ Various Sub-Commissions of the main ICAN met from 1922 onward, once the Convention had been ratified, in order to thrash out acceptable standards. Their discussions led to minimum standards that were internationally recognized on a wide range of issues including the size of flares, labelling of first aid boxes, and the lung capacity of pilots. On 24 May 1923, during a sitting of the Medical Sub-Commission in Paris, the French representative, Dr Garsaux, raised a question in the middle of a discussion regarding medical requirements for public transport personnel. He wanted to discuss the “competency of women for piloting.” This was an issue that he felt sure would “constantly arise in the future.”⁵ The only other representative present, Colonel C.B. Heald, who represented the British Empire and was also the chairman of the Medical Sub-Commission, asked whether any woman had applied for a public transport pilot’s certificate. After all, “the case had not yet occurred in England.” Garsaux replied that a French woman pilot had applied for a public transport pilot’s certificate – he was

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presumably referring to Adrienne Bolland, the French aviatrix famous for her flight over the Andes in 1919. The minutes go on to record Garsaux’s personal opinion: “In view of the endurance and muscular strength required for engaging in aviation in public transport he did not think that women should be allowed to fly in such circumstances. The safety of air navigation, on which depended the expansion of international aviation, would suffer.”⁶ Heald agreed but doubted the Medical Sub-Commission’s authority to make a ruling on this question. The two men decided to bring the issue to the attention of the ICAN proper, and Garsaux agreed to produce a report. The report, Item 5/8 “On the question of the competency of women for piloting aircraft,” was submitted by Garsaux to the Sub-Commission on 18 August 1923. He insisted that the competency question referred only to public transport: women flying for sport or in flying meets was perfectly acceptable. As postwar commercial airspace began to develop, however, their place there was open to question. “But would it be reasonable or even wise to admit them in a customary and legal manner as navigating personnel?” Clearly not, in his opinion. And he gave a number of reasons. As he admitted, one of these was beyond his remit because it was “extramedical,” but he mentioned it anyway. It was the “small amount of confidence” women pilots would inspire in “the public at a time precisely when aviation stands in need of instilling such confidence completely.”⁷ In other words, the nascent industry had to encourage flight by the public if it was to grow. He and his colleagues assumed that the public would not feel safe in women pilots’ hands. The opposite assumption was at work in the United States. There, women pilots were employed as demonstration pilots precisely to prove that flying was safe – since even women could do it. This strategy was not extended, however, as far as scheduled airline work – more because of male pilots’ protectionism than imagined public fears.⁸ In his report Garsaux admitted that some of his medical arguments were “debatable, such as instability of the nervous system, periodic indisposition etc.” However, he expressed confidence that one medical condition was “indisputable,” and this was women’s lesser “physical resistance.” He acknowledged that piloting did not require muscular strength, and his defi-

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nition of physical resistance focused instead on “resistance against fatigue.”⁹ He elided the difference between the latter, muscular strength, and the debatable medical arguments against women in the example that he chose to illustrate his point. His anecdotal report, which offered no concrete evidence, drew extensively on circulating discourses of female inferiority. In the postwar period these discourses formed part of widespread anxiety over feminists’ attempts to claim greater opportunities and increased financial, legal, sexual, and political independence as a result of the contributions of women to the various war efforts.¹⁰ Claiming – without providing details – that “on certain airways the journeys in bad weather are very tiring,” Garsaux asserted that the male pilot on such airways had “been able to bring his passengers and machine safely through, thanks to his nervous system, his cool-headedness and particularly an almost superhuman resistance against fatigue, which qualities could not be expected of a woman.”¹¹ This fantastic male pilot was a superman who demonstrated reason and rationality through his cool head and nervous system. Even though Garsaux acknowledged that woman’s supposedly unstable nervous system, and therefore implicitly her irrationality, was not a proven fact, he nevertheless drew on the idea of women’s instability to emphasize that only men could be competent commercial pilots. Garsaux went on to recount the example – again without providing details but utilizing the tropes of popular adventure stories dominated by heroic men¹² – of an incident in which a pilot who had force-landed his aeroplane during a storm had “during eight consecutive hours, to run to the end of one of the wings with the arrival of every wave [of the storm] in order to keep his machine righted.” Contemplating such a scenario, he added: “is not that a task which is out of all proportion to that which the female system could perform?”¹³ Garsaux’s point was nonsense for two reasons. Many women pilots held down their aircraft to weather storms. During an eventful flight over Syria in 1934, for example, Jean Batten landed in the desert in order to avoid crashing during a sandstorm. “I held on to the ’plane, hoping against hope that it would not be blown over. When an hour had passed I was able to relax my grip on the wing.”¹⁴ Clearly, the female system performed as well as the male in emergencies, and male pilots, flying

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larger machines, had to enlist the help of scores of local people to assist in saving their aircraft.¹⁵ In addition, Garsaux’s description of a body bracing against wave after wave for hours on end bore an uncanny resemblance to a description of childbirth – an activity no male system could perform. This correspondence went unremarked by his colleagues. To complete his report Garsaux added one last reason for excluding women from “employment in the navigating or operating personnel” of commercial aircraft:¹⁶ given that women were excluded from employment “at sea or on the railways,” why should the aviation industry be any different? Why, in effect, should this quintessentially modern transportation system allow for innovation? He then offered his proposed amendment to the ICAN. Women should be excluded from public transport employment, and they should also pass a medical examination before they could obtain a private pilot’s licence, the “A” licence.¹⁷ Given that he had earlier stated that there was no question of their competency for private flying, this additional requirement can be read only as an attempt to further restrict women’s access to all forms of civil airspace since at this time no one (male or female) had to pass a medical examination in order to receive an “A” licence. Having read the report, Heald corresponded with the director of civil aviation in England, Sir Sefton Brancker. Heald remarked that while he “concur[red] women should be excluded,” he thought “all that is necessary at present” was to “inform applicants that they do not conform to the physical requirements.”¹⁸ Brancker agreed that “it hardly seems necessary to amend the Convention” since the ICAN could simply “pass a resolution excluding women for the present on physical grounds from obtaining a ‘B’ licence.”¹⁹ This is what the Sub-Commission then proposed. The only two attending delegates at the meeting “decided unanimously” to submit a resolution to the ICAN stating that “women are excluded from any employment in the navigating personnel of public transport” and that they had to pass a medical examination before obtaining a licence for private flying.²⁰ The third man present, Albert Roper, was the general secretary of the Permanent Secretariat of the ICAN and did not have a decision-making role. Thus a decision that would have repercussions on women’s livelihoods was put in motion by three men responding to a “report” that was based

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entirely on anecdote and conjecture. The use of spurious medical authority to support hegemonic social constructions of female inferiority was well established by this point.²¹ Indeed, as more and more women took advantage of postwar conditions to assert their abilities, the medical clamour to pronounce them weak, unfeminine, deviant, or mad reached something of a crescendo.²² This crescendo echoed through the Sub-Commission’s discussions. The anxieties that members expressed over the very femaleness of women pilots’ bodies, their irrational carnality, implied concern with three kinds of safety. One was of the corporation whose passenger rosters would plummet should women pilots be employed by foolishly forward-thinking firms. The commercial aviation industries of most nations were struggling to break even and simultaneously to fund development of new machines that could carry larger payloads and fly farther with more reliable engines. Any scent of lost profits was a serious threat to potential investment. The second concern was over national self-identity. The Sub-Commission members talked as though they worried that prestigious and very expensive airliners carrying elite passengers and precious cargo, such as airmail and financial instruments, might tumble from the sky with hysterical women shrieking at the controls and crash onto the unprotected heads of a trusting citizenry. But if the women who qualified as “B” pilots were insufficiently feminine, because by definition only masculine traits made for competent pilots, then their presence at the helms of national flagships on national air routes would imperil the very idea of a natural national culture of appropriately gendered men and women. The third safety concern was the security of the masculine role as breadwinner. The “B” licence ban limited women’s roles by limiting their opportunities for breadwinning. The ban was a form of protective labour legislation, but unlike, for example, Factory Acts, it was not aimed at protecting future mothers from the kind of onerous work undertaken by nonunionized men. Instead, it protected commercial airspace from women. This move protected male pilots from female competition, although the fear that women would command lower salaries never entered the Medical Sub-Commission’s records. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that

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female competition was a motivating factor in the ban. In later discussions around rescinding the ban, both the Italian and French representatives noted with apparent satisfaction that because of differential medical examination requirements, women pilots would be unable to find air transport companies willing to employ them. This was a period in which the concept of breadwinning, the idea that a man should earn a “family wage” in order to support his dependants, was becoming more entrenched at state, employer, and union levels, although of course the struggle for such a wage long predated this period. The corollary of this idea was that women were naturally reliant (on men) and had no dependants themselves. They could therefore be paid less than their male colleagues for the same work.²³ The breadwinner ideology, and its practice, appears to have been an unspoken assumption behind restricting women pilots’ access to commercial airspace. And while labour relations within the commercial aviation industry were not serene – British imperial commercial aviation was inaugurated with a month-long strike by pilots at Imperial Airways in 1924 – pilots were well paid. Since all pilots had to perform the same functions regardless of gender, the presence of women would both call into question the logic of breadwinning and tarnish the masculine mystique of technological competence. The ban was also protective of masculine power and privilege because commercial flight very often required pilots to stay overnight away from home. It is too simplistic to suggest that women were expected to stay at home and that members of the Medical Sub-Commission were determined to keep them there, but there is an element of truth in this idea – especially given the later comments in the British House of Commons by Walter Perkins. By banning competent existing women pilots, such as Adrienne Bolland, from commercial airspace, Sub-Commission members may not have asserted that women should stay at home. Yet most members definitely wanted them to stay out of the sky, implicitly contrasting airspace with domestic space and reiterating the notion of separate spheres. Commercial pilots spent time away from home in all-male spaces. For some male pilots, such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French airmail pilot and author of Terre des Hommes, translated into English as Wind, Sand and Stars,²⁴ the mas-

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culinity of commercial airspace was precisely its appeal. For him, “flying is a man’s job and its worries are a man’s worries.”²⁵ The ban, then, protected corporate earnings, national prestige, and masculine privileges through the simple expedient of drawing on discourses of natural female inferiority and incompetence. Women pilots and their supporters, however, challenged their exclusion from commercial skies by insisting that they were just the same as men. Stella Wolfe Murray devoted a chapter of the book Woman and Flying, which she coauthored with the pilot Lady Heath, to recount how Lady Heath’s intervention led to the ban being rescinded. An alternative account suggests that the French air minister, P.E. Flandin, supported Adrienne Bolland in her challenge to the ban and that his support was what led to the ban being lifted.²⁶ The effect of the ban on Bolland was reported in the Times of London in May 1926. A brief news item mentioned that Bolland’s commercial licence, held since 1923, had been withdrawn as a result of the ban and that the pilot “is now communicating officially” with the ICAN “with a view to getting the decision (which was taken at the instance of Great Britain) reversed.”²⁷ Both the British and French Sub-Commission representatives were under pressure from their air ministers, who were themselves under pressure from Heath and Bolland, to reconsider the regulation.²⁸ Lady Heath – at the time Mrs Sophie Eliott-Lynn – certainly campaigned vigorously to have the ban rescinded. In November 1925 she wrote to the ICAN offering herself up to the Medical Sub-Commission as suitable material to undergo fitness tests. She claimed that her sporting background as founder of the Woman’s Amateur Athletic Association in Britain provided her with substantial evidence of women’s endurance. The Air Ministry eventually took up her offer and tested her, finding that she did indeed meet their requirements. Heath also lobbied signatories to the ICAN with the result that the Scandinavian nations, Czechoslovakia, and France all supported her. In May 1926 during England’s General Strike she flew newspapers between London and Paris. In her discussion of the ban, Murray argued that Heath’s “courage, beauty and charm” during her strike-breaking flights persuaded the Sub-Commission to perform a volteface and unanimously rescind the “B” licence ban.²⁹ Given the aristocratic

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to upper-middle-class composition of the aviation fraternity, it is perhaps equally likely that her active class solidarity won them over. Murray was privy only to the final resolutions, not to the reports and discussions that preceded them, so her narrative of the ban and its reversal is misleading. The “unanimous” decision taken by the Sub-Commission to rescind the ban was reached only after considerable debate and opposition from both the French representative, Garsaux, and the Italian representative, Professor Dott. Gr. Uff. Angelo di Nola. Their arguments demonstrate that the terms of the debate over who could occupy airspace had begun to shift. In the new 1926 discussions few of the men made universal comments about unstable women. Instead, they debated women’s racialized characteristics and gendered national roles. These debates framed the language of Item 10/26 on the agenda.

Item 10/26: Revisiting the Ban In 1926 Item 10/26 heralded the “New examination of the question of the competency of women for piloting aircraft.”³⁰ More nations were represented at the meetings of the Sub-Commission where this item was debated. In addition to France, still represented by Garsaux, and Great Britain and the empire, now represented by Group Captain Martin Flack, those present represented Italy (di Nola) and Japan (Dr Tsurumi). The debate began with Garsaux’s comments on the question, which had been reopened by the British delegation. Garsaux referred back to his original report (Item 5/8), emphasized (perhaps with some chagrin) that it had been adopted unanimously, and reiterated what he claimed were its main findings: “the insufficiency of female muscular power” and women’s “frequent and periodical troubles of genital origin.”³¹ This latter claim had not in fact been part of the original decision – Garsaux had admitted then that women’s periodic indisposition was debatable. Now Garsaux concentrated most of his attention on women’s “troubles of a genital origin, which everyone agrees may have a considerable influence on the nervous system.” Since, he asserted, safety was his main concern, the Sub-Commission should prohibit women from

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piloting “whenever the woman’s genital state is liable to place her suddenly and unexpected [sic] in a state of physical deficiency.” For Garsaux, this genital deficiency was caused in several ways. Pregnancy was the most obvious, but so were “uterine affections which render the menses painful,” dysmenorrhoea, and all tumours and infections of the “uterus or appendages ... and we have not to set forth the pathology of the female pelvis.” Indeed, Garsaux argued that it was “prudent to exclude [women] from flying during the menstrual period” and suggested that they should submit to medical examinations every two months instead of every six months, as was the case for men.³² The idea that a woman was unfit to perform paid work during her menses was not original. It formed the basis of protective labour legislation in the USSR from 1921, although it is not clear to what extent Garsaux would have been aware of this precedent for his comments.³³ Nor is it clear why Garsaux chose to focus on menstruation in particular, although the discovery of oestrogen in 1923 and its naming in 1926 may have given him the idea,³⁴ as he presumably read medical literature. Whatever the reasons for his focus, overall Garsaux considered women pilots to exhibit “unfitness ipso facto during menses or in case of presumed pregnancy.”³⁵ In his comments the Italian representative, di Nola, fully supported Garsaux but for a different reason: women’s maternal role. The decision, he claimed, was such a weighty one that he proposed a motion “calling attention to the serious consequences which may result to air navigation and to women by the admission of the latter as pilots.”³⁶ If his colleagues did not want to second the motion, he proposed instead a three-month postponement in order for all the contracting nations to submit written reports to the Sub-Commission. He argued that “when doctors, hygienists, legislators, are studying the amelioration of our race; when many countries are encouraging repopulation; it does not seem to me logical to subject women to toilsome aerial work, entailing efforts which are by no means compatible with the lofty mission of womanhood in the universe, namely, that of giving to the country healthy and vigorous children.”³⁷ Unlike his colleagues, di Nola’s argument here drew explicitly on the emerging pronatalism of Italian politics, with its gendered division of reproductive labour, rather than

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on ideas about women’s physical inferiority.³⁸ In addition, he pointed out that the measures put forward by Garsaux, if adopted, would effectively rule women out of employment in the public air transport industry. In a sixty-day period the woman pilot, he calculated, would lose twenty-six flying days. Ten of these would be taken up by the medical examination and an additional sixteen by the twice-occurring menstrual cycle since, he asserted, “at least 8 days elapse between the troubles which precede the periodical indisposition and the malady itself.”³⁹ His argument implied that the Medical Sub-Commission would be wasting its time changing the regulations for women given that their licences would be all but useless anyway. In response to these comments, the British representative, Group Captain Flack, argued that he could not accept a regulation “preventing flying during the monthly periods, as these, at any rate as regards British females, had no influence on their general state.” Accepting that the other members wanted more study, he proposed postponement of the question until the next meeting.⁴⁰ This initial discussion of Item 10/26 introduced two important concepts that had not been present in the discussions over Item 5/8 three years earlier. Sub-Commission members now argued over women’s “pathological” bodies rather than over their presumed physical weakness, and they also began to suggest that there were differences between women of different nations. They were drawing on changes in the discourses that connected gender, race, and nation. The Medical Sub-Commission reconvened in Paris on 8 December 1926 and dealt with Item 10/26 as the third item on the agenda. Both Flack and di Nola had submitted written notes on the question of women’s competency. Flack’s note on Item 10/26, dated 21 July 1926, comprised two parts. The first dealt with women’s muscular strength, and Flack conceded that this was as relevant for male as for female pilots. Under this section Flack proposed licence endorsements to limit who could fly what type of machine (single-engined, multi-engined, and so on). He suggested that women should not be permitted, if sole pilot, to fly machines that could carry more than six passengers since larger machines would tax women’s muscular

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strength. He further proposed that each country be given the discretion to fix lower maximums “to suit the women of the country concerned.”⁴¹ The second section dealt with periodical genital troubles, and in this section he again proposed that each country determine its own minimum standards, provided they were above the minimum set by the Sub-Commission. This was a crucial proposal. Setting national minimums depended on “race, upbringing and habits” and therefore on perceived differences between female national subjects. According to Flack, there was “no necessity to prevent flying during the monthly periods” for British women since “the young British girl and woman of the present day is taught to regard menstruation as a perfectly normal process – she goes about her duties as usual and does not cease to indulge in sports or recreational activities.” By making this claim, Flack drew on the discourse of the modern educated woman, whose citizenship in the advanced British nation kept her free of Continental debauchery and debility. Unlike her Continental counterparts, she knew better than to superstitiously fear menstruation. By proposing that each country set its own standards, he effectively argued that distinctive national differences existed between women and that British women were superior. He therefore suggested that the amended regulations read “women candidates must have a satisfactory history in respect of monthly periods.” Presumed pregnancy would render any woman unfit to fly.⁴² By contrast, di Nola’s note on Item 10/26 took the form of a discourse in response to two questions that he set himself: “are women skilful in piloting generally,” and “are women fitted for piloting public transport aircraft?” Since it was “legally” impossible to deny that women could fly, he argued that deciding they were fit to fly public transport aircraft depended on “the result of data thoroughly examined and technically verified.”⁴³ Just as Garsaux’s original report on Item 5/8 claimed exhaustive investigation when it was in fact mere hypothesis and anecdote, so di Nola’s note on Item 10/26 proceeded to make unsupported generalizations under the guise of technical verification. The main one advanced was that “female pilots are always of a special physical type having little or nothing in common with the women we see moving around in everyday society.” Thus, although their very existence should have disproved women’s perceived incompetence,

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di Nola clarified that existing female pilots had the masculine characteristics of “reflection, courage, firmness of character, promptness of judgment and presence of mind in coming to decisions” and that the “combination of these characteristics in a woman is an exception.”⁴⁴ Instead of taking these women’s competence as evidence of women’s ability in general, he argued that nothing could be extrapolated from their examples because the typical feminine woman did not measure up to them. They were not really women at all. At the meeting Garsaux remarked that the written reports by di Nola and Flack “lead in fact to different conclusions.” Clearly, he pointed out, “there is a marked difference, as regards female athletic training, among the different races and even between very neighbouring countries.”⁴⁵ Thus even if “women in England, very much addicted to sports for several generations, do not present signs of nervous or painful troubles during their periods, it is not the same in France, nor probably, as M. di Nola leads us to understand, in Italy.”⁴⁶ Given this discrepancy, Garsaux suggested that there was no need to regulate against women flying during their periods, especially since so few women pilots were likely to seek the “B” licence and “even in the countries less addicted to sports they will often be women who do indulge in sports who therefore are less liable to painful menstrual troubles,” and in any case transport companies “will be little inclined to engage them.”⁴⁷ A medical examination every three months would catch any “presumed pregnancy.” This set of recommendations suggests that Garsaux was satisfied that women would still be effectively debarred from public transport employment without thereby wounding the national and imperial pride expressed by Flack and, by extension, the British Empire. Dr Tsurumi, the Japanese representative, responded to Garsaux’s report and the other delegates’ written notes with the comment that his government had instructed him, in a further fragmentation of commercial airspace, to differentiate between national and international air navigation. In national commercial airspace the Japanese government wanted the question of women’s competency to “be left to the discretionary power of each country” since “the required conditions vary from one country to another.” Presumably, the phrase “required conditions” referred to the extent that

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Japanese women were, according to Japanese men, immobilized by their monthly periods or by other unspecified cultural assumptions. In international commercial airspace, the “entirely different domain of international air navigation,” his government concurred with the suggested medical examinations for women every three months.⁴⁸ The differential three-month rule for women was submitted to the ICAN along with resolutions that “candidates of the female sex must present a normal uterus and appendages,” that they would be deemed unfit if presumed pregnant, and that they would have to resubmit to medical examinations after miscarriage or confinement. The Sub-Commission completed its meeting in time for lunch.⁴⁹ Unfortunately, the Air Ministry files contain only the minutes and resolutions and do not include correspondence or evidence of much discussion. What is clear, however, is that Garsaux, di Nola, and Tsurumi were ranged against Flack, yet Flack’s power was sufficient to overcome in principle the objections of these representatives of other imperial powers even if the result – that women could hold “B” licences but would remain largely unemployable – did not challenge existing conditions. The differences between each nation’s representative over what made women unfit to fly commercial aeroplanes suggest that three interconnected discourses were in play. These were the pathologization of women’s bodies, fear of the older social spaces of women’s power, and myths of racial descent.

Pathology and Menstrual Magic Modern science and medicine, developing from the eighteenth century and commanding widespread material and discursive definitional power by the late nineteenth century, is the paradigm into which women’s bodies were inserted as pathological.⁵⁰ In this paradigm “menstruation signalled a woman’s ... recurrent irritability and inability to behave rationally.” Modern scientific thinking by the late nineteenth century “shackled a woman to her body and propelled the menstrual cycle and the ovaries to the forefront as the essence of a woman’s being.” This meant that women were “irremediably

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handicapped in their attempts to live productive lives outside the home.”⁵¹ Indeed, the connection that male political scientists made between women and irrationality when drawing up their version of democracy was based on their understanding that women were “less able to control the passions of the body [than men] and this failure is often located in the a priori disorder or anarchy of the female body itself.”⁵² These modern interpretations of female bodies were part of the information upon which the Medical Sub-Commission drew. The pathology of the female pelvis, for example, was the language of medical science. Similarly, the medical requirements for both “A” and “B” licences demanded that men “not present any clinical signs of syphilis.”⁵³ These remarks and regulations were examples of the two-fold process of producing the modern body that Foucault identified as starting in Europe in the seventeenth century. The first stage he characterizes as the body as machine, an “anatomo-politics of the human body,”⁵⁴ in which discursive and material controls increasingly defined the body as something that could be rendered docile, economically useful, and ultimately efficient within normalizing paradigms. This “imaginary body”⁵⁵ circulated well into the twentieth century – for example, the “body-as-machine was the acknowledged ideal of the fascist warrior” in Germany.⁵⁶ The second stage of the process was the concept of the species body. This was a way to see the body as responsible for life and for reproducing a healthy population. Foucault calls this notion a “biopolitics of the population.”⁵⁷ The menstrual body was an example of the body as (faulty) machine, and the “presumed pregnant” body exemplified the species body. Working within these paradigms, the Medical Sub-Commission read female bodies as collectively flawed through menstruation, an aspect of their being, whereas male bodies were merely individually flawed through disease, the result of their sexual actions. Another discourse was also present that implied the complex connections between race, blood, nation, bodies, and gender that persisted through several centuries. The idea of the body as a (divine) text dates from late medieval Christianity,⁵⁸ and by then interpretations of women’s bodies as uniquely powerful were well established. “Women’s bodies housed the forces and substances that could produce good as well as evil: blood, the

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periodic flow, the afterbirth, the amniotic fluid, and finally the ‘mother’ womb.”⁵⁹ Female power was most visible through menstruation. Blood was magical, and menstrual blood was the most potent form of the magical liquid. The connection between magical blood and menstruation defined women. “The rhythm of discharge, the periodic nature of bleeding, constituted womanhood – it was a necessary bodily phenomenon that gave women their special gender characteristic.”⁶⁰ Menstruation gave a woman a magical and potentially dangerous power, and this power was not displaced by later ideas about the body-as-machine. The psychologist Mary Chadwick discussed menstruation and its links to magic in a paper published in 1932. She argued that the destructive powers attributed to witches were very similar to those attributed to menstruating women and included such things as the ability to blight crops and cause mares to miscarry. The link that she identified between witches and menstruating women made sense of the idea that “women at this time [when menstruating] are dangerous.” Indeed, she noted an ongoing myth that “a chance encounter with a menstruating woman will bring ill-luck or death to any man in war or any other enterprise he is about to undertake, or the loss of his virility.” The menstrual body was in effect magical, and from the seventeenth century onward the Christian church attempted to dispel popular faith in this form of female power by describing “the female body and its ambiguous power as a demonic threat, and to explain its very nature as ‘natural’ weakness.”⁶¹ Such ancient understandings of the body continually reappeared through time, sometimes without alteration, and what was written on this early body and reappeared sporadically was female power explicitly connected to blood.⁶² The seventeenth century was a world away from Paris in the 1920s, yet old epistemes continually resurfaced in European politics and ideology. It is possible that by 1926 this idea that menstrual women were dangerous beings, with some kind of unquantifiable power, had resurfaced as a discourse available to the Medical Sub-Commission members because airspace was an unnerving space. Aeronautical engineers may have worked furiously to comprehend the laws of aerodynamics, but aeroplanes, pilots, and passengers still fell out of

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the sky and sometimes vanished into thin air. Most pilots (male and female) were intensely superstitious, carrying a range of lucky charms with them on flights as a matter of course. In 1927 the travel writer Lowell Thomas listed a series of superstitions held by pilots, which included not carrying flowers, not having a photograph taken before a flight, performing rituals before or during flights, and a sense that last flights (for example, before a vacation) were unlucky. The charms carried included a cane, a dog, and a girl’s garter. The Australian pilot Lores Bonney was unusual in having “no time for the fashionable vogue of carrying all sorts of good luck charms to keep away the ‘gremlins.’”⁶³ During the interwar period interest in spiritualism, the occult, and the irrational spiked. Many people held an “idea that those who flew above the earth in planes and airships developed perceptions over a period of time that made them more sensitive to thought waves and other dimensions that other men failed to perceive.”⁶⁴ Pilots believed in ghostly figures, strange presences, and guardian angels.⁶⁵ Sir Harry Brittain wondered “how many of these strange regions of the upper air exist over the Atlantic? Many brave men and women have gone to their death in these lonely unexplored skies. It would seem that somewhere north of Newfoundland is a Sargasso of the air, luring the flying-ships to their doom.”⁶⁶ Given these fears, it is possible that some Sub-Commission members sensed that allowing supposedly potent and destructive women into this unstable realm was a recipe for disaster and that male pilots might well oppose women’s uncanny threat to their virility and safety. Although di Nola insisted on “doubts which we all share,”⁶⁷ Flack resisted the way that women were pathologized by articulating a new order of female bodies – modern English girls. These women had cast off the shackles of Victorian thinking and struck out energetically, vote in hand if they were over thirty, to actively participate in national life. He defended the British “girls and women of the present day,” whose bodies were vigorous and resilient at all times of the month. What is clear from the second set of Medical Sub-Commission discussions around rescinding the ban is that all menstruating women were not the same. By the time the “B” licence ban was being reconsidered, the distinctions that Garsaux made between English, French, and Italian women indicate that although the arguments made were cultural, referring to sports or voting, the men drew on myths 70

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of ethnic descent through which women were increasingly racialized along national lines.

Races of Women Nationalism scholar Anthony Smith refers to the nationalist impulse to claim a mythological past as the myth of ethnic descent. He argues that each nationalism usually contains more than one type of myth, which may contradict each other. He identifies two myths at work in England from the nineteenth century onward. These were the genealogical and the ideological. The genealogical myth claimed direct descent from particular antecedent groups, while the ideological myth assumed cultural connections with the inhabitants of a glorious past. The difference between these two myths is that they appeal to competing sectors. “Conservatively-oriented groups” assert “patterns of family lineage,” whereas “radical aspirant strata” prefer to affirm ideological descent.⁶⁸ The presence of these competing myths affected understandings of the body. The meanings of the species body shifted as the European bourgeoisie became more powerful. Smith claims that toward the end of the eighteenth century, the multiplying bourgeoisie began to adopt aristocratic ways of ensuring lines of inheritance and power but altered the emphasis from the past to the future. Whereas aristocrats were concerned with maintaining bloodline and pure connections to ancestors through whom they claimed their entitlements, the bourgeoisie were concerned with bloodline in terms of heredity. What the bourgeoisie wanted was to reproduce vigorous offspring free of mental, physical, or moral defects. They aimed to pass down to their children not just the reins of hegemony but also perfect health and longevity, a eugenic program.⁶⁹ The genealogical and ideological myths and the eugenic program could all degenerate into racism.⁷⁰ The Medical SubCommission discussions drew on and contributed to these competing ideas about lines of descent and race as they defined which body was fit to fly in commercial airspace. Prior to the twentieth century the concept of race had already contributed to the elaboration of a European social order that opposed bourgeois respectability to the imperial savage and domestic great unwashed, find71

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ing in this intrinsically racialized opposition the reflection of the bourgeois naturalized claim to power.⁷¹ Dominant understandings of race by the interwar period were even more complex, and the idea of “‘national character’ reached its apogee.”⁷² In their 1935 critique of what they term pseudo-scientific uses of the concept of race to further political and economic ambitions, particularly in Germany and the US, Julian Huxley and Alfred Haddon list six different uses of the term “race.” The word was used to indicate the “major divisions of mankind – black, white, yellow, brown”; the inhabitants of a particular nation and “their descendants overseas”; a “hypothetical ‘pure race’” that is presumed to have once existed; an equivalent to a “supposedly recognisable physical type, as Arab, Irish, etc.”; an isolated local group; and the “peoples who speak a certain type of language,” such as the “Latin races.”⁷³ They argued that the term, because of these multiple meanings, its imprecision, and the social, political, and economic policies instigated through appeals to popular understandings of it, made it a dangerous and at the same time meaningless term. Huxley and Haddon attempted to discredit claims made by US and Nazi politicians for the superiority of the “Nordic” race, and they gave a careful explanation of heredity, or genetics, to demonstrate just how deeply fallacious and self-interested such claims were. The so-called “Nordic” race was one of the three European races that various writers referred to from about 1900 onward. The other two were the “Alpine,” or “Eurasiatic,” and the “Mediterranean.” Huxley and Haddon faced a mammoth task when they wrote their book in 1935, although that it was reprinted three times in three months suggests that some people were ready to hear their message. The idea that racial classification was a real measurement of intrinsic human worth had by this point been taken up and popularized through pseudoscientific texts, novels, magazines, and political policies and propaganda. The work of Herbert Spencer on the evolution of societies and survival of the fittest, coupled with Charles Darwin’s notion of natural selection, formed a foundational paradigm for later ethnologists such as John Beddoe writing on the Races of Britain in 1885, Madison Grant lamenting The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, and Herbert John Fleure documenting The Races of England and Wales in 1923.⁷⁴

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Since ethnologists tended to study all aspects of a given society, including physical, linguistic, and cultural, as they made their comparisons, their methodology made it a simple matter for them to claim that cultural characteristics were the result of biological characteristics. Cultural differences were explained as genetic, and in a world where natural selection was a natural law, these differences implied differential distribution along an evolutionary scale. As Madison Grant asserted, “the great lesson of the science of race is the immutability of somatological or bodily characters, with which is closely associated the immutability of psychical predispositions and impulses.”⁷⁵ One of Grant’s concerns, echoed more or less by other ethnologists, was that “Nordic blood is on the wane from England to Italy and ... the ancient, acclimated and primitive populations of Alpine and Mediterranean race are subtly reasserting their long lost political power through a high breeding rate and democratic institutions.”⁷⁶ So-called “racial” distinctions within the European context were thus based on national characteristics, a blend of somatic and temperamental differences that distinguished between everyone and explained everything. These distinctions were part of the drive to produce a mythological past for the still relatively new European nation-states as well as attempts to define who belonged in them.⁷⁷ As an element in this process, numerous volumes attempted to catalogue the English race. Most volumes implicitly or explicitly compared the English to other European races, the French, Germans, and Italians in particular, and always found the English to possess the best combination of racial attributes. English martial pride, French diplomacy, German efficiency, Italian passion – these were described as cultural characteristics and innate qualities. This racial discourse was widespread, appearing as logical explanation and taken-for-granted commentary in everything from magazine editorials to government documents. For example, the aviation proselytizer and pro-Nazi Marquess of Londonderry noted in 1938 that “there are many points of similarity between our two countries [Great Britain and Germany], and there is a racial connection which in itself establishes a primary friendly feeling between us which cannot be said to exist between us and the French.”⁷⁸ In 1931 Amy Johnson flew from England to Japan via Russia. The British consul who

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sent a despatch to London reporting on the reception that Johnson received appended a statement marked “Confidential.” It referred to the essential differences between the English and the Russians, who were of course more “Asiatic,” or “Mongol,” than the “Nordic” Englishwoman. “Unfortunately the food provided gratis was, through no ill-will almost uneatable by English people; and the sleeping accommodation was intolerably dirty.”⁷⁹ In a series of lectures delivered via the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1933, the historian Arthur Bryant claimed that there were seven authentic English “types,” six male and one – the housewife – female. He discerned these types from classics of English literature and argued that the English as a race were socially constructed, the amalgam of a half-remembered peasant heritage and the continuing impact of the changeable weather.⁸⁰ In another example Hedda Dyson, the editor of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly (who was herself Dutch by birth but British by marriage), wrote an approving editorial in March 1938 on the qualities of Britain and “all Britishers.” These she compared favourably with those of other Europeans. Using her experience of two shipboard fires, she remarked on the “phlegmatic courage, having a foundation like rock,” of the British. This she contrasted to the “hysteria of those emotional Italians,” who were “rushing about in lifebelts,” and the irrational actions of her cabin-mate, a Frenchwoman. Apparently, on hearing the fire alarm, this woman “hysterically ... pulled the heavy cabin trunks from under the bed, including my belongings, and after she had effectively blocked the door she fainted on top of the luggage.”⁸¹ The Frenchwoman was thus both irrational and dangerous, and the Italians were emotional, while only the British were courageous and reasonable. Identifying race as essentially bloodline, the ethnologist Robert Bradley provided a more “scientific” explanation for the “racial origins of English character,” as his 1926 study was called. Although full of anecdote and conjecture, his text attempted a systematic approach to defining Englishness. Race as Bradley understood it in the English context explained physical features, emotional propensities, political affiliation, and career choice. Acknowledging that the English were far from homogenous, given centuries of invasion, Bradley claimed that the English comprised all three separate European racial strains: the Nordic, the Asiatic (Alpine), and the Mediter-

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ranean. In his view these racial differences were positioned on a hierarchical scale and could account for “why Yorkshire is Liberal and Lancashire essentially Conservative,” for example, since the most English of the English possessed an innate love of freedom expressed as the capacity for selfgovernment.⁸² Of all the racial waves conquering England, the Nordics, the “most virile of our invaders,” were predominant.⁸³ The Nordic was “tall, blue-eyed, fair-haired, courageous, chivalrous, he has always been the darling of our lady novelists, which means that sexual selection has gone in his favour.”⁸⁴ And “the Nordic is free of Mongolism,” whereas the the Asiatics and Mediterraneans were “prone to revert to it.”⁸⁵ In his discussion of Nordic characteristics, Bradley made two claims that echo the simultaneous arguments of the Sub-Commission. The first was about morality and the second about the physical body of the Nordic woman. The Nordic paragons, Bradley argued, were the “hunting, shooting squirearchy who ride straight and speak the truth.”⁸⁶ Neither aristocrat nor bourgeois, what was most English about these landed gentry was connoted by their “numerous qualities both physical and moral – such things as personal cleanliness, cold baths, a fondness for games and sports, a code of honour and truthfulness in speech.”⁸⁷ Bradley combined the notions of racial attributes (the distinctive traits of the Nordic race) with cultural and ideological components (the fondness for sports and honourable behaviour). His emphasis on moral factors as part of the Nordic racial profile is significant because when the Medical Sub-Commission listed the requirements that a potential “B” licence candidate had to meet, the first one was “good family and personal history ... Absence of any mental, moral or physical defect which will interfere with the safety of air navigation.”⁸⁸ Since, in the racialized thinking exemplified by Bradley’s text, only Nordics were genetically free of defects, the ideal pilot’s body was a Nordic one. Garsaux, as a Frenchman (supposedly Alpine), might have disagreed, but he would have recognized the sentiment. The notion of a French race was wedded to bloodline in a slightly different way than it was for English thinkers. In early-twentieth-century France the falling birthrate, blamed on effeminate French men and individualistic and therefore childless French women, could be countered by “judi-

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cious mixing” with non-French people, provided they were of compatible “blood.” Other Alpine races were considered compatible, while Mediterraneans were not.⁸⁹ Thus, while the British representative may have approved the medical requirements on the assumption that they would exclude all but Nordic candidates, the French representative may have equally assumed that only Alpine candidates would meet the requirements. The second claim that Bradley made concerned Nordic women’s bodies. He wrote approvingly of “the physically admirable woman of the upper classes with her love of sport and athleticism, her defiance of petty convention, and her fine scorn of intellectualism.”⁹⁰ It was this type of physically admirable woman who was, to a certain extent, the type eventually approved of by the Medical Sub-Commission when they acknowledged that British women were not debilitated by their menstruating bodies.⁹¹ It was also a type into which Lady Heath, who passed the medical examination for the “B” licence, fitted quite well: she was sporting, apparently upper-class, and vigorously defiant of all convention. But Bradley contradicted his own assessment of the Nordic woman elsewhere in his text. He depicted Nordic women as somatic and emotional monstrosities. “Tall, thin and athletic of body, with narrow, high-bridged noses, they are more suited to the hunting-field than to the drawing-room or the marriage-bed. As wives they are dominating, haughty and conservative and responsible for much trouble.”⁹² He described them as repellent to Englishmen and to European women. “Generally their gaucherie and bad dressing are resented both by French and Italian women, and even the finer types of our womanhood offend by their athleticism and maleness. The Italian woman cannot understand their flat figures and their desire to walk.”⁹³ He linked the Nordic woman’s racialized body to her cultural characteristics and condemned both. The “masculine” woman that he pictured lacked the crucial feminine accomplishments that would make her a pleasant companion for a man. This figure appeared in the Sub-Commission discussions. She represented the woman pilot who had, in di Nola’s words, “little or nothing in common with the women we see moving around in everyday society.”⁹⁴ The racialized qualities that defined her as a competent commercial pilot embodied her as masculine.

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Women’s Challenge: Maternal Power The contradictions between Flack’s and di Nola’s comments suggest how race and nation were in the process of being gendered amid interwar changes. While di Nola insisted that women had one explicit maternal role to the express exclusion of any other, Flack suggested instead that certain women, by virtue of their genealogical and ideological lines of descent, could take on nonmaternal roles. Appeals to genealogy, ideology, and eugenics combined to form the idea of an ethnic community intersecting in one particular place: women’s bodies. Women were held responsible for biologically reproducing the national body – through producing babies and through passing their blood on to them – and for transmitting community norms and values to children.⁹⁵ Seeking alternative roles meant negotiating the discourses of embodiment, which is exactly what Stella Wolfe Murray did. In her discussion of the “B” licence ban, Murray noted with cynicism that “it is not difficult to guess how the ban came about, though of course it will be denied – and probably by some of the very same men that helped to impose it.”⁹⁶ She refuted the arguments that the Medical Sub-Commission had advanced. She started from the equally essentialist premise that women were in fact naturally better suited to the rigours of flying than were men because they were physically, temperamentally, and culturally different from men. Male pilots, she averred, “were not and are not blind to the woman’s natural advantages of lighter weight, lighter hands (very important for flying), and greater endurance of cold – the average man would shiver if obliged to wear the exiguous clothing that keeps a woman warm in winter. She is likewise less unhappy if unable to smoke and is less dependent on alcohol than some male pilots I have seen.”⁹⁷ Even more significant than these physical and cultural characteristics was woman’s maternal power. Murray described this power as “all the driving force of maternity unused that she brings to her work when she can sublimate her sex instincts properly.” Careful not to propose a radical shift whereby women turned their backs on their natural roles of marriage and motherhood in order to fly, Murray suggested instead that circumstances made

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such a shift inevitable. “Deprived of the right of motherhood and doomed to enforced celibacy by the ravages of war, as are so many thousands of girls to-day ... she can put all that marvellous creative power, that tremendous endurance that enables mothers to undergo the agony and fatigue of childbearing and child-rearing at one and the same time, the modern girl can transmute all that power towards her chosen career, be it aviation or any other.”⁹⁸ Her argument referenced virulent debates taking place in Britain over uncontrollable single young women who had some transient economic independence from men, the spectre of female redundancy, and unsettled gender roles that seemed to make masculine women and feminine men the order of the day. There was some basis to these debates. In 1921, 36.8 per cent of females over fifteen had never married, and 44.8 per cent of girls aged fourteen to fifteen were in full-time employment. One estimate puts the number of “surplus women” after the war at 1,920,000, although there had been more women than men since 1802.⁹⁹ The Daily Mail newspaper ran an “anti-flapper vote” campaign against the equalization of the franchise from 1927 to 1928, articulating a fear of the potential socialism of young working women.¹⁰⁰ Building on these contemporary concerns, Murray suggested that conditions forced women to look for meaningful occupations instead of marriage. Murray’s apologia for women’s economic freedom and their right to commercial airspace was carefully heterosexist. Motherhood was, in her terms, not so much a duty as an entitlement, the only object of a woman’s life, while lesbianism (whether as a mother or not) was not even a possibility – the modern superfluous girl had to make do without motherhood and intimacy. Women therefore had a unique power that circumstances made available and that made them fitter to fly than men. Murray utilized two notions of gender. She argued that “woman’s power of endurance and occasional even greater driving force, by reason of maternity unused,” referred to “the modern girl of the present generation, not someone in the early forties like myself, wrongly and unhygienically brought up according to Victorian ideas.”¹⁰¹ Her argument thus slipped between an understanding of gender as biological (the force of maternity unused) and as socially constructed (women were unhygienically raised in an earlier period). This second definition was similar to that used by Flack. Murray’s 78

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combined definitions of gender enabled her to implicitly refute any suggestion that because some women might not be able to fly, no women should be allowed to. She also countered the maternal argument with a twist: she argued that it was precisely their powerful but sublimated maternal force that made women (not mothers) ideal transport pilots. Having asserted that young women were naturally and culturally better fitted than men to fly and that circumstances beyond their control forced them to seek work, Murray turned her attention to the reason that men gave to stop them. The generic medical man “naturally picked on woman’s main physical disability, as he has always done from time immemorial”: her menstrual cycle. Murray excoriated this tactic since “by his greater medical experience throughout the centuries, he could have long ago helped her overcome it by a wider and freer existence and saner living.”¹⁰² In that most modern of activities, harnessing nature to social needs, man had long stymied progress and kept woman trapped by her body. The excuse that men used was no excuse at all, in other words, since menstruation’s persistence as a disability was a social construction perpetrated by men. Murray could question this menstrual trap because this was a period when menstruation was being modernized¹⁰³ and when expanding numbers of middleclass British women were, as Flack made clear, increasingly encouraged to remain active during menstruation. Murray’s commentary came after the fact, of course. The ban itself “was not given any publicity,” and Murray states that women pilots continued to learn to fly under the erroneous assumption that they would be able to secure the “B” licence.¹⁰⁴ She went as far as to suggest that the decision was so little publicized that even the British air minister, Sir Samuel Hoare, might not have known about it as “he was at that moment [in 1925] making speeches encouraging [women] to learn to fly in the then newly formed Light Aeroplane Clubs.”¹⁰⁵ The following year Murray spoke about the ban to Sir Sefton Brancker, the director of civil aviation, remarking that “women could not be kept out of the air any more than they could be kept off the ground, to which he agreed, making generous tribute to women pilots.”¹⁰⁶ Brancker had earlier supported excluding women. His contradictory comments perhaps signal shifts in the ways that women represented England’s modernity as the campaign for equal suffrage neared its conclu79

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sion. In a speech made by Hoare to the ICAN in April 1927, as the ban was being rescinded, he argued that “at a moment when the British Government were engaged upon giving equal rights to women on the ground, he was naturally sympathetic to the proposal to give them equal rights in the air.”¹⁰⁷ But his choice of phrasing emphasized that there were different spaces in which women would or would not be given equal rights by state representatives, of which commercial airspace was one.

Conclusions International aviation legislation provided a bare framework of rules and regulations for airspace to which all signatory states agreed. At the international level it would have been unacceptable to legislate against French women pilots but in favour of British women pilots. In part this was because of the difficulties of enforcement since a woman legally flying passengers from Lympne Airport in Kent would be breaking the law once she crossed the Channel and arrived above Le Bourget Airport in Paris, for example. But it was also because such distinctions would imply national hierarchies that could ferment political crises. Instead, each signatory state could make such provision as was deemed necessary for the licensing of their own national subjects or citizens once their representatives left the ICAN offices at 20 Avenue Kléber in Paris, in June 1927, as long as they adhered to ICAN minimum standards.¹⁰⁸ When he raised the question of the competency of women pilots, what exactly was Garsaux protecting? National reputations? Airspace? Employment prospects? Wombs? Wage levels? Insurance premiums? The masculine mystique? Certainly, attempts to redefine interwar gender roles in Britain, the dominions, and Europe generally, anxiety over masculine women and breadwinning, natalist policies, fear of race suicide, and women’s struggles generally to gain various forms of independence suggest that the answer is probably all of the above. What started as apparently one Frenchman’s determination to exclude women from paid employment provoked broader anxieties over female bodies in commercial airspace. Women’s bodies possessed a distinctive

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corporeality that was used to (naturally) render them incompetent to pilot. For Colonel Heald and Dr Garsaux, all women undoubtedly lacked muscular strength and possessed a tendency to hysteria. Once Heald had been replaced by Flack and once di Nola and Tsurumi took their places in the Sub-Commission, these initial assumptions shifted to the discourse of women’s bodily functions and their gendered representation of national, racial characteristics. In their deliberations and policymaking, gender and race and to some extent class constituted who occupied, controlled, and produced commercial airspace. When the Medical Sub-Commission put forward their resolution on Item 5/8 in 1924, it read that “women are excluded from any employment in the navigating personnel of public transport aircraft.” The larger body of the ICAN proper decided to alter the resolution to read instead that a “B” licence candidate “must be of the masculine gender.”¹⁰⁹ In 1924 commercial airspace was unproblematically masculine. Martin Flack’s subsequent insistence that vigorous British women should have access to commercial airspace was more than just his department’s response to Lady Heath’s lobbying efforts. It was also an attempt to ensure that the bodies in commercial airspace were appropriately raced and classed as well as gendered. His insistence that the British menstruating body, or body-as-British-machine, was faultless – unlike the other imperial models – suggests that struggles to assert imperial racial superiority were played out through the complex articulations of gender, class, race, and nation in the debates over the “B” licence ban. Although the ban was rescinded, its effects remained in place because the new regulations continued to define women as different from men and required them to submit to more frequent medical examinations. This made them unattractive to employers. Despite their efforts, then, women pilots and their supporters were ultimately unsuccessful in challenging the naturalization of commercial airspace as masculine. The pre-existing spaces of oppression stretched all the way up into the sky.

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Introduction In an attempt to drum up sponsorship for her proposed England to Australia fl ight, Amy Johnson wrote to the United Empire Party in March 1930 with a rhetorical question: “Do you not think a ’plane named ‘Spirit of England’ flown through our Dominions would capture the hearts of the general public and ‘do its bit’ towards Empire Unity by bringing the Mother Country into closer contact with them?”¹ Her question indicates the existence of another form of airspace in addition to the private and commercial forms. This third form was imperial airspace. This type of airspace was seen, by Johnson and many others, as a means of knitting the British Empire closer together to create “time-space compression.”² Six years later, when Jean Batten landed in New Zealand at the end of the first direct fl ight there from England, she remarked, “I had nowhere else to fly to. I was at the journey’s end.”³ For her, imperial airspace was an imaginative realm mapped onto a material base. The material base was the location of New Zealand at the Antipodes. To fly any farther than the Antipodes would of course be to fly back toward England, albeit via the opposite route. In this sense, there

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was indeed nowhere left to which one might fly. Imperial airspace signalled the imaginative limits to possible routes and destinations. As an imaginative realm it was a world filled with adventurous possibilities, a world that Batten and Johnson, among others, acknowledged had influenced their dreams. The effects of the “B” licence ban had already placed material limits on women pilots’ access to this new airspace regardless of the imaginative limits they placed on themselves. In 1924 Imperial Airways Ltd was incorporated in London, England. This was the state-subsidized monopoly that ran British imperial commercial aviation until 1936. Although a handful of private British airline companies had attempted to develop European routes prior to the incorporation of Imperial Airways, the company’s establishment signalled the systematic production of British imperial airspace through commercial (in addition to existing military) means.⁴ As its name suggests the airline focused primarily on British Empire routes, providing airmail and passenger services. It did not employ women pilots. It is not clear whether this was a policy, a custom, or an outcome of the differential medical requirements for “B” licence pilots, which made women uneconomical employees. Whatever the reason, the resulting lack of jobs on empire routes for women pilots forced them to seek alternative opportunities to fly in the empire. (A very small number of British companies, mostly owned by women, did employ women pilots in Britain.) One of these alternatives was the long-distance record-breaking flight. This was a flight that carved out an unflown route, covered an existing route in a shorter period of time than anyone else, or was flown by a woman for the first time. Examples of such flights included Lady Heath flying from the Cape to Cairo, Mary Bruce flying around the world (crossing the oceans with her Bluebird crated), Amy Johnson flying from England to Australia, and Jean Batten flying from England to New Zealand. The very existence of imperial airspace – made possible in part through the infrastructure that supported Imperial Airways and, outside the empire, other airlines such as the Dutch KLM – created the conditions for longdistance flights by private pilots. Many such flights were undertaken by both men and women, and women undertaking long-distance imperial flights

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helped to create British imperial airspace while at the same time challenging the articulation of gender within it. Imperial airspace was more complex and unwieldy than other forms of airspace. It had multiple constituent parts that need untangling. These include the constraints on imperial airspace effected through regulations, as well as the role of this space in communication and time-space compression. Because for many British subjects the empire was a place of adventure, when women and men entered this space they created adventure stories to explain what it was that they were doing. But adventure was dangerous terrain for a woman. It opened her up to the charge of being an adventuress, a fate suffered by Amy Johnson. In addition to being an adventurous space, imperial airspace was also corporate. Companies used imperial rhetoric to justify their penetration of this space, and just as adventuring women had to take care over how their actions were interpreted, so women in corporate-sponsored imperial airspace struggled to control their image and finances.

Defining and Regulating Imperial Airspace During the interwar period Commonwealth countries increasingly defined themselves as separate from the metropole and continued to articulate distinct national identities. As the relationship between the metropole and the dominions shifted, officially in the Statute of Westminster in 1931,⁵ legislative links to Britain remained important, as fierce debates over the nationality of “British” women who married “foreigners” demonstrated.⁶ In addition, as Britain’s relative economic power declined, many British politicians felt that “the chief hope for the preservation of Britain’s great power status and its social structure lay in closer relations with the Englishspeaking Empire,”⁷ and “growing importance [was] attached to the Empire as a trading bloc.”⁸ Integral to the reworked political and economic order was a changed spatial order. As flights made Britain appear to be closer to other parts of the empire than ever before, Commonwealth inhabitants felt pressure both to embrace the imagined homeland and simultaneously to define their distance from it. The extent to which this tension was experienced varied from Dominion to Dominion. After all, “Dominion nation-

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alism and imperial patriotism were far from incompatible feelings,” and these feelings were bolstered by material concerns. The “market provided by the British economy, the investment provided by the City of London, and the protection provided by the Royal Navy” combined to encourage the dominions to “remain part of Britain’s imperial system” to greater or lesser extents.⁹ In this imperial context airspace formed part of an economic realm of exchange, which mixed together imperial, national, corporate, and ideological spheres. It came into existence via tickets, petrol, gasoline and benzol mixtures, contracts, aircraft manufacturers, women making aeroplane wings,¹⁰ legislative controls, national prestige, engines, ground crew, aerodromes, Imperial Airways, colonial airlines, the Royal Air Force (R AF ), and aircrew training and licensing. Military imperial airspace had created the possibility of “control without occupation,” a phrase used by Sir Samuel Hoare, British secretary of state for air during the 1920s.¹¹ This phrase referred to the policy whereby the R AF took over from land-based forces responsibility for more cheaply policing mandated and imperial territories. As Colonel the Master of Sempill argued, “it must be remembered that in the case of the ‘police’ squadrons, such as those in Iraq, they are saving the taxpayer vast sums of money, for Army occupation of a country such as this would be a terrible expense.”¹² The phrase suggests the shifting relationship between territory and occupation that imperial airspace made possible. Civil and military imperial airspace also somehow promised to link disparate parts of the globe, to enact time-space compression. This phenomenon facilitated “the value of air transport to business”¹³ and was summed up by contemporary commentators in the phrase “farewell to time and space!”¹⁴ Airspace also changed over time – which is true of space generally. Thus the meanings of imperial airspace changed as geopolitical, economic, gender, and race relations shifted.¹⁵ Imaginative and material, imperial airspace was governed by international regulations. The Convention Relating to International Air Navigation, produced by the International Commission on Air Navigation (ICAN ), had three articles that affected the ability of pilots to fly aeroplanes

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(or airships) along the most direct routes between two points.¹⁶ Article 1 stated that the “High Contracting Parties recognise that every Power has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the air space above its territory ... the territory of a State shall be understood as including the National territory, both that of the mother country and of the colonies and the territorial waters adjacent thereto.” Article 2 clarified that each contracting state would during peace time “accord freedom of innocent passage above its territory ... without distinction of nationality” to the aircraft of other contracting states.¹⁷ Article 15 explained that aircraft could “cross the air space of another State without landing,” in which case the aircraft would “follow the route fixed by the State over which the flight takes place.” In addition, this article specified that “the establishment of international airways shall be subject to the consent of the States flown over.”¹⁸ These regulations meant that aircraft were obliged to fly along routes that were dictated by the political imperatives of other nations. In particular, this affected the routes taken across Italy and around the Persian Gulf by Imperial Airways.¹⁹ Squabbles over activities that represented national or imperial prestige also affected the granting of permissions since many politicians regarded airlines as “high-profile national flag-carriers, rather than as a means of transport.”²⁰ This occurred in the late 1920s, for example, when the Dutch were attempting to fly airmail to India. In the context of interimperial rivalry, “both the Air Ministry and the British government in India, rather over-conscious of imperial prestige, regarded it as unthinkable that the Dutch should launch a service to India before the British,” so they were obstructive in the granting of permissions.²¹ Similarly, a member of Parliament voiced concern in the British House of Commons over the service that Pan-American Airways planned from the United States to New Zealand and on to Australia. “Is it not a pity that Imperial Airways is not the service that is connecting Australia and New Zealand?” she lamented, noting with anxiety that Pan-American Airways and Deutsche Luft Hansa already had successful routes in China: “I do not think we can afford, either from the point of view of our trade or of British prestige, to allow this [China] route to be captured entirely by an American service.”²²

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The provisions of Article 2 (the freedom of innocent passage) of the convention were “soon restricted to private international flying,”²³ and all commercial activities were governed by Article 15 (state control of international airways). At an international civil aviation conference in Paris in June 1929, the existing conditions of Article 15 were strengthened, which signalled an increased need for diplomacy in negotiating air transport routes. While international regulations appeared to differentiate only between types of aerial activity (private, military, or commercial), in effect they could serve to replicate prevailing assumptions about gender and the extent of territorial power. For example, women were not allowed to fly over the Sudan unless accompanied by men. The local people had killed a district commissioner in December 1927 and “had to be bombed into submission,”²⁴ which presumably left them understandably hostile to the symbols of their oppressors.²⁵ The Defence Department in Khartoum apparently claimed that the rule was necessary since women would be “flying over territory where we use aeroplanes for military and punitive purposes. You can’t expect the native below to distinguish between military aircraft and civil.”²⁶ This point would have been equally true for men pilots, however, and the same ban on them did not exist. Women were different, out of place in this fold of imperial airspace. Explanations by Defence Department officials for the ban coupled women’s presumed incompetence to their questionable worth in a statement of extraordinary contradiction: “It is not that we doubt the ability of these women to fly or the airworthiness of their machines ... I should like to say, however, that many of them have not had sufficient tuition, and the state of their machines is often appalling.” In the event of a forced landing, caused by their incompetence, the pilot would be taken prisoner by the native people. “In these parts a woman is worth only two goats, and would be promptly exchanged for them if there were any offers. That might be humiliating for some of these fliers.”²⁷ That the authorities were concerned about women in particular being shot down or captured by the local people indicates that they were subscribing to the complex discursive role that women played in imperial narratives. An empire’s failure to protect women was a measure of its own weakness

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as a collective force.²⁸ In this particular case the responsible authorities may also not have wanted to risk the publicity about a disappearing European woman since their own policies of bombing local people had killed and injured local women and children.²⁹

Communications and Time-Space Compression As aviation spread across the British Empire, as it did across the contemporary Japanese and other European empires, so did regulated airspace. In the postwar period the British Empire was larger than ever thanks to the acquisition of the mandated territories. It was thus more unwieldy and more difficult to control than at any earlier period of its history. The potential of aviation to counter this vast instability seems obvious in retrospect, yet commentators at the time noted that not all politicians believed that aviation had a future. Sir Alan Cobham, for example, wanted his airline, Cobham-Blackburn Air Lines Ltd, to be a key player in the development of African aviation. He complained that most of the ministers, politicians, and civil servants with whom he dealt “were middle-aged or worse and set in their ways, and if they didn’t actually look upon civil aviation as one huge joke, some of them came fairly close to doing so.”³⁰ The same was true of military aviation. Quite soon after the First World War the R AF justified its existence – in some desperation – by deliberately turning to the question of maintaining control in the dependent colonies and mandated territories on the basis of cost. This was a period when government appropriations to the three branches of the armed forces were being slashed, and both the Admiralty and the Army wanted the upstart Air Force shot down by Whitehall.³¹ Quite quickly, however, politicians grasped that airspace could be a crucial component of the British imperial project. Sir Philip Sassoon, British undersecretary of state for air from 1924–29 and 1931–36, made this clear in his account of a flight to India and back undertaken as part of his duties in 1928: “The chapter which Vasco da Gama opened, when he rounded the southernmost point of Africa and brought the Western European nations for the first time into direct communication with India and the East, closed

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when the genius of de Lesseps translated into reality the dream of the Pharaohs. Now a third chapter has begun with the demonstration of a Third Route to India and beyond, infinitely more direct than the first, still more direct and far swifter than the second, the way of the bird through the air.”³² Here, then, airspace was appropriated most explicitly into the discourse of imperial exploration and an imperial chronology that began with Portugal, continued with France, and reached its apogee with Britain. While aviation’s military applications were never far from policymakers’ minds, its role as a form of communication, its ability to bring disparate parts of the empire closer together, was continually emphasized as rationale for funding, flights, and fame seeking. Examples of this communications role are abundant. Hoare remarked that when he became secretary of state for air in 1922, he “knew nothing about the technical problems of air transport services, but as a Conservative who had been brought up in the days of Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Chamberlain and [Alfred, Lord] Milner, I saw in the creation of air routes the chance of uniting the scattered countries of the Empire and the Commonwealth.”³³ British parliamentary debates over financing in 1930 referred to the role of aviation in promoting “swift communication between the peoples in various parts of the Empire” and noted that there were “great opportunities and great need in the vast spaces of the Empire for the development of civil aviation.”³⁴ Debates over subsidies for Imperial Airways in 1936 included references to the “great work Imperial Airways have done in knitting together the Empire.”³⁵ Inauguration of the Empire Air Mail Scheme in 1934, in which all mail to the empire went – with some limitations – by air, was also part of this general and ultimately unsuccessful trend toward uniting the dominions and colonies into a strong, unified empire. As Sempill argued, “In this great work the air must play a part of ever-increasing importance, not only in bringing the Mother Country into closer and more intimate relationship with her daughters, but in promoting friendly relationships and commercial intercourse between the overseas Dominions and colonies themselves.”³⁶ Intimate intra-imperial relations would be possible because of airspace’s role in “time-space compression.” This is the idea, analysed by David Har-

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vey, that as regimes of accumulation change they alter the “objective qualities of space and time,” with the consequence that representations of space also change, notably under modernity.³⁷ In particular, as transport speeds up the movement of goods and people, the world appears to shrink. In his critique of Harvey’s technological determinism, the geographer Scott Kirsch complicates Harvey’s analysis by examining the relationship between changing technologies and the production of the spaces of everyday life.³⁸ Kirsch critiques Harvey’s fallacy of the incredible shrinking world, correctly noting that it was not shrinking for everyone. As Doreen Massey points out, “there is a lot more determining how we experience space than what ‘capital’ gets up to.”³⁹ While many contemporary commentators believed in the ability of transport innovations to shrink the world, others understood that the relationship between places was determined by more than simply the distances between them. As Harriet Camac discovered when she tried to book a seat on the Imperial Airways flight from India to England in 1929, not everyone was allowed to experience time-space compression. The Bombay office of Imperial Airways refused to accept her as a passenger because she was a woman, and they did not feel that the route was suitable for a woman.⁴⁰ Imperial airspace did affect the relationship between dominions, colonies, and the metropole and changed perceptions of time and space – but not in the linear manner that Harvey assumes. When Jean Batten landed in Auckland in 1936, having completed the first ever direct flight from England to New Zealand, she claimed that the portion of her flight from Sydney to Auckland would “help to correct the impression that the Tasman is a sort of English Channel”⁴¹ rather than imply that the flight had reduced the width of the Tasman to that of the Channel. Her actions alone would not achieve this, but their widespread reportage through the infrastructure of airmindedness would. After all, it took just twenty minutes – not ten hours – to fly across the English Channel. Her flight thus changed perceptions of the distances and similarities between different parts of the empire for people reading about her flight from elsewhere within it. Routing requirements could also alter the meanings of particular places. Hoare remarked that “certainly with the development of air routes, Corfu has become a point of great strategic importance. I had always thought of the island as a paradise

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of woodcock.”⁴² In 1928 Lady Heath flew an Avro Avian from Cape Town in South Africa to England with the express purpose of proving “that the organisation of such a flight could be made as well in the Colonies as in England” and that colonial aviation was the key to imperial success. “We in England,” she wrote with a typical imperialist flourish, “do not realise that Africa, at least the greater part, is ours, and that her great storehouse of mineral and agricultural wealth is ours if we like to take it and use it.”⁴³ What each of these examples illustrate is that airspace affected how relations between different parts of the empire were viewed. Distance through airspace was not simply a measurement of mileage but was also a measurement of aeronautical conditions. In the mandated territories, for example, the “distance between major air bases, measured in miles, was still multiplied in flying time by the intervening hazards of primitive landing grounds, rocky coastlines and long stretches of waterless desert ... [and] the limited range of aircraft.”⁴⁴ Meanwhile, although India and Australia were farther away from England in miles, Canada, Newfoundland, and Labrador were much farther away in airspace because they were on the other side of the North Atlantic Ocean.⁴⁵ Given the limited range of aeroplanes, it was therefore easier for an aeroplane originating in England to fly to India, utilizing airfields where it could refuel along the way, than to Newfoundland because there were (obviously) no airfields in the ocean. Time was also affected by imperial airspace. Cables and radio waves had already modified the temporal relationship between the metropole, colonies, and dominions, of course. The cable from England to Australia, for example, opened in 1871, meant that messages were in transit for fifteen to twenty-four hours rather than fifty-four days (by the swiftest ship).⁴⁶ However, while the cables apparently gave London greater control over distant offices, in fact the capital “still depended on men on the spot, who distorted the facts to suit their own ambitions.”⁴⁷ The same caution should be exercised in relation to imperial airspace, and in any case aerial innovations in communications were not necessarily welcomed. Cobham caustically remarked that when he tried to interest the secretary of state for India, Lord Birkenhead, in a proposed airline service between London and Karachi, Birkenhead laughed off the idea. As things stood, he “could send off

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a despatch to Delhi in the blessed certainty that he wouldn’t need to be bothered with any reply for some six or seven weeks,” and he had no wish for this to change.⁴⁸ The conjunction of airspace and already existing standard time, based on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT ), complicated the meaning of distance. The introduction of standard time in 1884 – so that it was possible to know that it was 11:30 A .M . in Wellington when it was midnight in London⁴⁹ – had contributed to the sense of a bureaucratized empire running (somewhere) like clockwork. The speed of air travel accentuated the way that standard time created a powerful impression of simultaneity. Stella Wolfe Murray, for example, in her account of a flight from England to India in 1929, notes that the “uninitiated” may have been startled that the clock in the aeroplane read 4 A .M . when they embarked at Cairo for the scheduled 6 A .M . flight to Baghdad. “But it is Greenwich Mean Time,” she remarks, “as late as six by the local time.”⁵⁰ Mary Bruce also commented on her fascination with the international dateline: “it is an imaginary line where all time begins and ends, according to Greenwich reckoning.”⁵¹ Batten noted the significance of GMT in her account of her 1935 flight across the South Atlantic to Brazil. By having one clock on her instrument board set to GMT, she was able to consistently calculate how much daylight she had left on each leg of her flight. This was because, as she said, “the time factor is a great problem on such long flights, for each place has its own local time, and as I was flying gradually westward – that is, travelling with the sun – I was actually gaining daylight.” She adjusted a second clock to local time at each stopping place, “for naturally the authorities at each aerodrome had to know my estimated time of departure in their own local time.”⁵² For Batten’s flight to succeed, she had to be fluent in the meanings of simultaneous time zones. One of these was for navigational purposes, in order to know where she was, and the other was for political and social reasons, in order to get things done when she was in a particular place. One clock positioned her in abstract space; the other located her in place. Overall, then, far from compressing time and space, imperial airspace added to the already complex network of times, spaces, and relations within the empire. The changes wrought by imperial airspace opened up new pos-

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sibilities, such as challenging metropolitan assumptions about the width of the Tasman Sea. Imperial airspace also created new possibilities for the construction of gender, and one of these was the possibility of adventure.

Stories of Adventure However diverse the times and spaces that coexisted in imperial airspace, it did have one consistent function. It provided the path to a destination, as Batten suggested. Without an empire there was, in one sense, nowhere to which one might fly. When the New Zealand author Robin Hyde’s novel The Godwits Fly was published in 1938, its central metaphor was that of the migratory bird. Hyde’s concern, expressed in her foreword, was that New Zealanders were behaving as though they were human godwits. “Our youth,” she argues “our best, our intelligent, brave and beautiful, must make the long migration [to England], under a compulsion they hardly understand ... though logically, living or dead, they ought to have the same compulsion to come back ... the godwits, I mean.”⁵³ By creating a relationship of centre-periphery, in which those at the periphery felt some pressure to seek recognition from the centre, the spatial relationship of empire created the conditions for travel, making certain journeys possible, obvious, even necessary. It also, of course, created the conditions whereby certain groups of people were forcibly displaced.⁵⁴ When Batten sailed for England in 1929 in order to take flying lessons, she replicated the trajectory of the godwits. She could, after all, have learned to fly in New Zealand or in Australia, but she chose to go to the other side of the world.⁵⁵ When she flew back in 1936, making the first direct flight from England to New Zealand, she completed a national narrative as well as a personal journey. Her flight formed part of the nation’s attempt to reimagine the spatial order of home and away, centre and periphery – or more explicitly, the very idea of the Antipodes. From Britain, on the other hand, the empire was a space into which to travel for adventures. Women found adventure once they had overcome the barriers erected to keep them out of imperial airspace. And once they had found it, they wrote about it. Existing adventure stories already in circulation limited the kinds

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of aerial adventures that women pilots could recount, but in the process of producing their own narratives the women partially modified the gendered boundaries of the genre. Existing stories recounted narratives of masculine development. Women pilots claimed that these narratives inspired them. The reciprocal relation between narrative and action, in which narratives stimulate actions that generate further narratives, meant that women pilots’ published adventures suggested new possibilities for women and challenged the gendered limits to adventure. The British Empire provided fertile ground for adventure stories, in addition to the more bureaucratic and scientific tales, reports, and documentation produced by military and corporate engineers, cartographers, scientists, and geographers.⁵⁶ These different kinds of documents generated diverse discourses around the meaning of the empire. A cartographer described it as knowable space, a scientist as profitable space, an engineer as defensible space. Together the various discourses added up to “Empire,” but it was an incoherent empire. Authors exploited this incoherence, the idea that there were different kinds of imperial experiences to be had, in adventure stories. Such stories changed over time as the contours of the empire shifted and the demands of the readership changed. Nevertheless, adventure stories utilized the idea of imperial spaces as masculinist spaces in which masculine adventures could occur. Meaghan Morris argues that “in the space of a boys’ own adventure, home is a feminized place of stasis that functions as beginning and end; the voyage, a masculinized phase of change and development, is the action in between.”⁵⁷ Significantly, most adventure stories came out of Britain rather than the colonies or dominions, so there were few colonial-grown adventure stories. Adventure stories produced historically and geographically specific discursive masculinities, and these helped to define what empire meant for different men.⁵⁸ The same, obviously, is true for femininities and also for ethnicities, “races,” sexualities, classes, and nationalities, all of which can arguably be linked back to assumptions about masculinity and femininity. Imperial adventure stories helped to produce a discursive relation of home and away (adventures took place in the empire), a cultural space for

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the reproduction of and possibly some resistance to hegemonic masculinities and hegemonic femininities (manly young men and helpless – if any – women), and a narrative structure in which a young man’s being (his race, gender, and age) is expressed through doing since adventure stories are based on actions and events. By the turn of the twentieth century British imperial adventure stories became “more secular and more violent, and in the context of evolutionary theory they became more racist” than prototypical versions of the genre.⁵⁹ This trend appears to have continued into books that had flying in imperial airspace as their theme. The Biggles series of books by W.E. Johns, for example, in which the main character, James Bigglesworth, is a pilot, certainly combined global reach with imperialism, evolutionary racism, interimperial rivalry, and inter-European racism in their plots.⁶⁰ The first Biggles stories were published in the new magazine Popular Flying between April and October 1932 and then appeared as a book, The Camels are Coming, in 1932. The Biggles stories “greatly encouraged the spirit of flying in young people.”⁶¹ Flights were incorporated into adventure narratives and in many cases clearly replicated imperial masculinities, even when the books were not aimed at a juvenile readership. In Wind, Sand and Stars Antoine de SaintExupéry recounts his experience as a mail pilot for the Latécoère Company (the forerunner to Aéropostale) flying between Toulouse and Dakar in the late 1920s. The English title of his book refers to a terrifying night that he and the crews of two other aircraft spent stranded in the Sahara Desert. The experience caused him to valorize the all-male airmail world for the way that it fostered courage and team spirit. “Games and risk are a help here. When we exchange manly handshakes, compete in races, join together to save one of us who is in trouble, cry aloud for help in the hour of danger – only then do we learn that we are not alone on earth,” SaintExupéry enthused.⁶² Equally, Sir Harry Brittain admired the exclusive, masculine world of airline pilots that he witnessed at Croydon: “It is difficult to get to know these airmen. They are all reticent and shy. And most of them drink coffee ... The sky is in their blood. And they have a camaraderie of the clouds such as is unknown to the men on the earth.”⁶³

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While the fictional world of Biggles and the fictionalized world of SaintExupéry provided paradigmatic imperial aerial adventure narratives, women’s aerial adventures made it into print too. In her study of both real and fictional women pilots, Mary Cadogan notes that “the popular image of Jean Batten certainly influenced writers of flying stories for girls.”⁶⁴ Cadogan gives the example of books by Dorothy Carter, the first of which appeared in 1936. At least one of these was serialized in the monthly Girl’s Own Paper. Pauline Gower, who went on to command the women’s section of the Air Transport Auxiliary during the Second World War and who later became one of the directors of the British Overseas Airways Corporation, also wrote short stories for the Girl’s Own Paper.⁶⁵ Batten herself wrote that she had read adventure stories and that they had a significant impact on her. “For many years books of travel and adventure had increased my enthusiasm and longing to travel abroad,” she wrote. “One school vacation had been spent in Sydney, but this experience only made me want to see more of the world.”⁶⁶ Lady Heath too imbibed the geography of adventure, arguing that the slogan “Cape to Cairo” “has always been the slogan of great adventure” and that “no nation can advance unless the old ideals of exploration and adventure are lived.”⁶⁷ Amy Johnson noted that she had been fed “since childhood on fairy-tales, stories of the Arabian Nights, Greek and Northern Mythology, and innumerable books of adventure of the Rider Haggard and Jules Verne type.”⁶⁸ Indeed, Johnson’s predilection for the perils of adventures stories apparently led her to fabricate a story about a near-rape that she claimed had occurred after she landed in Poland in January 1931. She resented being forced to retract her story after it had been investigated in 1933.⁶⁹ In a slightly earlier period than these women’s childhoods, “to stare at a map and dream of adventure was, in effect, to imagine transgressing British gender boundaries.”⁷⁰ These women wrote of reading stories rather than staring at maps, but the same dynamic was in effect. The recursive relationship between actions, the discourse of imperial adventure and imperial airspace, also appears in school recollections and scrapbooks. Muriel Bradshaw, then Muriel Innes, was a teacher at the Ladies College, Remuera, Auckland, which Batten attended. Recollecting her years there, she noted that she set all the girls in her class an essay

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based on Amy Johnson’s 1930 flight. She assumed (or misremembered) that Batten must have written the essay, but by 1930 Batten was in Britain, so clearly she could not have done so.⁷¹ Nevertheless, that Johnson’s flight was set as a topic for an essay in an all-girls’ school in New Zealand indicates that her actions provided an opportunity for New Zealanders to engage with the narrative of imperial adventure. Two scrapbooks deposited in New Zealand archives also attest to the impact of women’s flights. Joyce Prime, who learned to fly at the Wellington Aero Club after reading about Jean Batten’s 1934 flight, kept a scrapbook containing every item of news about Batten that she could find.⁷² Rito McKinnon also learned to fly at the Wellington Aero Club and also kept a scrapbook. Her scrapbook contained clippings about other members of the Aero Club, but McKinnon pasted a picture of Batten in pride of place on the second page, with no text, suggesting that Batten was an inspiration who needed her own page but no comment.⁷³ Female pilots’ exploits, inspired in part by the desire for imperial adventure, circulated in various forms (speeches, reports, columns, books, movietone newsreels, essay topics, scrapbooks, and unofficial biographies), inspiring more women. The geography of adventure, then, spilled “over into the ‘real’ world, into ‘real’ gendered subjects and spaces, inspiring merchants, investors, travellers, settlers and others to go out physically and become ‘empire builders,’” and it also “legitimate[d] these colonial acts.”⁷⁴ Discourses had a material impact that reciprocally produced more discourse. Indeed, Batten chose her route from England to Australia not on the basis of flying as a crow would, nor according to the availability of permissions to fly through foreign airspace, but on the basis of which imperial possessions she wanted to visit. “The island of Cyprus, Britain’s only possession in the Levant, had always intrigued me, and even as a child I had looked at it on the map of the world, where it appears only as a tiny red dot at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and resolved to go there if ever I had the opportunity ... [this] meant travelling many hundreds of miles further than the route across Europe and Turkey, but enabled me to visit these places I had always longed to see.”⁷⁵ Visiting an island is not, obviously, in itself an imperial act. But Batten’s rationale reveals the sense of geography generated through

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the British school system – she writes of “Britain’s only possession” and the “tiny red dot.” Given that she was an expert navigator (widely regarded as the best in the world), her reference to the tiny red dot is revealing. It demonstrates that Batten read maps in different ways, sometimes to locate herself geographically, in relation to other places, and sometimes to locate herself firmly within the British Empire with external referents removed. In this second capacity she utilized the “map-as-logo,” in which each imperial colony “appeared like a detachable piece of a jigsaw puzzle ... Pure sign, no longer compass to the world.”⁷⁶ That Batten related herself to the mapas-logo indicates her own complex position as both national and imperial subject as well as the subtle links between geographies of adventure and school geography. Rather more self-important texts, particularly those written by passengers, not pilots, such as Sir Philip Sassoon’s The Third Route, instilled the romance of adventure by discussing the remarkable perspective on the past created when ancient sites were flown over.⁷⁷ Such texts engaged in a wellworn narrative strategy – a sort of Cook’s Tour via the air – that made them both travelogues and adventure yarns rolled into one.⁷⁸ That the purposes of all these flights were often threads in the fabric of imperial control – mail flights in the case of Saint-Exupéry, administrative visits in the case of Sassoon – also links them to the pseudo-scientific narratives of imperial geographers. Just as Batten’s comments on Cyprus linked school geography to the geography of adventure, so narratives of long-distance flight linked the geography of adventure to the bureaucratic detail of imperialism. Other accounts blended the geography of adventure with the geography of racism. Particularly suggestive are the words of Mary Bruce. After a forced landing in Baluchistan in 1931, Bruce tried to work out how to keep the local “chief and tribesmen,” who had arrived to examine her crash, from abandoning her in boredom to what would have been, for her, certain death. She had recorded advice, gleaned from people in England before commencing her flight, in a notebook, so she took it out and “turned to the paragraph headed ‘Treatment of Savages.’”⁷⁹ Although she was clearly grateful for their civility, which kept her alive, Bruce expressed no sense of doubt at identifying them as savages. Later in her trip Bruce noted with

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disgust that “numbers of the natives leered insolently at us” when she was driven through the suburbs of Calcutta and that the “inhabitants in the squalid part of the town had been particularly troublesome.”⁸⁰ In this context women pilots contributed to geographies of adventure. They set their experiences within a discourse through which millions of imperial readers could make sense of what was largely otherwise both unimaginable and, as so much long-distance travel was, really rather dull. Shortly after her arrival in Darwin, Johnson received a cable from the foreign editor of the Daily Mail in London, the newspaper that had bought the exclusive rights to her story: “First story very disappointing stop every word you write will be read by millions of readers stop give us your mental picture of every hour of your last crossing ... there are no picturesque ficts [sic] in what we have got up to now stop.”⁸¹ Batten, by contrast, had fewer difficulties producing adventure narratives. In Solo Flight, her account of her three attempts to fly solo from England to Australia, she recounts two incidents that occurred as she was flying over Syria. The first example is classic adventure in which the hero encounters life-threatening danger and, utilizing a combination of skill, instinct, and coolness, overcomes it. The second example demonstrates how Batten injects both suspense and humour into what is actually a tale of banal inconvenience. Drawing on the conventions of classic adventure, Batten wrote that her aeroplane was tossed about during a sandstorm. “I clung to the controls and succeeded in righting the machine just in time,” she wrote, “and pulling it out of the subsequent dive.” Realizing that she could not continue to fly through the violent turbulence, she claimed that she “scarcely had time to land on a stretch of hard sand, and to plug the air-intake and stubbexhaust pipes, when another sand-storm of equal intensity swept over the machine.”⁸² Such quick-thinking resourcefulness stood her in good stead when she was confronted with what she presented as the next catastrophe: a tin of pineapples and no tin opener. In order to pierce the tin, she found a stone with which to hit a spanner. “Almost running back to the ’plane, and seizing the tool kit, I gave that tin such a mighty blow that the top was gashed in and it was possible to drain the juice and poke some of the

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pineapple out with a small spanner.” She wryly noted that “it must have looked rather humorous to see me struggling with that tin of pineapple in the middle of the desert, about 90 miles from civilisation.”⁸³ If Batten’s narrative invoked both typical and humorous notions of adventure, some airminded authors defined adventure more broadly as the capacity for modernity, independence, and work. The explicitly gendered benefits accruing to English women pilots who had a taste for imperial adventures were not lost on Murray. In her critique of the “B” licence ban, she had argued that women’s unused maternal power made them excellent pilots. The empire, however, provided her with a slightly more conventional suggestion for those women whom she had earlier described as “doomed to enforced celibacy.” After all, she asserted, “there are too many women on our island! Nearly two million women of marriageable age more than men! So the girl who wants to try her wings must somehow find the courage and the capital to sally forth to the wider and freer spaces where any and all air pilots will be welcome, be they men or women. She need not go beyond the bounds of the British Empire unless she wants to. It covers a quarter of the globe and with the brilliant examples of Lady Heath and Lady Bailey in Africa, and Mrs. Keith Miller in Australia, nobody will be shocked at the thought of a woman pilot again.”⁸⁴ For such an airminded proselytizer as Murray, imperial aviation thus promised to solve one of Britain’s chronic problems, a surfeit of women, in two ways. Imperial airspace could absorb these women and supply them with the career opportunities missing from the metropole. Better still, since marriage remained the ultimate destination of women in the interwar period, Murray’s solution combined heteronormative gender roles with imperial geographies of adventure. “To adapt herself to doing her job by flying would be to lead a happy and healthy life in pure air, in countries where eligible bachelors abound, which cannot be said of these islands. If you want to see the young men who are the backbone of Great Britain and the fathers of the coming generation, you must go out of it.”⁸⁵ The idea of sending women from Britain to the rest of the empire in order to maintain British stock and women’s class status, in addition to providing them with work opportunities in the absence of male providers, had a long history

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and had been part of the impetus behind the creation of the Female Middle Class Emigration Society, founded in 1861–62, and its successor, the British Women’s Emigration Association, founded in 1884.⁸⁶ The work of these private emigration organizations was supplemented (or supplanted) by the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, which provided assisted passages under the Empire Settlement Scheme and was designed to promote emigration to the empire in order to relieve unemployment and therefore the threat of socialism in Britain.⁸⁷ This Settlement Scheme was very much a solution to British and imperialist “problems,” of course, rather than those of the colonies or dominions. Quite apart from the wishes of Ma¯ori in New Zealand, for example, who may not have identified a need for yet more settlers determined to acquire their land, the scheme intended to reproduce the heterosexual unit as the basis of Dominion settlements and to maintain women’s role as domestic servants within these settlements. Participants in the scheme, however, were often able to subvert its intentions, gaining some independence once they had emigrated.⁸⁸ Murray appears to combine a sense of both discourses, of emigration for marriage and emigration for adventure, in her determination to convince women that imperial airspace was vast enough to accommodate them and could provide new answers to old questions.⁸⁹ Utilizing the conventions of adventure narratives, then, airminded texts such as Heath’s and Murray’s, books such as Batten’s and Bruce’s, and adventure stories such as Dorothy Carter’s and Pauline Gower’s collectively created a discourse of imperial airspace that combined imperialist sentiment with a taste for adventure. They insisted that this imperial airspace held possibilities for women. But women in this space could also be seen as adventuresses.

Regional Disturbances During her record-setting 1930 flight from England to Australia, Johnson’s actions compromised regional spheres of imperial control, particularly from the perspective of the British consul in Sourabaya (now Surabaya) and the acting British consul-general in Batavia (now Jakarta), both in what

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was then the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia). Figure 4.1 shows Johnson’s route through the region and the routes of the local airline, the Koninklijke Nederlandsch-Indische Luchtvaart Maatschappij (KNILM ). On 24 May 1930 the British consul at Sourabaya, J. Drummond Hogg, sent a confidential despatch to His Majesty’s principal secretary of state for foreign affairs at the Foreign Office in Whitehall, in which he expressed his grave concerns over Johnson’s flight and its negative impact, from his perspective, on Anglo-Dutch relations in the region. While the Prince of Wales, Lord Wakefield, and ultimately Johnson herself trumpeted the imperial significance of the flight, Drummond Hogg argued that it was at best a troublesome and at worst a dangerous case of irresponsible selfishness.⁹⁰ Drummond Hogg argued that “it is impossible to view an undertaking of this nature, coupled with the sex, youth and comparative inexperience of the pilot, with other than mixed feelings ... one is amazed that a girl alone should have got thus far safely in a machine of which the seating accommodation is scarcely roomier than a perambulator”; but he felt that the flight, amazing or not, was “foolhardy.” His justification for such harsh condemnation, at a moment when the empire was erupting into extravagant praise, came from his conversations with Johnson. In particular, he noted that in addition to her relative inexperience, “she had little or no idea of the magnitude of the undertaking or of climatic and atmospheric conditions in the tropical Far East.” He was also critical of her reasons for the flight, her explanation to the local press in Sourabaya that “she ‘wanted to make a name for herself in the flying world’ with a view to her future prospects and knew that this could be done only by performing some outstanding flying feat.”⁹¹ He implied that her desire to “make a name for herself” was a vaguely distasteful activity, the sort of behaviour eschewed by well-broughtup young women. The problem was that Johnson was an “adventuress.” “I hope I may be forgiven for writing this despatch which seems to deny the pioneering spirit for which we are justly famous,” he wrote, “but I feel strongly (and others here share my view) that adventuresses (I use the word in the good sense) like Miss Johnson should be protected against themselves and not permitted to venture alone upon such dangerous undertakings for purely selfish ends and with few other qualifications therefor than a dauntless courage. I 103

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pass over the trouble caused to foreign authorities en route, in this case the Dutch authorities in Java.”⁹² Drummond Hogg’s claim that calling Johnson an “adventuress” was not an insult was purely disingenuous. The term could only be an insult since the only sense it has is that of a scheming woman out to make her fortune, the very way he described Johnson. While he took the paternalistic view that she and other “adventuresses” like her “should be protected against themselves,” what he also seemed interested in protecting were his own relationships of political power in the region. He asserted his expertise against the metropolitan ignorance displayed by Johnson. “From Timor,” he explained to his superiors back in London, “the flight to Port Darwin is the most hazardous of all – a seven-hour flight over the Timor Sea, a stretch of water which master mariners describe as the most deserted on the globe, without a square inch of land anywhere and right off any shipping routes.” If Johnson had a forced descent there, it “would mean almost certain death,” he added.⁹³ The “trouble” that Johnson caused in Java was discussed at greater length in the despatch sent by H. Fitzmaurice, the acting consul-general in Batavia, to London on 28 May 1930, four days after Johnson had arrived in Darwin at the end of her flight. In his despatch Fitzmaurice described Johnson’s progress through the Netherlands East Indies after her departure from Singapore on 19 May, a period during which she went missing twice. He explained that by “nightfall no news of her had reached any aerodromes in Java except a rumour that she had been seen about 3.40 above the small town of Tegal, not far from Samarang, on the North Coast of mid-Java ... and an active search for her was commenced by the Naval and Military authorities, parties of troops having been sent out from Samarang after dark to search for her.” The authorities later found out that she had made an emergency landing at Tjomal, near Pekalongan, at about 4 P.M ., “but she unfortunately failed to notify either the Dutch authorities or British Consular officials until after 7 p.m.” The following day she flew to Samarang and from there was “escorted by the passenger aeroplane of the Koninklijke Nederlandsch-Indische Luchtvaart Maatschappij, which makes the journey daily, to Sourabaya.”⁹⁴

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Fitzmaurice listed what he found troubling about Johnson’s time in the region. According to him, she was unable to locate emergency landing grounds in the area – her landing at Tjomal was in front of a sugar factory rather than on the emergency landing ground at Bodeh, “only some five miles distant.” Johnson also failed to communicate her position to the relevant authorities; the Dutch naval and military authorities commenced a search for her because of this failure. Furthermore, the KNILM , the Netherlands East Indies airline, was already flying scheduled daily services along Johnson’s route, shown in Figure 4.1. Johnson’s subsequent actions underscored the trouble that her adventuring was causing. On her flight from Sourabaya to Timor on 22 May, Fitzmaurice claimed that “once again she failed to locate her landingground, and, missing Atamboea, made an emergency landing at Haliloelik, 20 kilometres to the south.” The acting consul-general noted that “once more the authorities had no news of her and anxiety was aroused as to her fate, and when next morning we were still without news the Naval and Military authorities made arrangements for extensive search measures, in Timor and the neighbourhood, including the despatching of naval aeroplanes from Sourabaya.” Constructing his own version of an adventure narrative, Fitzmaurice claimed that when the news finally arrived confirming that Johnson was safe, “it was just possible to cancel the search which had been organized before the ’planes left for Timor.” Furthermore, in his explanation of Johnson’s silence, he undermined her skill in successfully executing an emergency landing, making an aside in brackets that “she must be accounted extremely lucky in not damaging at least her machine.” He also implied doubt about her explanation for her failure to contact authorities in Timor, remarking that after her landing at Haliloelik she “was taken to a Mission house in the village, from which there was apparently no telephonic communication with Atamboea.”⁹⁵ If Johnson had caused nothing but trouble, the same could not be said of the Dutch. “I cannot speak too highly of the ready help which the Dutch on all sides have accorded to Miss Johnson,” Fitzmaurice enthused. The naval and military authorities had “gallantly not wished to criticise any remissness

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on her part.” Fitzmaurice also drew attention to assistance offered to Johnson by the KNILM , by the Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij, although they “were doubtless interested in the flight as the local filiale of the Shell Group,”⁹⁶ and by numerous private individuals, including the manager of the sugar factory at Tjomal and miscellaneous amateur aviators. “In short,” he concluded, “only this ready co-operation ... enabled her to complete her flight to Australia.”⁹⁷ Just as Drummond Hogg had done, although in different terms, Fitzmaurice called into question the image of a pioneering individualistic flight by drawing attention to the complex web of social and political relations on which Johnson relied. And from his perspective, she was not alone in stretching the resources of this web too far. Fitzmaurice expressed particular concern that “as in the case of nearly all recent England-Australia flights or attempted flights, this goodwill of the Dutch has once again been unduly trespassed on, and much avoidable trouble has been given to officials and others through the aviator’s failure to exercise due consideration for them.” He outlined four steps that pilots should take to keep the relevant authorities appraised of routes and changes to flight plans so that awkward incidents would not arise. “Had Miss Johnson followed these [suggested] lines a great deal of unnecessary trouble would have been saved to the Dutch authorities, British Consular officers, and many others, to say nothing of the undue anxiety which has been aroused.” Unlike Drummond Hogg, whose main concern was to prevent “adventuresses” from flying through his sphere of influence, Fitzmaurice positioned Johnson within the wider context of long-distance pilots, all of whom had demonstrated equally cavalier behaviour in the region. He listed the offending aviators and the despatches in which he had criticized them. They included Bert Hinkler in 1928 and a more recent attempt to fly from Australia to England made by two Australian aviators about which Fitzmaurice complained that his “latest information, up to the very afternoon of their arrival in Batavia, was that their flight from Australia had been indefinitely postponed!”⁹⁸ The irritation that the acting consul-general expressed over private pilots’ carelessness and thoughtlessness indicates the extent to which his diplomatic position was compromised by his task of representing the British government’s responsibility to its subjects.

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Fitzmaurice’s closing remarks about Johnson’s flight support this reading. He argued that the “intrinsic utility of her enterprise however is doubtful: its only value to the world generally would seem to lie in the advertisement it gives of the rapid progress civil aviation is making, which may well have its benefit to the revenues of air mail services. Against this we have to set the undue trouble which a singular individual risking her (or his) life in this particular manner can give to official authorities of a region like the Netherlands East Indies, who feel in practice, if not in theory, bound to take all possible measures to aid her if she does not arrive according to schedule.”⁹⁹ For apparently different reasons, he reached the same conclusion as Drummond Hogg. “Even admiration for the pioneer spirit, and pleasure in the fact that a British girl is the first woman to accomplish such a feat, can hardly restrain those who know of the hazards of aviation in the Far East from condemning such adventures.”¹⁰⁰ The flight was somewhat pioneering because scheduled services did not reach Australia from England at this time, and every aeroplane that departed from England with Australia as its destination was credited with bringing the possibility of a through service closer to realization. Regular round-trip services between London and Brisbane, jointly operated by Imperial Airways and Qantas Empire Airways, commenced in April 1935.¹⁰¹ The pioneer spirit, however, carried a faint whiff of absurdity when the image of Johnson in Jason, a tiny biplane buffeted by unpredictable and dangerous local weather systems, was placed beside the steady KNILM airliner guiding her along an already-surveyed air route. Here, Fitzmaurice’s remarks about Johnson’s incompetence – she could not find landing grounds, and only luck prevented her from having an accident – as well as his comments about the KNILM ’s daily flights suggest that just as Drummond Hogg had done, he was highlighting his regional expertise and contrasting it with the ignorance of the metropolitan adventurers, male and female. Their tiny aeroplanes and careless attitudes contrasted oddly with the ground organization of the KNILM ’s reliable scheduled airliner service operating large three-engined machines. From Fitzmaurice’s perspective none of these pilot adventurers understood what conditions were like in the Netherlands East Indies, in terms of aviation facilities, diplomatic considerations, or topographical factors and weather systems.

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Of course, Fitzmaurice may also have been expressing interdepartmental frustration. The Air Ministry was responsible for securing permissions for flights such as Johnson’s but was also responsible for blocking Dutch airmail routes in the region. As a representative of the Foreign Office, Fitzmaurice had to contend with the Dutch on the ground. The British Air Ministry and British government in India blocked proposals from the Dutch airline KLM to operate airmail services to India on the airline’s route from Amsterdam to Batavia.¹⁰² The British did not have suitable aeroplanes to fly the route since much of their approach to long-haul imperial air routes had been based on airships, not aeroplanes, a policy abandoned after the disastrous crash of the R101 airship on its inaugural flight to India in October 1930. From early 1929, a “somewhat reluctant Foreign Office was, after extended discussions, forced to accept the Air Ministry’s lead on civil aviation policy” and to participate in obstructing the Dutch.¹⁰³ This policy was so transparently obstructive that by 1930 embarrassed Foreign Office officials persuaded Air Ministry officials to change their position and authorize Dutch flights over British territory, provided that reciprocal allowance was made for the British to fly over Dutch territories when they eventually commenced through flights to Australia. These arrangements were negotiated in a series of notes exchanged between April and June 1930, with the KLM service authorized to begin on 1 October 1930.¹⁰⁴ Johnson’s flight, then, took place in the middle of these delicate negotiations between the Air Ministry, the Foreign Office, and Dutch officials. For both Drummond Hogg and Fitzmaurice, Johnson’s adventuring caused a very specific regional trouble based on imperial rivalries.

Flying Markets Imperial airspace was not just a place of adventure. Long-distance women flyers flew in and reproduced it as a corporate space – but one that contained both real and rhetorical elements of imperialism. This was obviously the case for airline companies, which were always struggling to generate profit even when in receipt of state subsidies and were charged with respon-

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sibility for improving imperial links, but the relationship between profit and imperialism became more complicated when individual women attempted to negotiate it. British pilots’ ability to fly around the empire depended on a number of factors, beyond the obvious possession of flying experience and a licence. Access to an aeroplane was clearly as important as the ability to fly it, but access to other goods and services was also necessary. This included access to petrol, oil, and aerodromes (or at least landing grounds) along the route, supplies and tools, permissions, maps, and appropriate clothing for relatively swift changes in the season, including clothes for flying in and perhaps some clothes for attending functions.¹⁰⁵ Money in various currencies was also necessary to pay for taxes, duties, sending cables, landing fees, hangar fees, and other expenses if services such as transportation to and from the aerodrome, food, and accommodation were not provided by the relevant high commissioner, British resident, or local authority. Maps did not exist for every part of all routes, and when they did they varied in quality and availability. Some could be obtained in Britain from the Automobile Association, some from other pilots along the way, and if all else failed there was always a “page torn from an atlas.”¹⁰⁶ Notwithstanding ICAN regulations, pilots had to obtain permission to fly over, and land in, the states along their routes before departing on their flights. Getting these was a task for the Air Ministry, Foreign Office, and Dominion Office, and pilots were obliged to place deposits of between £10 and £20 with the Air Ministry to cover the cost of obtaining permits and sending telegrams.¹⁰⁷ By carrying carnets, pilots avoided paying customs duties. A long-distance flight was clearly an expensive undertaking. Consequently, pilots without independent wealth sought sponsorship. Pilots’ primary concern was making money, even if this was a means to the end of taking off on fresh flights. Sponsoring companies regarded pilots as marketable commodities to whom they had purchased exclusive rights through contracts. The pilot’s role was to sell the company’s prestige. The rhetoric of imperial sentiment that appeared in parliamentary debates, newspaper accounts, and speeches given by the pilots themselves, however,

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did not reflect the primary motivating force of the companies backing the flights. The language of imperial communications was a convenient mask for corporate attempts to control imperial airspace. The single most significant sponsor of long-distance British imperial flights during the 1920s and 1930s, and even earlier, was Lord Wakefield of Hythe, owner of C.C. Wakefield & Co., which produced Castrol Oil. According to the New Zealand Herald, he was known as “the father of English aviation” and “was associated with nearly every important event in flying from 1909 and is said to have given over £5,000,000 in contributions toward British air prestige.”¹⁰⁸ He financed many long-distance British imperial flights in order to bolster imperial connections, including the early flights by Sir Alan Cobham that had a major effect on British imperial airmindedness. As a businessman he also realized the importance of advertising and hence the potential profit from sponsorship of pilots. Other major sponsors were newspapers. The Daily Mail of London was one of the most significant. Its editorial policy focused on imperial politics and spectacle: indeed, from its inception it had described itself as the “Voice of the Empire.”¹⁰⁹ It had also sponsored or offered prize money for a number of flights as part of its strategy of campaigns and stunts designed to boost circulation. The top-selling daily until at least the early 1930s, with over two million copies, it also had a largely middle-class readership.¹¹⁰ It helped to foster the British middle classes’ sense of identity, persuading them that they were the “people of the country.”¹¹¹ This link, between the middle classes and the spectacle of empire, helps to explain why the Daily Mail kept the activities of middle-class pilots such as Johnson and Batten before its readership in a way that its stablemate, the Times, did not. Incidentally, the Daily Mail was not as quick as Lord Wakefield to recognize the publicity and circulation-boosting potential of Johnson’s 1930 flight to Australia. Whereas Wakefield sponsored Johnson before she set out, the Daily Mail got involved only once she was well underway.¹¹² In this context, Jack Humphreys, the mechanic who tutored Johnson as she studied for her ground engineer’s licence, wrote to her father, Andrew, who was responsible in her absence for negotiating contracts. “Her stories, etc., are worth a good deal of cash to her,” he asserted “and since they would not help before

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they must pay afterwards ... rub it in, making them realise, all that this brave lass is doing.”¹¹³ Andrew Johnson was eventually able to procure a contract worth £10,000 for his daughter. Cutting the best deal with sponsors or other companies wishing to cash in on the publicity value of their flights was a preoccupation for longdistance pilots in general. Some of the sponsorship was quite straightforward: a cheque in the mail from the sponsoring company or payment for oil and petrol along the route. After her record-breaking flight from London to Cape Town and back in 1936, Johnson received cheques for £2,000 from Wakefield and £50 from De Havilland.¹¹⁴ Other forms of sponsorship were more involved. The correspondence between Batten and Cyril Westcott, the Australasian representative for the Wakefield company, gives a sense of how much negotiation took place in order for a pilot to get paid for the use of her persona. In October 1936, for example, Batten told Westcott that she had written to the New Zealand Herald trying to clear up the confusion over which newspaper had purchased the exclusive rights to what part of her England to New Zealand flight. She had to “rely on their sense of fairness in assessing the value of the exclusive story” that she had given them.¹¹⁵ The Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Express, and the New Zealand Herald were apparently vying for exclusive rights to the Tasman leg, which was not, from Batten’s perspective, part of the England to Australia account already purchased. In the same letter, she listed other contracts or payments for endorsements that she or her New Zealand manager, Bob Smilie, had secured: Roma Tea, Bushells Tea, Airmen Tabacco [sic], Black and White cigarettes, the Australian Women’s Weekly, and the Telegraph. Negotiating a sum was one thing; receiving it was another. She thanked Westcott for his effort on her behalf in Sydney and remarked, “I am quite sure that if I had to get all these people to pay up I should still be waiting round for payment in 1940.”¹¹⁶ Her concern was well founded. After her flight from Australia to England in October 1937, she wrote to Jock Clarke, acting general manager of C.C. Wakefield & Co. in Australia, asking whether “Mr. Packer has paid the amount agreed upon for my story to Mr. Kelymac yet. You remember the amount was to be paid within one week of the completion of the flight.”¹¹⁷ By February 1938

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she was writing again, in frustration, asking for his advice. She had written to Packer, the newspaper magnate, twice more and still received no reply. “It is so terribly difficult trying to settle this thing when I am 12,000 odd miles away ... and I feel frightfully disappointed that after sending all those news cables through religiously at every stop on my flight sometimes when I felt dead tired that I have not yet been paid the amount agreed upon.”¹¹⁸ Consolidated Press did pay the same month, apparently after the intervention of Clarke on Batten’s behalf.¹¹⁹ If, for pilots, money was the main concern, for sponsoring companies prestige and product placement were paramount. The imperial airspace produced through long-distance record-breaking flights contained commodities – the lucrative persona of the pilot, the marketable spectacle of the flight, the machine itself, the sponsoring company logo painted on the fuselage, the oil and petrol within the machine. The commodities did not always perform as required, which could reflect badly on the company associated with them. In 1928, after sixteen local men paddled Alan and Gladys Cobham in a canoe to Grand Bassam on the Ivory Coast, 120 miles away from their disabled aeroplane, Cobham cabled Rolls-Royce asking for a new engine. “We phrased this cable cryptically, hoping to keep the failure of their old one a secret; the reliability of aircraft, and therefore of their engines, was a major part of what we were trying to sell.”¹²⁰ Much later, in 1937, Batten had to send a long explanation to Wakefield accounting for engine trouble in order to dispel any question of Castrol’s efficiency. She followed up the letter with a cable that the company could publicize. “As on all my previous flights,” it read, “Castrol X XL ensured perfect lubrication.”¹²¹ Imperial sentiment was being promoted through a variety of Britishbased initiatives during the interwar period. Empire Day (24 May, Queen Victoria’s birthday) was a prototypical example, first proposed in 1902. In New Zealand it was not a particularly well-observed day,¹²² but English organizations were undaunted in their efforts to popularize it. The Overseas League, for example, mounted a campaign for empire meals on Empire Day.¹²³ In a context such as this the struggle for companies like C.C. Wakefield & Co. and for pilots like Johnson was to present themselves as motivated by the desire for imperial progress rather than personal profit. John-

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son, for example, made this claim explicitly in her fundraising attempts. In a letter to Sir Thomas Polson dated 5 March 1930, Johnson asked the new United Empire Party to finance her flight.¹²⁴ “I am not out to make money,” she clarified, “I merely want to do my bit in spreading Empire Aviation, and incidentally to make a living.” Not convinced that her imperialistic plea would sufficiently move the party leaders, however, Johnson added a threat that would disrupt “Empire Unity.” If the party failed to deliver financing, she would “have to turn to some other country.” After all, “America respects her women pilots and gives them splendid opportunities and positions, and I have good reason to believe there would be keen competition among certain European countries for an available British woman pilot with such qualifications as I possess.”¹²⁵ For a company, sponsoring women made sense for two reasons. One reason, of course, was that they presented a spectacle. There were far fewer women than men making long-distance record attempts, and airspace was still largely defined as a masculine space, so women in it were both rare and unusual.¹²⁶ A second reason was that women were more constrained than men when it came to admitting that they needed money: if attempting a long-distance flight exposed a woman to the taunt of adventuress, then asking for payment risked her reputation even further. Johnson was characterized as the “gimme gimme girl” by segments of the Australian press in 1930.¹²⁷ Male aviator Charles Ulm could frankly name the profit margin that he expected to make on a specific flight,¹²⁸ whereas Batten had to circle around the issue of remuneration, asking Westcott to intervene on her behalf. Johnson had to claim that her attempt on the London to Cape Town record in 1936 was purely a sporting attempt, even while she suggested an exact sterling value for it.¹²⁹ How the commercial outcome of sponsoring women reflected on a given company was more delicate. During Johnson’s tour of Australia, Westcott warned the Wakefield head office that “it would be a great pity if anything occurred which would in any way diminish her prestige and the very high regard in which she is held by everyone throughout the world. By this we mean that she will probably receive very attractive monetary offers to appear on the stage, or in other ways commercialise her popular-

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ity. We are, however, of the opinion that she is of such tremendous value to the Empire that it would be a great pity if such commercialisation was allowed to take place.”¹³⁰ What exactly did Westcott mean by this? He was not a British resident or high commissioner sending a dispatch back to the Foreign or Dominion Offices in London. He was a regional representative of a corporation reporting on publicity. Johnson’s association with Castrol was already commercializing her popularity, so presumably both “commercialisation” and “Empire” had particular meanings in this context. Perhaps Westcott was anxious that his hard work in making Johnson respectable would be wasted if she took up vulgar offers that tarnished her femininity and made her profit motive more apparent. Equally, while his reference to “Empire” appears (from other references in the document) to be about the British Empire, it is difficult to distinguish here between imperial interests and the interests of C.C. Wakefield & Co. Perhaps he was keen to preserve the prestige that linked the Wakefield company to the empire through Johnson, prestige that would be soiled by other more tawdry exploitations of Johnson’s persona. The complicated negotiations between personal and corporate interests in and claims to the imaginative and material meanings of imperial airspace surfaced in relation to Batten too. When she flew across the South Atlantic in 1935, beating James Mollison’s record, the British government representatives in Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires all commented on the significance of her flight for British aircraft interests in South America. Hugh Gurney in Brazil remarked that because Batten had “youth and good looks, a singularly easy and engaging manner, a sense of humour and a clear and simple style of oratory,” she “won all hearts, Brazilian and British. Her exploit has,” he added, “strengthened interest in British aircraft, which, it is hoped, will lead to practical results.”¹³¹ E. Millington-Drake, writing from the British Legation in Uruguay, concurred. The “enthusiasm aroused by the achievement itself and by the attractive personality of the aviator will undoubtedly be of great help to us in our efforts to interest the authorities of this Republic still further in British aircraft.”¹³² Only the British air attaché in Buenos Aires raised the question of responsibility. Lionizing Batten was expensive, and the arrangements had to accord with the level of

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local enthusiasm. A poorly organized reception would reflect badly on the British. Like his colleagues, Group Captain Park acknowledged that Batten’s “courage and skill as a pilot aided by her youthful good looks roused spontaneous admiration among the many Argentines with whom she came in contact. This coupled with the excellent press given to Miss Batten undoubtedly raised anew interest in British aviation which it is hoped may lead to future purchases of British material.”¹³³ But Park pointed out that so many firms had an interest in the flight that the British Embassy ended up having to take charge of arrangements since none of the companies “knew which was the predominant partner.” In order to avoid such confusion in the future, he suggested either that “one commercial organisation could be made responsible for the financial and general arrangements in Argentina” or that such flights should “be officially sponsored by either D.O.T. [the Department of Overseas Trade] or the Air Ministry in order that the maximum value be obtained from the point of view of British propaganda and prestige in South America.”¹³⁴ The Air Ministry in Britain dismissed Park’s idea, even though they acknowledged that “the people who stand primarily to gain from such flights are the aircraft manufacturors [sic].”¹³⁵ The ministry explained that they already “recognised certain bodies, viz: the Automobile Association, the Royal Aero Club, the Asiatic Petroleum Co., Ltd., and Edward Stanford Ltd., as ‘authorised’ agents for civil pilots undertaking long distance flights.” As this arrangement was working well, the ministry was “somewhat loath to disturb it. (Recently for instance the Automobile Association paid the fine inflicted on a pilot for an inadvertent oversight by the Association in arranging the flight).”¹³⁶ This exchange over whether those who benefited from flights were responsible for all the arrangements indicates just how complex the personal, political, and commercial connections were. After all, Batten benefited financially, yet no one suggested that she was solely responsible. The propaganda element of these assessments points to the demands of imperial prestige: a nebulous quality difficult to quantify. The number of aircraft ordered was an easier measure of the impact of her flight, but again while the companies clearly benefited from such orders, Britain did too. Women pilots may have been effectively shut out of the

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cockpits of national flag-carriers by the ongoing effects of the former “B” licence ban, but they still managed to fly the flag.

Conclusions Imperial airspace created markets for products and a place for adventures, while international regulations delimited its boundaries. Through timespace compression it promised disembodied, clockwork efficiency while delivering a complex reconfiguration of the relations of time and space. As a produced space, imperial airspace bore the imprint of its producers, and these included women, just as the earthly dimension of the empire was packed with female emigrants. Although in July 1928 Lady Heath very briefly secured a position as co-pilot on the KLM route from Amsterdam to Batavia, apparently she did not keep this position, and even if she had, the imperial airspace that she would have been producing would not have been British.¹³⁷ Women pilots who wanted to play a role in actively producing British imperial airspace had to find other, less formal ways into it than working as a pilot for an airline or flying for the R AF. Their solution – the long-distance flights by Bruce, Heath, Johnson, Batten, and other women – threw the meanings of empire, nation, and gender literally up in the air. The women had their own ideas about what imperial airspace was reproducing – the racist assumptions so dear to Bruce or the challenge to imperial geographies mounted by Batten, for example. They fought to present their visions within the gendered limits of the geography of adventure and of the marketplace. In the process they modified these limits, recomplicating the already complicated flows of meaning and power around the empire.

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Introduction On 16 October 1936 Jean Batten landed at Mangere Aerodrome just outside Auckland at the end of the first direct fl ight ever made from England to New Zealand. Although Batten made one more record-breaking fl ight from Australia to England the following year, her fl ight to New Zealand marked the realization of what she claimed was her ultimate ambition. She wanted to link the mother country with her homeland by air and promote airline services between the two places.¹ In a letter to her sponsor, Lord Wakefield, written from the luxury Hotel St George in Wellington a week after the fl ight, Batten noted that “words are inadequate to describe the scenes of my homecoming and my own people have placed my fl ight side by side in greatness with the discovery of New Zealand by the first Maori canoe and the voyage of Captain Cook.” They shared her joy in having completed the fi rst direct fl ight from “the heart of the Empire – England to the furthest flung dominion of the British Empire 14,000 miles away – it was the happiest moment of my life.”² Batten was a godwit who fi nally flew home.

1934

1935 1936 1937

1935 Equator

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While her flight can be read as a clear example of typical efforts to compress the time and space between England and Australasia, her flights and the meanings attached to both her and them by New Zealanders are also examples of how a woman produced national (New Zealand) airspace. She hoped that her flight would generate interest in New Zealand’s potential to be “not merely a terminus, but an important South Pacific junction where eventually air lines from Vancouver and San Francisco would connect up with the England-to-New Zealand service.”³ She was engaged in a great voyage of discovery that held significance in urban, national, and gendered terms. “We are inspired,” the Mayor of Auckland, E. Davis, wrote in a testimonial, “by the knowledge that you are an Aucklander and a woman. By your remarkable achievement you have brought great credit to your city and your country and everlasting honour to your sex.”⁴ The period of Batten’s record-breaking career, from 1934 to 1937, coincided with one of the most intense periods of New Zealand nationalism, and Batten brought both the quintessential New Zealander and the New Zealand nation itself into airspace. Batten made five record-breaking flights between 1934 and 1937: England–Australia, 8–23 May 1934; Australia–England, 8–29 April 1935; England–Brazil, 11–13 November 1935; England–New Zealand, 5–16 October 1936; and Australia–England, 19–24 October 1937. The flights are illustrated in Figure 5.1. In contrast to the principal flights of other record-breakers, four of Batten’s flights reproduced one trajectory: the route between England and Australasia. All of these flights were between the two hemispheres rather than remaining in one or the other. While her sense of herself as antipodean may have affected her choice of routes that linked both halves of the globe, her flight across the South Atlantic to Brazil in 1935 can also be seen as training for her all-important trans-Tasman flight the following year. Two of these flights, in 1934 and 1936, were from England to Australasia. Batten followed both flights with tours of New Zealand. The first, in 1934, followed the successful completion of her record-breaking flight from England to Australia. She landed at Darwin on 23 May 1934. Johnson was the only other woman to have made this flight solo, and Batten’s time of

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14 days, 22 hours, and 30 minutes beat hers by four days. The second tour, in 1936, took place after she had become the first person ever to fly direct from England to New Zealand. She completed that flight in 11 days, 45 minutes. Her record flights were sponsored by Lord Wakefield, but on both tours she was under contract to cinema groups: in 1934 to the Williamson Picture Corporation Ltd and in 1936 to Amalgamated Theatres Ltd. These two flights and the subsequent tours were assertions of gendered national identity. They contributed to two forms of national airspace, one created by internal connections and the other through external pressures. The tension between internal and external factors pulling the nation in opposite directions occurred in several ways, not just through Batten’s flights. From relatively early on European settlement and export trade by both Ma¯ori and Pa¯ keha¯⁵ created differing, sometimes conflicting, demands on the population and on the land. In the interwar period New Zealanders grappled “with the twin problems of geographical isolation and internal communications,”⁶ as they had done in earlier periods. The primarily British settlers achieved responsible government in 1856, which gave them control over all internal affairs except Ma¯ori matters, while external and Ma¯ori affairs were under the jurisdiction of the governor general and through him ultimately Britain.⁷ By the 1880s Ma¯ori were also split, broadly speaking, between internally and externally focused approaches to maintaining their political, economic, cultural, and spiritual power and autonomy. The Ma¯ori king movement, based around the Waikato region in the west of the North Island, was a movement set up in the 1850s that developed a form of Ma¯ori sovereignty. It looked inward, attempting to pull together disparate Ma¯ori groups into a relatively unified pan-Ma¯ori body.⁸ By contrast, just to the east tribes based in the thermal region in and around Rotorua, for example, encouraged external tourism in the region from the late nineteenth century.⁹ Through their roles as tour guides, they became the Ma¯ori that most visitors and foreign tourists encountered. Pa¯ keha¯ also split their attention between a sense of home that was internal to the nation and an external relationship to “Home,” meaning Britain. The distinction and tension between internal and external perspectives was therefore built into the state’s fabric.

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Batten, then, contributed to these internal and external issues of spatial orientation. The former articulated cherished notions of an evermore distinctive national identity. The latter signalled concerns about the security of that national identity in the face of overseas competition. Given that “it is men who claim the prerogatives of nation and nation-building [and] it is for the most part women who actually tend to accept the obligation of nation and nation-building,”¹⁰ emphasis on Batten’s gender as well as on her place in the nation – “you are an Aucklander and a woman” – meant that her creation of national airspace was gendered in ways that went beyond the more common practices of having children or cooking for a labouring husband. To explore these ways in which her nationalism was gendered, this chapter first examines three of the foundational myths that New Zealanders maintained and developed in their articulation of nationalism. These are the myths of the original waka (large ocean-going canoes) and the good race relations between the original Ma¯ori settlers and the later Pa¯ keha¯ ones; the relationship between “Home” and geographical distance; and pioneering pragmatism, especially by women. I then discuss the relationship between modernity, aviation, and the nation prior to Batten’s flights before analyzing her 1934 tour and arguing that it had a strong nationalist inflection that served to cohere the nation. Finally, her 1936 tour suggests that by this time increasing corporate control and internationalization of Batten created conditions whereby national responses were directed toward external threats rather than internal cohesion.

Foundational Myths New Zealanders had been articulating their own brand of what journalist Richard Jebb in 1902 termed “colonial nationalism”¹¹ since 1840, when the islands officially became part of the British Empire. But during the interwar period, after New Zealand’s troops had fought in the First World War, nationalism burgeoned. The devastating impact of the Depression raised questions about the Dominion’s economic dependency on Britain, while the Statute of Westminster, in 1931, raised questions about its legal connection to Britain. Writers, artists, and musicians increased their attempts to

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develop a national culture that ceased to look to England for guidance. Various projects begun in the 1930s and designed for the Centenary Celebrations in 1940 promoted self-reflexive thoughts about the distinct meaning of New Zealand, distinct not just from the metropole but also from other dominions such as Australia and South Africa. The idea of a distinctive New Zealand national culture was given high profile support by the governor general, Lord Bledisloe, and Alina, his wife, during their term of office in the Dominion between 1930 and 1935.¹² They contributed to recognition of the Ma¯ori king,¹³ and in 1932 they purchased the house at Waitangi in the north of the North Island that had been the original residence of the governor general. They donated the house to the New Zealand state. It was in Waitangi House that the Treaty of Waitangi had been signed in 1840, in both Ma¯ori and English versions, between the representative of the British Crown and over 500 tribal chiefs. Ma¯ori enjoyment of long-held agricultural, fishing, and hunting rights were supposedly protected under this document, yet successive New Zealand governments reneged on most of the provisions of the treaty, instead dispossessing thousands of Ma¯ori through a variety of means, including war, deceit, confiscation, and alienation.¹⁴ Nevertheless, it was generally regarded as the founding document that brought the nation into being, and Ma¯ori groups spent the following 150 years struggling to have the New Zealand and British governments honour the treaty.¹⁵ The Bledisloes’ purchase of Waitangi House and their donation of it to the New Zealand state arguably demonstrated their desire to foster dominion nationalism and, as part of what they understood this nationalism to be, state recognition of Ma¯ori sovereignty. In this context, Batten and her flights represented three of the nation’s foundational myths. The first of these was closely linked to the Ma¯ori. The three-island paradise of Aotearoa in the South Seas was originally settled by Polynesians arriving in waka (canoes) from the mythical origin point of Hawaiki in about A .D . 900. Ma¯ori subsequently traced their genealogy back to one of the original seven waka and identified with their iwi, or tribe, and with their hapu¯, or subtribe or extended family, rather than with any form of pan-Ma¯ori national identity. Once the colonizing voyages of the Polynesians ended, “the waka of ancestral forebears took on new meaning as the symbol for tribal identity, territorial ownership and political relations.”¹⁶ 122

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Ma¯ori settlers engaged in relatively continuous conflict, both between hapu¯ under the same iwi and between iwi, as they negotiated complex hierarchies of power and prestige. Europeans, primarily the British, added to the volatile mixture when they appeared nearly a thousand years later. They encouraged existing hostility between various iwi and hapu¯ as they sought to conquer, buy, and confiscate tribal lands for European settler use. From this beginning Ma¯ori-Pa¯ keha¯ relations in general formed the basis for a distinct nationalism. Many New Zealanders had assumed that Ma¯ori were disappearing as a result of disease imported by Europeans in the nineteenth century and through assimilation into the non-Ma¯ori population. During the 1930s, however, this assumption was challenged as Ma¯ori numbers increased after nearly a century of decline¹⁷ and a variety of Ma¯ori-led initiatives resisted the erosion of Ma¯ori culture.¹⁸ While Ma¯ori worked to strengthen their position within the nation, Pa¯ keha¯ claimed that the nation’s race relations record was the best in the empire. Through this claim New Zealanders defined themselves as superior to their domineering Australian neighbour, particularly once the Commonwealth passed its “White Australia” policy in 1901. Race relations may not have been as uniformly oppressive as they were in Australia, depending on whose perspective was taken, but this did not mean that they were benevolent. Despite the inferior access to state services and justice that Ma¯ori suffered, both Ma¯ori and Pa¯ keha¯ politicians inveighed and legislated against Chinese immigrants in 1920.¹⁹ Nevertheless, the myth of the seven waka, coupled with the belief in harmonious race relations, provided a framework for understanding Batten’s 1936 England to New Zealand record flight. Batten’s claim that her flight was compared by New Zealanders with the voyages of the waka was supported by “Maorilander,” the astrology columnist for the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. According to Maorilander, Batten’s unique connection to New Zealand lay in her relation to the moon. “The moon influences the tides and currents of the earth, and the spirit of her ancestors inspired our New Zealand bird-woman in the timing of her flight. Just so did the Maoris come over across uncharted seas in open boats from far-away Hawaiki.”²⁰ By inserting Batten into the story of the waka, both she and Maorilander performed an act of “cultural colonisation” and challenged the imperial notion of linear progress. 123

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Cultural colonization is “colonisation through various cultural practices, particularly those involving writing and printing.”²¹ It was the process by which Pa¯ keha¯ settlers appropriated local knowledge, reproducing it in a variety of textual forms such as books, magazines, poems, newspapers, and photographs in an attempt to stake their claim to the meaning of the nation that they were inventing as well as to its territory. In a sense, colonists “produced (or invented) ‘the Maori’, making them picturesque, quaint, largely ahistorical, and, through printed materials, manageable.”²² Cultural colonization often takes textual form, although Pa¯ keha¯ also gave Ma¯ori names to concrete structures such as post offices and schools, and Pa¯ keha¯ trampers, or recreational walkers, began to claim access to the land (rather than textual images of the land) as conservationists, thereby justifying their occupation of it.²³ Batten’s and Maorilander’s comparisons to the waka indicate that the national identity that Batten’s flights helped to foster remained a colonizing one, but their claims extended the realm of this colonization into airspace. Their claims also challenged linear progress. Even though the language of discovery and the trajectory of the journey – from England – echoed the stale rhetoric of imperial conquest, another tale was encapsulated in the brief phrase that Batten wrote to Wakefield. At the heart of the empire the Ma¯ori canoes would never have counted as great voyages of discovery, as did Captain Cook’s. Yet they were central to New Zealand identity. Significantly, Batten did not place them in a narrative of linear progress that moved from the primitive to the modern,²⁴ from the canoes to Cook’s Endeavour and then to her Percival Gull aeroplane. Instead, Batten claimed that her flight was placed “side by side” with the two previous journeys, thus placing them also side by side. This rhetorical image disavowed strictly imperial history, emphasizing instead the process of national self-definition. It was her “own people” who decided how significant the flight was and where to place it in the national story. A second foundational myth in New Zealand was based on the relationship between “Home” and geographical distance. England was referred to as “Home” in everything from newspapers and novels to parliamentary debates, while new immigrants from Britain were rather derisively called “homies.”²⁵ Amy Johnson had identified herself in 1930 as being at one 124

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with all English-speaking peoples, perhaps even then having an eye on the American market, and comfortably at “home” in Australia.²⁶ The meaning of “home” was more complicated for Batten, however. Although she had been delighted, when sailing to England for flying lessons in 1929, to cross the Equator and see Polaris for the first time,²⁷ she was glad to be back in the Southern Hemisphere at the end of her 1934 flight to Australia. “When Miss Batten landed at Darwin last Wednesday afternoon her first remark was:– ‘It is nice to be in the Southern Hemisphere again,’” the New Zealand Herald reported. This was an interesting recasting of her statement, which five days earlier the newspaper had reported as, “thank heaven I am here.” Clearly, her initial statement may mean almost the same thing as the newspaper’s later rewording of it, but it certainly has a different ring. Indeed, the shift in her attributed statement may indicate the newspaper reporter’s or editor’s decision to shift the emphasis to a hemispheric homecoming from a merely successful crossing of the Timor Sea “after fighting side winds all day.”²⁸ This different sense of location illuminates the contrast between being from Britain and being from a dominion. For Amy Johnson or Lady Bailey or Lady Heath, “home” – being at the centre of the world, which was where their maps placed it – could be found in shared language, shared food, shared customs, all of which had been effectively dispersed around the globe through the processes of imperialism and colonization. They expected to feel at home among people speaking English because they assumed (metonymically) that the world was centred around them. Batten, by contrast, knew that she would not feel at home everywhere. She had already spent time in England and, while thrilled by its vibrant history and culture, had not felt at home there.²⁹ Home for her was a specific location. Her books continually insisted on her nationality, and she carefully noted occasions when she met her “own countrymen and women” abroad: she distinguished them from the British.³⁰ The complicated relationship of New Zealanders to “Home” was compounded by their distance from it. The idea that New Zealand’s isolation constituted its national identity is indicated by the titles of books such as Distance Looks Our Way and A Destiny Apart.³¹ As a colonial appendage New Zealand “has been imagined as a peripheral outpost of the ‘metropolitan 125

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core,’” yet the nation’s “peripheral status has been imagined to free New Zealand from the shackles binding the core to ‘tradition,’ allowing New Zealand an immanent superiority” and creating a paradisal “Britain of the South Seas” without unjust inequality.³² Drawing on these notions, the nation attempted to present itself to itself and to others as homogenous, conformist, and free from the kinds of social unrest that might scare off investors.³³ Despite privation in the major cities, the fact that many rural Ma¯ori and Pa¯ keha¯ lived in unrelenting poverty and disease, and the rise of urban classes of workers, interwar New Zealand was a place that continued to promulgate the nineteenth-century notion that it was a classless society, a world without entrenched class interests or class conflict.³⁴ Its location, so far from the perceived British and European roots of these evils, provided a geographical explanation for its exceptional character. This location also provided the conditions that gave rise to a third foundational myth, that of pioneering pragmatism. New Zealanders defined themselves in ways that related directly to their physical and economic landscape. Pioneers had had to be resourceful and pragmatic to survive. Even though the settler period itself was long gone by the 1930s, the nation was still largely agricultural and as a consequence liked to remind itself how vigorous it was. It was best cultivated by “fit bodies.” As the range of increasingly sedentary jobs proliferated with the growth of urban centres, men resisted domestication by developing an exclusively male culture around demanding physical activities such as rugby.³⁵ In a more formal, state-supported initiative to engineer “fit bodies,” Dr Frederic Truby King founded the Society for the Promotion of the Health of Women and Children (the Plunket Society) in 1907. Plunket nurses began a widespread and long-lived campaign of health education based initially on eugenic principles. The role of Plunket nurses was to teach mothers about motherhood and hygiene, and the society set standards for mothers to attain for babies’ health, weight, and size.³⁶ Their interventions were intended to produce healthy babies, who would grow into healthy men and women, thus maintaining a strong nation and metonymically a strong economy in the arena of international trade.³⁷ The myth of a nation brimming with robust specimens encouraged belief in a particular type of ideal womanhood. As they developed distinctive 126

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identities in opposition to metropolitan culture, “Australasians” emphasized that “their women were sturdy pioneers, their women were the mothers of the new generation of citizens, their women were able and smart.”³⁸ This idea of the sturdy pioneer circulated quite widely. In the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly in 1937 Ellie Bailey, the magazine’s London correspondent, contributed an article entitled “True New Zealander.” It was an interview with Lottie May Nash, in London with her husband, Walter, the minister of finance and future prime minister. Bailey asserted that Nash exemplified the New Zealand woman’s qualities: “Thoroughly feminine, efficient in any job she undertakes, vivacious, cheerful, and full of energy ... [and with an] absolute naturalness of manner.” In the interview Nash herself criticized English girls who lacked the practical skills essential to running a home – skills that she claimed New Zealand’s women possessed in abundance. After all, attending “special courses in art, languages, and music, which are all splendid in their way, [were] not very helpful when maids suddenly walk out or the baby’s nurse is taken ill.” Nash was referring to the English daughters of wealthy parents, but her comparison reveals more about national narratives in New Zealand than in Britain.³⁹ Batten was described in terms of this tradition. The N.Z. Truth called her a “typical self-reliant New Zealand girl, who has made a place for herself among the great figures of the world’s airways by her courage, resources and dauntless determination in the face of immense difficulties.”⁴⁰ She was also explicitly linked to the type of pioneer stock that the nation valued. The “Auckland Social Tit-bits” column in the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly claimed that Batten possessed “just the type of girlhood that typifies all the qualities for which we still honour our pioneer women. Like them she is a woman first, adventurer second, but she has all the boundless courage, all the efficiency, and tenacity of purpose that made them what they were.”⁴¹ Later in the winter the magazine remarked that “Whatever gathering of women the Governor-General has addressed since [Batten’s] visit here, he has made some reference to her particular character of pluck and endurance, drawn some comparison between her amazing courage and the New Zealand attitude toward life. That, it seems to me, is the greatest compliment she has been paid.”⁴² In his formal testimonial to Batten in 1936 after she had flown across the Tasman, the mayor of Auckland, E. Davis, 127

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claimed that “in forging a flawless aerial link between the Mother Country and this Greater Britain of the south you have rendered to the Empire a service which in character upholds the highest traditions of pioneering endeavour.”⁴³ The comparisons between Batten and pragmatic female pioneers did not extend, oddly enough, to the most significant pioneering event of the nineteenth century: granting the vote to women in 1893. New Zealand was the first liberal democracy in the world to enfranchise women at the national level. It provided an inspiring example to woman suffrage movements elsewhere and was able to claim that through this act of political justice it was the “birth place of the 20th Century.”⁴⁴ Batten may not have been placed in this political genealogy, but overall she and her flights were read into, and contributed to, some of the foundational myths of national identity. But how did the airspace that she produced affect this identity?

Before Batten: Aviation, Modernity, and the Nation The first trans-Tasman flight in 1928 by three Australians and a New Zealander – Charles Kingsford Smith (“Smithy”), Charles T.P. Ulm, H.A. Litchfield (navigator), and T.H. McWilliam (radio operator) – had fired Australasian imaginations. Until then there were only two ways of communicating across the 1,330 miles of water between Australia and New Zealand: by boat or by trans-Tasman cable (the latter had been laid in 1876).⁴⁵ The flight, on 10–11 September 1928, took 14 hours and 25 minutes, and the aeroplane, the Southern Cross, landed at Sockburn (later Wigram) Aerodrome, Christchurch. The New Zealand Herald reported that about 30,000 people were at the aerodrome to watch it land.⁴⁶ “Smithy” and Ulm were extremely popular in New Zealand despite being Australians, and it is to them more than any other pilot, bar Amy Johnson, that Batten was most often compared. Both men went missing in aviation accidents, Ulm in 1934 and Kingsford Smith in 1935. In 1936 the shadow of their disappearances hung over Batten’s plans to fly the Tasman. Their 1928 flight was significant because it affected understandings of the relationship between time and space, altering the myth as well as the reality of geographical distance. As one member of the Auckland Harbour 128

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Board, T. Bloodworth, remarked, “almost at the same moment the Southern Cross left Richmond, Sydney, the limited express left Auckland for Wellington. The plane had a journey of over 1100 miles before it, while the train had to travel about 400 miles; yet the Southern Cross reached Wellington over two hours ahead of the express.”⁴⁷ Meanwhile, the New Zealand Herald noted, the Union Company steamer Maheno had left Sydney at 4 P.M . on Friday and had dropped anchor at Soames Island, the quarantine island in Wellington Harbour, at the same time that the Southern Cross appeared over the city, which it circled before heading south for Christchurch. This was at 5:45 A .M . on Tuesday. The boat crossing had taken three days and 14 hours. The crossing comparisons made clear that the frictions of distance were being overcome. The flight’s significance was made even clearer in the New Zealand Herald leader of 12 September: “For this Dominion, last of the British outposts of importance to be linked by traversing of the skyway, it is this pioneering aspect which means most ... until this crossing had been achieved, New Zealand stood apart from almost all the countries of the earth in its failure to profit by the advance of aviation.”⁴⁸ Indeed, aviation infrastructure was so poorly developed in the country that Kingsford Smith and Ulm could not fly the Southern Cross to Auckland because there were no suitable landing places for the large three-engined machine there. Up to this point New Zealand had indeed failed to profit from advances in aviation, but aviation came freighted with cultural and political baggage unsuited to the Dominion. The rhetoric surrounding interwar aviation in Europe and the United States was infused with the hyperbole of progress and the promise of a new cultural world order.⁴⁹ The European nations in particular, struggling with war debts and the pressures of mass industrialization, fastened onto aviation as a means to procure military supremacy and take their peoples’ minds away from the belching smoke of the cities. At the same time flight made possible a perspective from which the human handprint on development was clearly visible. New visual patterns and new spatial relationships combined to make artists, writers, and pilots dream not only that God was dead but also that the machine age of the superman had arrived.⁵⁰ If European (especially German and Italian) responses to the aesthetics and geo-politics revealed by altitude were resolutely modernist, even 129

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fascist, New Zealand’s responses were not as clear-cut. The absence of the language of power, domination, and national potential around aviation is striking in the New Zealand context. New Zealand did not want the evils of industrialization to taint its pristine landscape or the class conflicts of “Home” to blight its egalitarian profile. In the nineteenth century commentators claimed that “New Zealand’s progress had escaped and would continue to avoid ... the evil effects of industrialism and urbanisation.”⁵¹ For this reason, narratives of national modernity during the 1930s were not those of machine-age aesthetics, the power of man multiplied a hundredfold by the rhythm of a steel heart and iron bowel. Instead, the Dominion promoted a specific version of modernization. Whereas in Europe progress promised the mirage of a new breed of supermen and sometimes superwomen who were as pristine as the clean lines of the machines that made their existence possible, in New Zealand the settlers had already fashioned a version of themselves as physically and morally pristine. Robust, vigorous, and practical, they did not need machines except to refrigerate and transport their agricultural exports. When Batten flew, therefore, the overriding focus of attention was not on the prototypical superwoman that the nation might one day mass produce. Nor was it on the machine whose sleek lines glinted in the sunlight. Indeed, her Moth, known by its registration markings as G -A AR B , was actually rather dated,⁵² and it was the same model of machine that Johnson had used in her flight over the same route four years earlier. Instead, Batten and her achievements were exemplars of the unique quality of New Zealand’s modern identity. Her presence on the world stage was an opportunity to demonstrate this identity to other nations, particularly Britain. Her 1934 tour also created an opportunity to reconfigure the internal spatial relations of the nation.

The 1934 Tour: Internal Cohesion When she landed at Darwin on 23 May 1934 Batten was already something of a familiar name for newspaper readers and wireless listeners around the British Empire. This was her third attempt at the flight. The first in

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April 1933 had ended in a crash at Karachi. The second ended in April 1934 when she crashed in Rome, sustaining injuries to both herself and her G -A AR B . After the first crash in Karachi, which destroyed the aeroplane she was using, Batten concluded that “although now absolutely broke, not even having any income, I resolved to cheer up, try and be a good loser, and hope for the best.”⁵³ Following her second failure, Batten remarked that “although most of my enthusiasm for the England–Australia flight had gone, I had doubled my determination to try again and benefit from the experiences gained on these two failures.”⁵⁴ These two attempts gave the media time to develop a profile of her. One English newspaper dubbed her the “Try again Girl.”⁵⁵ It is hard to distinguish which element of her story appealed most to New Zealanders, her final success or this persevering streak. New Zealand newspapers certainly chose to refer to the latter when she finally did reach Australia in May 1934. The New Zealand Herald in its Saturday supplement “Auckland Aero Club News” column commented on her “great pluck and determination to overcome difficulties ... in spite of several setbacks.” The day after her arrival in Australia the Dominion in Wellington ran a subdued leader, perhaps misgauging popular enthusiasm, calling her “plucky but unlucky” and sketching in details of her previous attempts. The New Zealand Herald in Auckland ran a rather more jingoistic leader the same day, noting that the record flight “gains added merit because it was the third attempt ... [and] is a splendid example of grit and determination.”⁵⁶ A month later, finally realizing the swell of popular interest, a Dominion editorial remarked that “Miss Batten’s achievement presents a moral for the younger generation of New Zealanders ... a triumphant exponent of that fine old adage: If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try, try again.”⁵⁷ Local newspapers had not responded in the same tone to Amy Johnson’s flight. In an editorial after her arrival in Australia in 1930, the New Zealand Herald had remarked that although Johnson’s achievement was a worthy effort, it was in large part sheer luck. Fortunately, the paper suggested, this meant that her “recital of fear and threatening exhaustion will deter others of her sex from following her example.”⁵⁸ Johnson, of course, had crashed four times during her flight, so she could hardly be accused of lack of determination. The distinction between the reports lim-

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ited Johnson to being an unusual but not unfeminine example of her sex, while Batten was an exemplary model of triumphant national identity, an identity that her public persona also helped to mould. Once she had arrived in Australia, Batten was approached to visit various towns on her way down to Sydney, the embarkation point for sailing to New Zealand. Her Moth did not have sufficient range to cross the Tasman Sea, so she could not fly there. These visits, coupled with the delay while she waited for her mother to sail out from England to meet her, had three effects in New Zealand. First, there was anxiety and some indignation over whether she would come home at all. Batten was initially quite ambiguous about her plans, presumably hedging her bets. Second, the period of time that elapsed between her arrival in the Commonwealth and her subsequent arrival in the Dominion gave the New Zealand public time to anticipate, demand, and plan a huge national reception. Third, this same delay obliged newspapers in New Zealand to create constant stories about her to both satiate and feed a demand that was selling papers. This in turn boosted the demands for a national response and helped to generate debate over her significance to the nation. The delay gave the New Zealand press and public an opportunity to work themselves up into fever pitch over her impending return to her native soil. During this period letters to the editors of newspapers crackled with excited and emotional pride; leaders bristled with superlatives; news articles enumerated Batten’s qualities and kept citizens abreast of public subscriptions accumulating in her name. She became “New Zealand’s heroine of the air”; she had given a “splendid world-advertisement ... to this Dominion”; she was a “heroic young New Zealander”; “New Zealand proudly acclaim[ed] a daughter” in her; and “in her the New Zealand spirit of the war lives again.”⁵⁹ By the time she appeared in the flesh, Aucklanders were falling over themselves to give her a proper homecoming. Wellingtonians panted at the city’s heels, determined to play the national capital card in their dealings with the nation’s new darling. Neither the city of her home (if not of her birth) nor the nation’s capital wanted to be found wanting in the warmth of its civic pride. Rivalry between the two cities had long roots.⁶⁰

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Despite this anticipation the details of a tour had not been worked out when Batten disembarked, with her G -A AR B , from the Aorangi at Auckland, having sailed from Sydney as a guest of the Union Steamship Company. The Aorangi docked at Prince’s Wharf on Monday, 25 June 1934, a good month after Batten had initially landed at Darwin. On the boat on the way over from Sydney, Batten was approached with offers to tour the Dominion. Charles Ulm, who was aboard the boat with her, advised her not to accept anything until she had spoken to D. Ardell at the Department of Internal Affairs. Ulm sent a telegram to Ardell from the Aorangi on 22 June, in which he said that he had advised Batten to forestall theatre invitations, which were being sent by wireless telegraph to her by her father, until “personal discussion with you.” Batten wanted Ardell to come out to the Aorangi on the doctor’s launch, which met the ship and checked that all the passengers were fit and had certificates of health, so that she could privately discuss arrangements with him before she disembarked and was swamped by the crowds. As it transpired, the telegram was not received by Ardell until 10:30 A .M ., three and a half hours after the Aorangi had already arrived.⁶¹ The ship was met by huge crowds. As the New Zealand Observer reported, “the tangle of traffic outside the Town Hall,” where Batten was taken for the official reception “at midday on Monday[,] was due to the fact that the traffic men were busy assisting the police to control the crowd, which had assembled to get a glimpse of ‘Auckland’s girl flier.’”⁶² Even before she arrived the Coalition government of George Forbes was under pressure to provide some material recognition by which to measure the national significance of Batten’s achievement. In a memo to the private secretary of the prime minister, dated 11 June 1934, Ardell noted that “the hospitality extended to this aviatrix by the various governments of the Commonwealth of Australia is somewhat extraordinary and it is appropriate that the New Zealand government should recognise Miss Batten’s excellent performance and invite her to be a guest of the government if she desires to tour the Dominion.” Cabinet rubber-stamped the recommendation four days later.⁶³ As a Guest of Government, Batten’s expenses such as

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hotel, telegram, and telephone were paid for by the Department of Internal Affairs, although it is not entirely clear what was considered a national expense and what was a personal expense that Batten herself should cover. On 21 June 1934 Ardell issued another memo, this time to the permanent head of the prime minister’s department. No one, it seemed, was entirely sure of what Batten was subsisting on. A story that she had sold her piano to pay for flying lessons was circulating, and while the public in the midst of a depression dreamt up innovative solutions to her apparent lack of funds, as many of them were having to do in their own lives,⁶⁴ Internal Affairs proposed something more concrete. In this memo Ardell noted that he was “reliably informed that [Batten] badly needs financial assistance and that she is most reticent on this point.” Fortunately for everyone concerned, “her demeanour in Australia is stated to have been of the highest order, to have added lustre to her sex and to the country of her birth.” Since Ulm and Kingsford Smith had been awarded a grant of £2,000 for their 1928 flight, Ardell wondered whether the government would consider the “question of financial recognition.”⁶⁵ They would. In Cabinet six days later they approved a state grant of £500 “in recognition of the outstanding achievement of a New Zealand girl.”⁶⁶ In 1928 the state had given £2,000 to the group of four male trans-Tasman fliers, so Batten’s flight was nominally valued in this transaction at the same level as the men’s. In fact, Kingsford Smith and Ulm split the £2,000 between themselves. They insisted that they were the record breakers and that Litchfield and McWilliams, indispensable though they may have been to the success of the flight, were mere employees of the pilots.⁶⁷ Still, £500 was a great deal of money in 1934, and the New Zealand government would not necessarily have known that the grant to the earlier flight had not been distributed equally. Arrangements for a tour were finally made between Williamson Picture Corporation Ltd and Internal Affairs. The tour itself was an enormous undertaking. Internal Affairs had a reputation for running distinguished visitors into the ground with gruelling schedules of appearances. In 1927, for example, the visit of the Duke and Duchess of York to the Dominion was so exhausting that the duchess had to “call off her part in the tour

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when the royal couple reached Christchurch.” Presumably, they were travelling north to south. On an earlier royal visit in 1920 the Prince of Wales had hated the tour that he was obliged to undertake. The under-secretary for Internal Affairs during both these tours, James Hislop, “found it hard to accommodate the endless requests of mayors and councillors for a spot in the limelight,” but his attempts to do so clearly affected the demanding nature of the typical distinguished visitor tour.⁶⁸ The effects of the sheer number of engagements were compounded by the fact that while New Zealand’s land mass is small, it had a relatively poor transportation system through its mountains, volcanoes, valleys, gorges, and swampy land and across the Cook Strait. In 1928 “several North Island main highways were still broken by long unmetalled stretches which were often practically impassable in wet weather. The whole country contained less than 1,300 miles of tarred or bitumen road.” In addition, even though there were 48,000 miles of formal (not necessarily sealed) roads by 1929, “too many of them were in the wrong places.”⁶⁹ Rail transport was better but served limited areas. In 1935, for example, Gisborne on the east coast of the North Island was “still not connected with the rest of the country by rail and its road links were often unsatisfactory.”⁷⁰ By flying, Batten was in a position to overcome some of these transportation obstacles and begin to generate a national airspace. Her itinerary began in the South Island and included visits to Blenheim, Sockburn Aerodrome, Christchurch, Timaru, Dunedin, Oamaru, and Invercargill, all in the South Island, and then to Wellington, Wanganui, Palmerston North, New Plymouth, Hawera, Auckland, Hamilton, Hastings, Gisborne, Wairoa (a flying visit), Napier, Dannevirke, and Masterton, all in the North Island. All of these visits took place between Friday 6 July and Saturday 11 August. Figure 5.2 shows her route on this tour. To ensure that poor weather, particularly in the South Island, did not hamper her schedule, she was driven by car to some of these places. Each visit had a specific format. Except for the few towns into which she motored, Batten flew into the local aerodrome around 11 A .M . in her G A AR B , accompanied by Captain Isitt in an escorting machine. Her arrival was followed by a civic reception, usually scheduled for about an hour later,

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which gave her time to get to her hotel and change. At 3 P.M . she was contracted by the Williamson Corporation to make a theatre appearance. Those women’s organizations that had arranged to meet her as a group did so at 4 P.M . Her next contracted theatre appearance was at 8:30 P.M . Ardell wrote to the Town Clerks of the centres that Batten was visiting, enclosed a proposed itinerary, and explained that he had copied the details to the local aero club. He hoped that everyone would cooperate with the arrangements. It is not clear how quickly the Williamson Corporation sent the itinerary of theatre engagements to Internal Affairs in the first place, but they seemed only too happy to hand over to the government the tremendous responsibility and cost of getting Batten to each engagement on time.⁷¹ Batten averaged seven speeches at each of the eighteen towns that she visited on the official tour.⁷² The decision of Internal Affairs to become so heavily involved in Batten’s commercial tour multiplied the significance of the event beyond anything that could have been achieved by the Williamson Corporation alone. By making Batten a Guest of Government, providing her with an escort machine and pilot, and insisting that all requests for noncontracted appearances go across his desk, Ardell managed to create the impression that Batten was touring under the auspices of the government rather than through a commercial company. One effect of her tour was to generate national airspace by bolstering the aero club movement. At Rotorua, for example, Batten’s visit provoked such enthusiasm that the “almost defunct” Rotorua Aero Club, which had been established in 1930 but had been largely dormant since then, held a meeting to evaluate the local desire for flying lessons. A brief visit by Kingsford Smith in the Southern Cross earlier in 1934 had not generated the same level of enthusiasm or impetus to local flying as did Batten’s visit.⁷³ Promoting the tour was a way to promote airmindedness, and this gave the aero clubs more leverage with which to exert pressure on the government for effective subsidies. If her actual flight had “stirred the imagination of all New Zealanders and stimulated interest in the practical side of aviation in New Zealand,” her “subsequent tour of New Zealand in her machine did much to enhance the value of her feat, so far as aviation in this country is con-

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cerned.”⁷⁴ Intensive state involvement in her visit helped to generate airmindedness, but attempts to impose homogeneity on the tour were resisted by municipalities. Each insisted on giving Batten a special welcome, and some expressed anger at being expected to slot into the state’s itinerary.⁷⁵ Criticisms began to trickle in. Not, as everyone was quick to emphasize, of Batten herself but of how Ardell and Internal Affairs were handling the arrangements. Such complaining came from a long tradition of tension between local government bodies and Internal Affairs, which had a “constitutional function as central government’s link with local government, the nation’s second tier of administration.”⁷⁶ One of the councillors for Hastings Borough Council, for example, complained that “for the department to arrange the programme and insist upon it being adopted is, to my mind, a piece of impertinence,” while the mayor explained that “quite a different programme had been suggested, but he was informed that it could not be accepted, and the department insisted upon its suggested programme.”⁷⁷ Ardell suggested to Batten that she should tackle the criticisms head on when she went to Hastings and should point out that she was a Guest of Government, confirming “that she is grateful for this consideration by the Government, and especially so for the arrangements made on her behalf by the Government Representatives.”⁷⁸ Her position as Guest of Government and the department’s insistence on refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of criticisms made Batten a national figure not just in the sense that all the newspapers were writing about her, but also because the state had displaced both Lord Wakefield, her sponsor, and the Williamson Corporation, to whom she was under contract, as the body most immediately associated with her. Her status as a national figure was further enhanced in two ways: through Lord and Lady Bledisloe and through her ceremonial reception at Rotorua. Lord and Lady Bledisloe invited Batten to stay with them in Wellington, and while in their company she attended the opening of Parliament. She attended along with Te Kirihaehae Te Puea Herangi, leader of the Waikato people, who had also been invited by the governor general.⁷⁹ Te Puea was one of the most important Ma¯ori of the period. She had revitalized the king movement and worked tirelessly to inculcate a sense of purpose in her

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people.⁸⁰ She set up Tu¯rangawaewae, a model marae, or Ma¯ori, meeting house, courtyard, and associated buildings, at Nga¯ruawa¯ hia, at the confluence of the Waikato and Waipa Rivers. In the mid-1930s she conceived an ambitious project to build seven waka, each representing one of the original seven and each crewed by descendants of the original seven. With an eye on the upcoming Centenary celebrations scheduled for 1940, the Labour government promised assistance in 1936, but in the end only timber was forthcoming.⁸¹ Te Puea’s activities received widespread and largely favourable coverage in the New Zealand press.⁸² Both women were therefore linked, symbolically at least, with the seat of government and the nation’s founding myths, and both were metaphorically stamped with Lord Bledisloe’s nationalist seal of approval. By a happy coincidence Batten had been born in Rotorua, the nation’s centre of Ma¯ori-themed tourism and thermal splendour. It was another location of the Ma¯ori cultural renaissance. The Maori Arts and Crafts Institute was located there, an “inter-tribal carving school” set up by Act of Parliament in 1926 in an attempt to preserve the cultures and traditions of Ma¯ori.⁸³ Batten herself had left Rotorua for Auckland with her family at the age of four, so the region was hardly “home.” Yet Batten claimed it as her hometown. In common with other distinguished visitors, Batten was provided with a ceremonial ha¯ngi, or feast, by what she described as the “Arawa tribe”⁸⁴ at Whakarewarewa, the village by the thermal region. If at Parliament she had been associated with one of the most significant Waikato leaders, now she met one of the most significant leaders of the Rotorua area, Mita Taupopoki, as well as the famous guide Bella.⁸⁵ Having conferred honorary “Rangitira-tane”⁸⁶ on her, Mita Taupopoki gave Batten the name “‘Kuhurangi,’ meaning ‘gem,’ and placing a rare handcarved greenstone tiki or Maori god around my neck, said that his people would always think of me as a shining gem.” She went on to tour the thermal area with guide Bella, whom Batten described as a “very distinguishedlooking and educated Maori.”⁸⁷ In her later writing Batten would invoke her knowledge of Ma¯ori terms and experiences with Ma¯ori to assert her legitimate position within the distinctive New Zealand nation. In addition to describing her experiences at Whakarewarewa in Solo Flight, Batten also

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“ O U R S ! ” C O M P E T I N G C L A I M S T O B AT T E N B Y N E W Z E A L A N D A N D T H E W O R L D . W E E K LY N E W S , 2 7 J U N E 19 3 4 .

referred to sighting “Aotea-Roa,” the “land of the long white cloud” from the deck of the Aorangi on her way over from Sydney. She referred to Mount Cook as “Aorangi – ‘Cloud Piercer’ to give it the Maori name”; devoted five pages of Solo Flight to the hakas, poi dances, and ha¯ngi to which she was treated; and drew attention to the fact that Ma¯ori at Gisborne had given her the name “Turoa,” or white heron.⁸⁸ One final example of how this 1934 flight contributed to a sense of national airspace is an example that also points to the tensions attendant on her 1936 flight. Figure 5.3 is a cartoon that appeared in the Weekly News in June 1934. The bulky male figure at the front appears to be the globe itself, a pair of pince-nez on his nose.⁸⁹ On his right-hand side stands a svelte Zealandia: she represents one half of the national crest. The other half, the Ma¯ori chief, is noticeably absent.⁹⁰ Both figures are exclaiming “Ours!” and

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signalling to a distant biplane trailing the words “Jean Batten” in smoke in the cloud-filled sky. Batten herself is nowhere to be seen. Since New Zealand is actually part of the world, the pictured distinction serves to emphasize that while Batten’s achievement was global in scale – she flew almost half-way around the earth – it nonetheless had a significant dimension as a national achievement. Reading representations such as this requires caution – too much can be claimed that was perhaps never intended or perhaps unthinkable in the context. This image, however, contains subtle suggestions of the difficulties ahead for New Zealanders as they claimed that Batten belonged to them. While the jovial globe makes an expansive gesture of embrace, Zealandia’s apparent “cooee” seems more anxious as she stretches up to be noticed. Is the globe even aware that she is beside him? Is her presence beside him on what appears to be the curve of the earth’s surface a sign that the nation is emerging onto the world stage? And is the globe the globe, or does he signal instead the British Empire? Finally, is it possible for both to claim Batten, or do these claims conflict?

The 1936 Tour: External Threat At the beginning of October 1936 Batten announced that New Zealand, not Australia, was her destination on her flight from England. Of course, she had to fly via Australia, but this time she did not delay there. Instead, she went on to fly alone across the Tasman. This time, also, she did not fly around New Zealand but toured via train and car. And this time the state failed to capitalize on Batten’s flight and its massive symbolic significance, leaving the door open instead for commercial interests. This second tour was heavily commercialized, and it focused attention on external relations. It raised a more problematic vision of the relationship between Batten, the nation, and the rest of the world than had the earlier tour. There are two reasons why the flight could have been incorporated into a huge national spectacle, securing New Zealand’s place on the world stage. The first is that this was the first flight by a New Zealand-born pilot across the Tasman, symbolizing thereby the nation’s link to the rest of the world (or, more accurately, Australia) and the nation’s modernity since it had

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finally produced an aviator to rival the best that the British and Australians had to offer. The second reason is that Batten was not the only New Zealander to distinguish herself that year. Jack Lovelock (1910–49), the athlete, won the only “British” and the first ever New Zealand gold medal in athletics at the Berlin Olympics over the distance of 1,500 metres, breaking the world record by a second in the process.⁹¹ He was made a Guest of Government on his return, and although his tour of the Dominion did not elicit the same number of column inches in newspapers as Batten’s, his success further confirmed the nation’s sense of producing pragmatic – and very fit – pioneers who would have an impact on international events. Figure 5.4 shows a sketch of a proposed statuary group to celebrate Batten’s and Lovelock’s 1936 world records. This fanciful sketch, of Batten and Lovelock joined in speed on top of the world, implies that their achievements have relocated New Zealand from the Antipodes to the top of the world. This is achieved both by stating that they are “On Top of the World” and by placing the shapes of the North and South Islands toward the top of the globe. It appears, from all the clouds of dust that surround the globe, the smashed hour-glass at the front, and the orientation of the lines of latitude, that the illustrator intends the globe to have physically turned to reposition the nation. In addition, the presence of the kiwi, the flightless bird that is one of the symbols of the nation, does not indicate that New Zealanders themselves lack soaring ambition. Not only have the two rather comical kiwis on the plinth kitted themselves out in running shoes, roller skates, wings, and a propeller to overcome their aerial disadvantage, but Batten and Lovelock also have wings on their heels. Finally, this sketch suggests that the nation is a balanced one, the physically competent male and technologically competent female running harmoniously together.⁹² Batten herself saw her ambition to link England and New Zealand by air as an event with national significance and placed its achievement above financial gain. In a letter to Cyril Westcott of C.C. Wakefield & Co., she asserted that “I doubt if I shall make very much here although the people are very – amazingly enthusiastic,”⁹³ and “although I may have missed contracts in Australia and lost money – if I hadn’t flown on across the Tasman I would have regretted it all my life.”⁹⁴ Despite both Batten’s decision to forsake

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contracts and the symbolic potential of the flight, the tour was heavily commercialized, and this time she was not a Guest of Government. The program proposed by Amalgamated Theatres was quite strenuous although not as demanding as the 1934 tour. The decision not to fly around the Dominion seems to have originated with Batten. She was reported in the Argus as being temporarily “tired of flying, and has flatly refused to travel by plane, even as a passenger, on her tour,”⁹⁵ even though by then New Zealand had a “network of [airways] extending over the entire length of the Dominion, and speedy services linked the North Island and the South, enabling people to travel in speed and comfort.”⁹⁶ This decision dramatically curtailed the number of places that she could visit and dramatically increased the amount of time that she spent travelling in a country that remained poorly served by road and rail links. Perhaps the strain of this additional travel time was what caused her “nerve of steel”⁹⁷ to snap in Christchurch, where a doctor ordered her to have complete rest. Her intended itinerary had her staying in Auckland until Wednesday, 21 October, then travelling to Hamilton, Wellington, and Christchurch, leaving for Dunedin on Tuesday, 3 November. The worst day by far was when she actually landed at Mangere, Auckland, from Sydney, Australia. After a tense ten-and-a-half-hour flight (and she had been up since 2:30 A .M . prior to departing),⁹⁸ she landed at Mangere at 5:05 P.M . on Friday, 16 October. Speeches ensued. By 6:30 P.M . she was at the Grand Hotel in Auckland itself. Presumably, she had time to change her clothes, freshen up, and have a bite to eat before she was taken to the Civic Theatre on Queen Street to address the massive audience at 8:40 P.M . The following day, Saturday, Batten met with the Hon. Frederick Jones (minister of defence) and a Mr Dwyer to discuss program arrangements. At this meeting Batten explained that since the “Local Authorities and Aero Clubs had arranged, and were arranging, further benefits for her, and as she was under contract to ‘Amalgamated Theatres Limited’ to appear at theatres throughout New Zealand, to her financial advantage, she thought it may embarrass the Prime Minister if she found it necessary to refuse any courtesies that he may offer.” In addition, she did not expect a monetary grant. She acknowledged that a monetary grant might “cause the Government ... to receive some criticism from the Opposition.” The minister 144

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replied that the prime minister “did certainly desire to offer hospitality, but it was considered better to ascertain what Miss Batten’s plans were before his intentions were made known, so as not to conflict with any business agreement.” For its part, the government wanted her to know that after her tour of New Zealand she could spend a leisure week or two as a Government Guest at a tourist resort such as Rotorua.⁹⁹ A monetary grant might have had political repercussions for the government because in 1935, the previous year, New Zealanders had elected their first Labour government. A large part of the electorate was “radicalised” by the impact of the Depression.¹⁰⁰ National sentiment swung to the left in opposition to big business practices and the self-interested actions of the 1931–35 Coalition government, whose policies had seemingly compounded the impact of the Depression on wage-earners and small farmers.¹⁰¹ Batten’s expressed desire to avoid placing the government in an awkward position suggests that she understood her complex position. The Labour government was in the process of developing and implementing the most extensive social security system in the world, and, as a woman who could earn an income through her tour at a time when many women and men remained in dire need of social security, she did not need governmental support.¹⁰² The Labour victory had helped to shift the discursive relationship between the government and the people. In 1934 the prime minister, George Forbes, could reward the individual achievement of a New Zealander. Two years later Michael Savage, the Labour prime minister, was presiding over a new form of government that increasingly redistributed income among the people¹⁰³ and no longer rewarded individuals for their success nor blamed them for their economic misfortune. This ideological and practical transition may account for concerns raised over whose interests Batten’s tour was serving. The scurrilous weekly magazine N.Z. Truth sounded the alarm over the implications of the commercialized tour for New Zealand’s nationalism. It promised to reveal a behindthe-scenes story that showed “a public heroine is available to the public within limitations.” The article affirmed Batten’s achievements in the face of all nay-sayers (she “snapped slim fingers at podgy armchair critics”) but then launched into its exposé. When Batten landed at Mangere, it claimed, she “landed into a world of interests battling for the profitable privileges of 145

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her personal appearances, her spoken words, her name!” “The record dash she made across the world has been equalled only by the dash made to tie her up with sundry radio, press and business interests,” it continued. As an example of the competition that she created, it claimed that since she had inconveniently arrived at Mangere after the newspapers were printed, they were obliged to produce late editions. This caused heated arguments with the radio broadcasters who were using the lines that reporters wanted to use to telephone through their reports.¹⁰⁴ Frantic scrambles such as these were merely entertaining, but what was really galling, the N.Z. Truth implied, was that Australian combines were restricting access to Batten by home-grown interests. A representative of the Australian combine that had control of her appearances was quoted as stating that Batten’s “contract with the Australian and overseas interests comes first,” and he added that “her contract with a New Zealand theatre group was arranged in conjunction with that of the Australian combine.” The only broadcast that the combine would allow her to make was one for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC ). Thus, “while the public is avid to hear Jean, overseas interests had to be satisfied first.” While “Jean’s flight made a notable page in the history of aviation,” it was appalling that “in the hour of her triumph she was forbidden to talk freely of her achievement to her own people.”¹⁰⁵ If the tour arrangements two years earlier had elicited frustration over how Internal Affairs had apparently limited access to Batten, now the culprit was the much larger spectre of Australian commercial interests. The exact details of her contracts and the extent to which the N.Z. Truth was correct in its assessment are difficult to ascertain. Batten’s biographer agrees that she was under contract to a consortium of newspapers, including the Sydney Morning Herald and the New Zealand Herald, and that for a period of three days they had exclusive rights to her. She was not allowed to give interviews or be photographed by any group outside the consortium, a point that the N.Z. Truth makes. She had a separate contract with Amalgamated Theatres, which was a New Zealand cinema group, but according to the N.Z. Truth, Amalgamated Theatres’ governing director himself did not know the terms of the contract.¹⁰⁶ Once at Mangere, Batten was “virtu-

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ally taken in charge” by H. McD. Vincent and K.H. Usmar, two journalists working for the combine. They saw to it that she did not break her contract.¹⁰⁷ There are two possible reasons why the combine’s control of Batten was so vexing to New Zealanders. One is that the commercialization of the tour had the potential to sully Batten’s image. The second is that foreign control of the nation’s assets was a source of ongoing concern, and the tour was one more, perhaps startling, example of this source of concern. Hedda Dyson, writing her editorial in the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly on 29 October 1936, noted the mixed feelings that the commercialization was provoking: “Millions must have listened into Jean’s first broadcast from Sydney, and although our hearts throbbed in response to the brave words of the brave girl, a slight disappointment was expressed by many on hearing an advertisement at the conclusion of her speech. Somehow it depreciated the value of that message to the world; somehow we regretted this commercialization – for Jean has won a special place in our hearts, and we so deeply admire her courage and genius for organising. Naturally, therefore, this exploitation of our Jean strikes a slightly jarring note.”¹⁰⁸ Dyson, however, was determined that this jarring note could be brought back into harmony with the general perception of Batten. The pilot, after all, had “to come back to earth,” and her success found its roots in “financial arrangements” without which the “heroism, skill and daring” would have always remained merely the stuff of dreams. Her readers and herself, she admonished, “must therefore doubly admire Jean, because apart from her heroic feat she proves to be a practical business woman.”¹⁰⁹ There seems to have been something of a consensus in the Dominion at the time that on the whole Batten was beyond criticism. The pragmatic bent of a nation that was still telling itself stories of its close roots in the pioneer era and budgeting its way through the Depression allowed the public to praise her for being sensible about finances. If Batten’s image could be recuperated, however, asserting control over her as a national asset was more difficult. A couple of weeks after its initial story, the N.Z. Truth revisited the question of the Australian combine contract and its effect on Batten’s appearances – specifically, the way that “her movements have not permitted the

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people to lavish upon her the praise they naturally wish to give her.” The paper went on to praise the ingenuity of a Wellington cameraman who managed to outwit the combine, which had issued restrictions on shooting footage of her landing at Mangere. He flew into Mangere himself, set up his equipment moments before Batten landed and obtained “some 300 feet of film of Miss Batten’s arrival.” Jumping on the limited express train to Wellington, he was able to develop the film in time for it to be exhibited in Wellington on the evening after her landing. Within three days a print of this footage was being shown as far south as Invercargill.¹¹⁰ National ingenuity could orchestrate a symphony of modernity with which to outwit the forces of Australian corporatism when it had to, but the country nevertheless struggled to keep hold of Batten in the face of external demands on her. By now Batten was an international icon, and her international status appeared to displace national definitions of her significance. She was a celebrity well beyond the shores of the Dominion. Her receptions in Brazil and Argentina in November 1935, as well as the sheer volume of press reports on her leisure activities, provide ample evidence of her international renown.¹¹¹ She was replicated as a waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s in London, guaranteeing her exposure to many thousands of people who had not seen her in the flesh.¹¹² That she was an international icon is further confirmed in a remark by Ellie Bailey in the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. Referring to an Auckland actress, Elaine Hamill, who was being “described in London as New Zealand’s No. 1 girl,” Bailey commented “I suppose that’s because our beloved Jean Batten has become international by fame.”¹¹³ Asked about her future, Batten told a reporter in Australia that “she would be remaining in New Zealand indefinitely. ‘That is my home and I am flying home.’”¹¹⁴ In Britain, however, Batten’s home started to slip out of the picture, and she was increasingly defined as British.¹¹⁵ The London Times, for example, achieved this by quietly dropping mention of her dominion status. Still referred to as a “New Zealand airwoman” in 1935, by 1937 she is just “Miss Jean Batten,” who had “held the attention of British people all over the world.”¹¹⁶ Taking Batten up as a British imperial figure made sense for two reasons. The first was that Johnson, a Briton,

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had already made the first major imperial flight by a woman. When New Zealand granted women the vote in 1893, British responses were cool. The colony was not considered civilized in the sense that complex European societies were, nor did it shoulder the burden of imperial conquest. There had been, therefore, “a marked reluctance to follow the lead of a colony” and grant women the vote in England.¹¹⁷ Since Johnson had already claimed imperial airspace for Britain’s women, Batten’s more accomplished achievements could now receive attention. The second reason why Batten could be regarded as British was that Johnson could no longer be trusted to deliver the goods, and no other Englishwoman pilot had emerged as a contender for long-distance records. Rather than contrast the colony with the metropole and find the metropole wanting, the metropole could simply disregard both Batten’s and her nation’s preferred definition of her identity and claim her instead as British.

Conclusions Only three years older than Batten, Robin Hyde’s life bore little resemblance to the pilot’s. The writer grew up in Wellington, whereas Batten grew up in Auckland. Hyde supported herself as a journalist and had two illegitimate children. One died at birth, and the other Hyde kept secret, in a foster home, since knowledge of his existence would have rendered her permanently unemployable.¹¹⁸ Hyde’s novel The Godwits Fly is considered the first literary articulation of female Pa¯ keha¯ identity.¹¹⁹ The central metaphor of her book suggests that this identity would become possible once New Zealanders stopped flying away to England and once those who were in England returned to New Zealand to stay. It also suggests that such an identity depended on women learning how to support each other and how to generate their own meanings of the nation.¹²⁰ Hyde made explicit connections between an “ambivalent notion of gender” and the “complexities of a nation fundamentally uncertain of its own story,”¹²¹ tracing how the incoherence of New Zealand nationalism generated unclear definitions of gender roles. Her work was informed by a sense of a “crisis in social

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relations, which itself was provoked by war, depression, the rise of fascism and the failures of socialism,”¹²² and always contained a trenchant feminist perspective. At one point in The Godwits Fly, Hyde’s protagonist, Eliza Hannay, is sitting crying on a beach. She has received a telegram confirming that her friend Timothy Cardew has sailed for England without her. Her younger brother Kitch is attempting to fly his homemade model aeroplane. In a passage rich with metaphor, the little model does fly, but only briefly before it is snagged by a “black root of seaweed,” and it is later damaged when its “aquiline nose jagged on pebbles.”¹²³ Hyde’s novel is full of images of the landscape, and as this episode suggests, attempts to fly away from the land will result in damage. What is left, once Timothy has fled like a godwit and the little aeroplane has been broken, is Eliza’s enduring and deep friendship with another woman, Simone Purcell. At the risk of stretching the meaning of this canonical text too far, it is possible to see in the novel a version of the national narrative that Batten was generating. Batten represented the strong, independent female who (at this stage) was using the aeroplane to reconnect to the nation and the land, not disconnect from it. This reconnection was on national, not imperial, terms. And as the next chapter will demonstrate, she also had a profound effect on women who took her up as an adored figure through which they could challenge their own gendered relation to the nation. In Batten’s performances and public personality, then, New Zealanders found the combination of qualities that confirmed them in their national identity. Her trans-Tasman flight and her birthplace linked her to the Ma¯ori, her modest charm and iron determination classified her as an exemplary female New Zealander, her pragmatic emphasis on getting the job done reaffirmed their most cherished stories of their pioneer selves, yet her use of aeroplanes and her gender heralded the nation’s modernity. Batten and her flights offered a convincing challenge to an imperial geography that placed New Zealand not just physically but also politically and technologically at the Antipodes and redirected the national gaze toward a reassessment of its location.

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Introduction If the members of the Medical Sub-Commission of the International Commission on Air Navigation (ICAN ) had attempted to pathologize women pilot’s bodies, then arguably in Jean Batten, ten years later, some women found an example through which they could celebrate the flying female body and perhaps extend its possibilities, bringing it down to earth. Her control over airspace changed their relation to everyday space. This worked because Batten’s body itself was another form of airspace – modern, youthful, glamorous, desirable, and suggestive of independence and lesboerotic possibility. While the iconic figure of the pragmatic female pioneer provided the basis for approving comparisons with Batten, the range of roles available to other women was narrowing down. Despite ongoing exertions by feminists, state policies under Depression-era conditions increasingly defi ned men as breadwinners and women as economic dependants. Women struggled to negotiate these changing roles. The ways that Batten was taken up created a challenge to the developing heteronormativity of the Dominion and to the spectre of gendered economic dependence on which it relied.

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A cartoon by A.S. Paterson that appeared in the Dominion on 26 October 1936 hints at Batten’s significance for women (Figure 6.1). It shows a series of panels in which women dismiss men’s and boy’s attempts to assist them with various tasks involving heavy labour. They justify their dismissal with reference to Batten – if she can do what she does, they can function without male assistance. Like all newspaper cartoons, this can be read as capturing an ephemeral and therefore perhaps otherwise undocumented sentiment rather than the more politically cautious feelings that were represented by longer-lasting monuments such as street names or statues. However, “jokes about women and wives in particular form a monotonously staple diet of the jokes columns in the interwar years,”¹ and while this cartoon might,

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therefore, be easy to read as evidence that Batten’s impact on the Dominion was empowering for women, it can also be read as an example of how any such empowerment was ridiculed by men because it threw gender roles into disarray. The poem “Viva! Jean Batten!” – written by “Diogenes” in response to Batten’s England to Australia flight in 1934 – provides a less ambiguous example of how the gendered meaning of Batten’s flights was taken up. Like cartoons, doggerel tended to reflect, and of course contributed to, the tenor of the moment. The final verse of the poem claims that Batten’s performance is yet another challenge to obsolete masculinist assumptions about female inferiority: Salute the Valkyrie of airways! Hail, Woman! Triumphant again! And throw to the breeze that musty old wheeze That girls are unequal to men!² Earlier verses referred to Batten as “courageous and dominant” and as “persistent, invincible, great,” having “a purpose of steel,” possessing “the urge to Adventure,” and achieving “a triumph of spirit and brain” through her actions. These actions included “girdl[ing] the spheres” and conquering the “hazards of Fate, / Of Sex and of Time, of Distance and Clime.”³ The poem moves from the specific, Batten, to the general, “girls,” and Batten thus becomes representative of what “girls” can achieve. The cartoon and poem – along with other similar descriptions of Batten and her effect on some women – imply that Batten had an impact on women’s everyday senses of self. She offered an alternative version of what their female bodies could do, an alternative that had particular resonance during the Depression but resonated generally with interwar gender distinctions. Any narrative (such as the story of Batten’s success) is “ontological: it provides us with a sense of being.” The sense of being can then act as a guide for actions. The actions themselves go on to “produce new narratives and consequently new actions.”⁴ If women took up the narrative of Batten’s achievements and used it as a guide to their own being and their own

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actions, then they could potentially produce new everyday spaces through their own bodies. As part of airspace – young, glamorous, and modern – did Batten’s body generate an emancipatory model for some women’s embodied relationship to the Dominion? Batten certainly had an impact on two of the roles available to women: consumer and dependant. In the context of debates over these roles, Batten offered an irresistible ideal for women’s attempts to negotiate their own gendered identities. Batten’s public persona was a commodity on which certain women brought their skills as consumers to bear. In the process they expressed a visceral desire for her as a flesh-and-blood aesthetic commodity, and they domesticated her. Batten also suggested emancipatory possibilities to women that challenged heteronormativity because she represented economic independence coupled with an appealing brand of emotional resilience. Women could appropriate the meaning of Batten in such a way as to challenge her state-sanctioned function as paradigmatic New Zealander as well as their own roles within the nation.

Brand Loyalty: Batten as Commodity As well as being the medium through which a version of modernity as progress was made concrete, aviation was embedded in and relied on commodity culture. Air travel in the 1920s and 1930s signalled affluence, and aviation companies sold their wares in part through the generally circulating association of flight with glamour. This was particularly true of longdistance record-breaking flights. Modern society (particularly in England, France, and Germany) was “increasingly structured around the erotics and the aesthetics of the commodity.”⁵ The social relations of modernity were organized around making purchases desirable and beautiful. They were also structured around the politics and the economics of the commodity – who could be persuaded to buy what. Batten’s public persona existed at the intersection of these elements of the commodity. She was the object of consumers’ complex desires. While the Depression limited the ability of most women to spend, they were expected to shoulder the onerous identity of consumer not just in

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New Zealand but in the empire too. Aggressive “Buy Empire Goods” campaigns in newspapers and magazines around the empire exhorted consumers to contribute to imperial economic stability. “Be Thrifty, Be Loyal, Buy Empire Goods,” ran one such advertisement. “Undoubtedly the best goods are those made by our own kith and kin.”⁶ The Empire Marketing Board, established in England and in existence from 1926 to 1933,⁷ promoted British manufactured goods to colonial and dominion consumers. The introduction of imperial preference in 1932 further underscored key lines of trade. The dominions would continue to supply raw materials such as food and wool to the metropole and in return would purchase manufactured goods from it rather than from competing, non-Empire nations. The dominions had tariffs against British imports, but tariffs against foreign suppliers were set at higher rates, creating a system whereby imperial goods were preferable.⁸ In 1936 a touring British minister issued a veiled threat to the women consumers of the Dominion, comparing them to British women and implicitly placing the two groups in competition with each other. “Sir Richard was insistent that New Zealand’s future prosperity depended on the British housewife. That influential person in the household had now become used to New Zealand goods, and with reasonable prices consumption would be maintained. But the New Zealand housewife must play her part by helping to bring the wages into the British home. She must buy British. If she was not already convinced of that necessity, she must be convinced by propaganda, and that was part of his job.”⁹ As consumers New Zealand women were thus held responsible for generating national incomes at home and abroad. They had to buy British products to keep British men working. Their counterparts in Britain were, through their purchasing practices, keeping New Zealanders employed. Sir Richard’s words placed New Zealand housewives within a loose collective of “consumer-citizens” or, in this case, imperial consumer-citizens. These were national subjects whose relationships to the nation were expressed and mediated through the commodities that they purchased (or not) as well as through their purchasing power.¹⁰ Victoria de Grazia argues that in the “era of mass consumption, it is difficult to conceive of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation ... with-

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out considering how political actors and social groups use the accumulation of goods typical of modern material culture to construct collective identities.”¹¹ The consumption of material things can have many meanings depending on the context (during pioneer activities, under a welfare state, during Depression-era conditions), on the consumer (affluent, poor, old, young, childless), and on the consumed item itself (bicycle, cosmetic, gramophone, carpet beater). How women expressed their relationships to the state and to their collective identity through consumption depended on the form of the state at the time, who the women were, and what the objects that they consumed signified generally. Consumption was not necessarily a politically empowering action, but to be a consumer may “perhaps yield alternative notions of self and social ties.”¹² Women may generate different conceptions of their own power and roles from those intended by product manufacturers and state agencies. Commodities are not just seductive illusions purchased by female shoppers who are easily manipulated by manufacturers and advertisers. Commodities can also be domesticated.¹³ Shoppers draw the commodity into their own worldview rather than wholeheartedly embracing the commercial meaning attached to the commodity, and “householders reworked the goods they brought into their homes from the market, domesticating these things which once were commodities by cleansing them, in measure, of their market referents.”¹⁴ Their consumption of Batten is a significant manner by which individual women may have conceptualized their bodies and placed themselves within the New Zealand nation on their own terms. A process of domesticating commodities occurred with visual images of women too, images that were designed to encourage women viewers to consume the persona of the depicted woman as well as the commodities that she advertised. In the 1930s Hollywood generated a set of controlling images that circulated widely in New Zealand.¹⁵ Jock Phillips notes that “Hollywood fascinated New Zealand. Beyond the huge attendance at the films, the Press was full of clippings about the stars.”¹⁶ The Production Code of 1934 (the Hays Code) increased the rigidly heterosexual binary of onscreen gender roles, placing discursive limits on how the pictures should be consumed. Yet watching women onscreen created a space for women to

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experience intense lesboerotic feelings for other women,¹⁷ as well as “the semi-magical transformation of screen identification” with the stars.¹⁸ Static images of models in magazine advertisements had an analogous effect, and women’s fashion magazines provided “a socially sanctioned structure in which women are encouraged to consume ... the images of other women.”¹⁹ The “semi-magical transformation,” coupled with consumption practices, “produces imaginative lesbian identities,” as viewers and readers “want the hero” and also “want to be the hero.”²⁰ During the 1920s and into the 1930s, therefore, women who did not necessarily identify as lesbian were learning to find other women attractive and desirable, learning how to consume images of women as commodities, and also learning to insert themselves into the discourses of beauty and heterosexual desirability promoted by movies and magazines.²¹ When Batten entered this arena, consumers may have domesticated her meaning into something local and personally and physically empowering rather than identifying with the figure of corporate and national modernity constructed by C.C. Wakefield & Co., the New Zealand government, and the various manufacturers whose products she endorsed. While this process was not formally collective, the very public nature of Batten’s activities – landing on airfields crammed with spectators waiting to see her, undertaking public speaking tours, appearing in Parliament and in tearooms – meant that individual women responding to her were, to some extent, part of a wider feminine community. Women had differential access to the role of “consumer-citizen,” of course. Particular groups of women interacted with Batten in different women’s spaces. Elite women, such as Te Puea and Lady Bledisloe, met her at civic functions. Women in the salaried middle class – either by profession or through the position of their male relatives – could pay to see her at speaking engagements in cinemas or tearooms. Figure 6.2 shows an advertisement for a tea reception with Batten at D.I.C., the department store on Lambton Quay in Wellington. After examining the commodities on display in the store, shoppers could consume some tea and sandwiches while also consuming Batten’s talk. They might also buy the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly or one of the major newspapers in order to read about her. Working-

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class women, such as domestic servants and women working in industry, may also have seen her at cinemas or read about her. Unemployed women would not have been able to afford to see her speak but may of course have read about her in magazines that circulated at charitable agencies such as the Y WCA .²² Since the Depression had forced many Ma¯ori women to return to their rural communities in order to survive, they would have had less access to Batten, either in the flesh or as an image, than most nonrural Pa¯ keha¯. Women also came together in numerous organized women’s groups. These included Women’s Institutes, the Y WCA , and professional women’s associations. They took differing ideological and practical positions, thereby attracting a variety of women.²³ It was through women’s groups that many women would have met Batten. During her 1934 tour she expressed the desire that “the Women’s Organisations in each centre should co-operate, in which case she would be glad to attend a purely women’s function.”²⁴ In this way she attended many women-only functions, but these did not allow members equal access to her. The Victoria League in Gisborne, for example, asked Batten to “‘wangle’ a few words ... linking up two great ideas – the Empire and flying – without any personal experiences.” She would make these comments while having “a cup of tea with the various presidents, and then give members an opportunity of hearing your voice in a general greeting.”²⁵ Despite such hierarchical restrictions on the membership, women-only events such as these ensured that the community of consumers interested in Batten was female. Before she reached New Zealand, in Sydney, Australia, on 1 June 1934, twenty women’s organizations had united to entertain her at an event where “the police again were compelled to control the crowds that assembled wherever she went.” This was followed by an event at the Hotel Australia hosted by “a group of prominent business men’s womenfolk.” The “last of a long day’s receptions” saw her as the guest of the New Zealand Women’s Association, an organization for expatriate women living in Australia founded by Elenor Hempton, a soprano living in Sydney. There, the “welcome accorded to her was so earnest and enthusiastic that Miss Batten lasted just long enough to express her thanks and was then overcome with emotion.”²⁶ Once she arrived in New Zealand, the “Woman’s World” page of the New Zealand Herald noted that it

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was “needless to say women predominated in the audience” at the Auckland civic reception in 1934.²⁷ One gender-specific medium that discussed Batten in detail, helping thereby to develop a public persona for her that then circulated as a commodity, was the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly. Editor Hedda Dyson used the magazine to promote critical discussion of feminist issues, such as women’s civic and political equality,²⁸ among the recipes and celebrity gossip. She provided stirring editorials and articles on strong women role models such as sportswomen, politicians, and aviatrixes generally. Details about the latter came in all formats, from double-page spreads complete with photographs, to interviews, to short paragraphs or merely captioned photographs. Typical examples pictured “Miss Trevor Hunter, of Wanganui, New Zealand’s youngest aviatrix, [who] is a member of the local Aero Club and holds the ‘A’ licence,” and “Miss Yen Chi Waung, daughter of a Cantonese diplomat, [who] is an enthusiastic and capable Eastern aviatrix.”²⁹ Dyson maintained a constant smattering of aviation jottings sandwiched between “Wellington Social Titbits” and heartfelt testimonials for Lifebuoy Soap. The overall effect of these insertions was to create a tension in the very idea of the aviatrix. On the one hand, she appeared next to the pattern for a smart golfing cardigan or hints on how to remove a stain. Such juxtapositions made her actions normal, part of the shared knowledge that the magazine’s women created for women. On the other hand, activities in Hollywood and those of royalty were also detailed in each issue, and their presence might suggest that the flights of aviatrixes were as far beyond the realm of possibility for most readers, as were life in front of a movie camera or on a throne, although women might well dream that they could attain these states. Then again, the role of pilot itself was not so rigidly fixed as to be beyond all women. A handful of New Zealand’s women pilots, like Trevor Hunter, appeared on the social pages in flying garb, lending glamour to the pages and proving that the right connections could get a kiwi into the sky. Dyson gave Batten more elaborate coverage than the other women pilots. After Batten’s successful 1934 flight, the magazine ran a photographic spread of the pilot, printed the poem “Viva! Jean Batten!” in honour of

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her achievement, and included a long article based on separate interviews with Batten’s mother and father. The latter was “somewhat reticent to talk,” although the unsigned article claimed, “it was obvious that he was very proud of his daughter’s accomplishment.”³⁰ This material was followed in subsequent issues by regular reports until August on Batten’s movements in the “Auckland Social Tit-Bits” and “Wellington Social Whirl” sections of the magazine. In addition, Batten was featured briefly in the “Solar Biology” column, a sort of astrology column, in which “Maorilander” explained how when Batten’s name was translated into numbers (“Maorilander” seemed unaware that Batten had a middle name, Gardner) it indicated that she had “strength of purpose, self-reliance, with possible distinction.”³¹ The material on Batten carried in the magazine in 1934 focused on her social engagements, listed other notables present, and commented on how people in general and women in particular responded to her. The qualities that made her an exemplary New Zealander and an attractive woman were also emphasized. Attempts to capture her allure on paper sought to satisfy the readership’s passionate interest in her, to describe the erotics and aesthetics that made Batten desirable and beautiful, and to cultivate these responses in the readership. One lengthy unsigned article in the “Auckland Social Tit-Bits” column in June positioned Batten in a number of contradictory ways. She was the heroic “recipient of ... homage from practically every corner of the English-speaking globe.” She displayed the typical qualities of the perfect pioneering Pa¯ keha¯ woman: “courage, initiative, and tenacity.” She expressed suitable filial devotion, delighted to be home and to be greeted by her father. She was also attractive, “dark-haired, brighteyed, alert, winsome, graceful,” and “charming.” Despite her heroism she was “still woman enough to be fascinated by pretty clothes,” but not to the extent of being gaudy or overdressed, since she realized “the necessity of suiting her clothing to the occasion.” In addition to this range of qualities and “besides her aero career, she has the eternal, age-old career of Eve before her,”³² a reference to her then-engagement to an Englishman, broken off by Batten shortly after her arrival in New Zealand in 1934. This article is the only one in the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly that attempts to position Batten in relation to men: her father and her fiancé. All others refer to her signifi-

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cance for the nation and for women. The range of sometimes contradictory roles sketched out in this unusual article attest to the difficulty of placing her into conventional hetero-patriarchal roles such as daughter or wife. Once her public persona was established, it took on a life of its own from 1934 onward. On the ground, her persona confronted Batten from newsstands, newsreels, magazine articles, advertisements, radio broadcasts, and signed photographs. She attempted to secure the greatest possible returns on this strange creature. Apart from her public appearances on speaking tours, Batten wrote two books, endorsed a vast range of products, modelled clothes, and signed souvenirs. The most original of these were strips of the silver fabric cut from the wings of her Percival Gull (the aeroplane she flew from 1935–39) at the end of her trans-Tasman flight in 1936. Batten signed each of the tiny pieces, which were then sold.³³ These souvenirs were not just mementoes of what had been seen. They were also part of a long history of relics, in which the aura of a person attached to a thing – a challenge, perhaps, to the mystical allure of the commodity. In addition to exploiting herself to generate much-needed income, Batten circulated. She did this physically, through her tours, but she also circulated as an image. This commodity status was precisely what brought her into the homes and hearts of thousands of women, in reproduced advertisements for face cream, for example.³⁴ Apart from consuming her image, however, consumers began to domesticate her. One way that they did this was by sending her money. In 1934 the New Zealand Herald ran one article on the “spontaneous offerings” sent in to the newspaper for Batten (Miss Mary Garden sent £5.5s.0d., while “Cyma” contributed £1), and another listed the total received by the newspaper (£39.19s.0d.) when it closed a subscription list. In addition, £22.17s.0d. was donated directly at the Auckland Town Hall, largely by companies rather than individuals.³⁵ The financial support of these donors maintained Batten in a state of apparent economic independence. It also maintained the donors themselves in the loose community of “citizen-consumers,” defining themselves in relation to the nation through the commodity that they helped to create. When “people ‘find’ themselves in a narrative ... a process of recognition occurs which functions through relationality to place the subject in a web of identifica-

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tion with more subjects like herself.”³⁶ In recognizing themselves in a narrative, readers or viewers also saw others with whom they could connect. By sending Batten money, donors placed themselves in the story of Batten’s success. Consumers also domesticated Batten through her body. The opening of Parliament in 1934 was marked by a tea at Bellamy’s, the restaurant and bar in Parliament House, presided over by Emma Forbes, the prime minister’s wife. When the strains of the national anthem at this function indicated that their Excellencies Lord and Lady Bledisloe had arrived, “there was a buzz of excitement at the prospect of seeing the famous girl flyer, Miss Jean Batten, who was known to be with them, at close quarters.”³⁷ A similar buzz was generated wherever Batten went, but in addition to this general frisson of anticipation, Batten’s effect on women in particular was extraordinary. Her body elicited eroticized responses. Dyson began one New Zealand Woman’s Weekly editorial on her with a sensual description of Batten’s “small, slender hands” and “clear eyes, fringed by incredibly long lashes.”³⁸ In another example, Batten was described as having a delightful voice, “low-pitched and gentle.”³⁹ At a reception for women reported on the “Women’s Page” of the Dominion, she was described as promptly “capturing the hearts of those who meet her for the first time ... ‘This charming girl,’ you think; a lump comes into your throat; and there it is!” Indeed, the writer confirmed, “you get, definitely, a most tremendous thrill out of just being in the same room with her.”⁴⁰ Two years later the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly claimed that there was no need to “sigh for the days when knights were bold and ladies merely lovely, for a lady both lovely and bold has brought romance into our everyday lives.”⁴¹ In addition to these rather excited descriptions of the effect that Batten produced, she was also, of course, described at length in the customary aesthetic manner reserved for women. A typical example remarked that she looked “very attractive in a long clinging dress of autumn-yellow ring velvet, made with a slight train and with a touch of gold lam[é] on the bodice, over which she wore a short white fur coat. In her dark hair an Alice band of diament[é] sparkled.”⁴² Batten also provoked a visceral desire to touch her. At the beginning of July 1934 Batten was a guest of Lord and Lady Bledisloe in Wellington,

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before she began her tour in Blenheim. She attended a civic reception at the Town Hall in her honour. The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly reported that although “it takes a good deal to rouse the public’s enthusiasm here to any great extent,” for Batten’s visit the “excitement was intense” among the “packed assemblage at the Town Hall” watching her. The excitement was too much for at least two women. The reporter asserted that “I saw one woman throw her arms around her neck, and heard a resounding kiss; and another cried, ‘I want to touch her – let me get through!’”⁴³ Not only were women compelled to throw themselves at her, but reporters told other women who had not been present that these things were happening. If thrilling in Batten’s physical presence was a way to domesticate her, to return the person to the persona, then Batten herself adopted the same strategy. She emphasized her own embodiment. In her published narratives her body featured prominently in her discussions of her flights. Food, stiffness, sun cream, and coffee all merited sometimes quite detailed remarks. Batten placed her body’s (selected) needs squarely in the middle of her tales. A cup of coffee warmed her over Lyons, a pillow had “silken softness,” a special cork helmet protected her head from the sun in Damascus, while at Victoria Point she had “a welcome cup of tea and the most delicious egg sandwiches I had ever tasted.” During her flights she ate “milk tablets, raisins, barley sugar, concentrated meat tablets” as well as sandwiches and the occasional orange that she picked up from stage to stage. She noted that the “tucker-box” was “unfortunately near enough to the auxiliary tanks to allow all the food to be permeated by the unappetizing odour of petrol and oil” and that she managed, over the Atlas Mountains, to “sip some coffee from the flask without spilling a drop on my white suit.” A gift of grapes and oranges from some residents of Nicosia helped to “while away the time” between Cyprus and Beirut on her 1936 flight to New Zealand.⁴⁴ Batten’s remarks about food feature as narrative moments when adventures were absent and she needed to displace the effects of her own efficiency, which meant a trouble-free and therefore rather boring flight, and create instead the illusion that something was actually happening, even if it was just the threat of a coffee spillage. They also function to domesticate flight, to challenge its heroic stature, by signalling the “domestic geographies that enabled heroic conquests.”⁴⁵ 164

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Batten thus circulated as a commodity in a nation of gendered consumers. These consumers wanted to touch her. While touch is a sign of possession (as “Do Not Touch” signs indicate), it also domesticates by tarnishing and wearing away through use. Touch can also be reverent, of course, an attempt to receive some of the mystical power associated with a magical object or person, suggesting that Batten represented much more than a successful woman pilot, perhaps even more than “the first of the country’s truly international heroes.”⁴⁶ The prolific reproduction of her image through endorsements and tours rapidly disseminated Batten’s public persona. What it also disseminated was the idea that an attractive woman could choose to be independent.

Batten as Breadwinner Forty years after women had won the franchise, opportunities for New Zealand’s women, particularly working-class and rural women, both Ma¯ori and Pa¯ keha¯, remained limited in terms of education and careers, and women were still expected to marry and have children. Unlike England, with its historic population of “surplus” women, New Zealand had had a deficit of Pa¯ keha¯ women since the early colonial period, in common with other British colonies. Sex ratios evened out by the 1930s, and even tipped toward a surplus of urban women,⁴⁷ but the notion that it was “somehow wrong and unnatural, and definitely wasteful, to have an uneven distribution of the sexes” remained, and the majority of women married.⁴⁸ In New Zealand, as in many other nations at the time, national discourses increasingly polarized into two main roles for women: mothers or workers. Debates over race suicide, the role of women as mothers of the nation, and the value of eugenics to eliminate the childbearing capacities of so-called “mental defectives” had been going on since at least the founding of the Plunket Society in 1907.⁴⁹ Nowhere was concern over race suicide so prevalent as in the Committee of Inquiry into Abortion between 1936 and 1937. International events added to the complexity of the arguments, as commentators tried to distinguish between (New Zealand) state interference in birth rates and the perceived threat of race suicide and the Fascist approach in Europe, which was widely criticized as a strategy to provide 165

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cannon fodder for militarizing nations.⁵⁰ The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, for example, ran an article in 1934 by one Gelis Gray entitled “Racial Welfare – Marriage of the Unfit” that proposed voluntary sterilization for “mental defectives” for the good of the nation.⁵¹ On the letters page of the same issue of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, a “Perplexed Mother” from Christchurch berated the “girls of to-day” for being “dead against” their real careers of marriage and reproduction. Commending the pronatalist policies of Hitler and Mussolini, the letter writer complained: “I can’t see that it is right for married women to work simply because they don’t like housework – why did they marry if they don’t like it and don’t want children?”⁵² These two examples represent one side, by no means limited to New Zealand, of the debate raging at the time over women’s roles. Racism lay behind these concerns over which women were giving birth since “the pakeha birth rate was barely at replacement level at about sixteen per thousand in 1936, while the Maori birth rate was about double that figure ... European women were accused of committing suicide of the British race.”⁵³ The other side of the debate argued for the redefinition of the meaning of “women” to include the idea of waged “worker.”⁵⁴ Women’s workforce participation, the rights of married women to work, and women’s access to unemployment relief payments were all issues that became more pressing as the effects of the Depression deepened during the 1930s. These debates revolved, essentially, around the idea of dependency. Who was or should be dependent on whom, what rights and obligations went along with dependency, how did state legislation legitimate those relationships, and how could feminists challenge them? Earlier feminist arguments that women could never achieve full citizenship as long as husbands had legal right to their wives’ bodies were now supplemented by arguments that working women were individuals who should receive the same benefits as working men.⁵⁵ Women workers received differential treatment because they were assumed to be dependants rather than breadwinners,⁵⁶ although some space had opened up to understand women as in need of their own source of income. The introduction of family allowances in 1926 did more than simply reinforce the notion that women should stay at home and care for children while men should work for wages. The allowance was paid to

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the wives of men earning less than £4 a week and having more than two children. Although it essentially supplemented the male breadwinner wage, it did give “some women an income for the first time.”⁵⁷ Nevertheless, the much-vaunted social security system implemented by the first Labour government produced a notion of “women” as both helpless and simultaneously “needing to be controlled.”⁵⁸ Under Labour government reforms “a home with an earning father and (implicitly) a non-earning mother was to be the marker of a successful nation.”⁵⁹ During the early years of the Depression, the problem of unemployed men had been hotly debated: “above all else, men worked, and not to do so was a failure of national significance. There was a genuine fear that provision of sustenance or dole payments would undermine men’s character, independence and motivation to work.”⁶⁰ The marker of the successful nation symbolically underscored “the manly ‘independence’ of working men of which the corollary was female economic dependence.”⁶¹ This set of signs (women, the nation, and manly independence) was enshrined in the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Amendment Act (1936), which set minimum rates for male and female workers. The male wage was defined as a “family wage – a basic wage sufficient to support a man, his wife and three children.” Its money value was set at £3.16s.0d. a week for men while women were entitled to £1.16s.0d.⁶² This 1936 Act and the later Social Security Act (1938), with changes in entitlement to unemployment relief (working women paid into it but were not initially paid from it) indicate that while the family wage institutionalized women’s heterosexual dependency, legislators also recognized that women had some legitimate claims to economic citizenship in their own right.⁶³ Their recognition may have been purely pragmatic. Women’s workforce participation rates increased by 32 per cent between 1921 and 1936. The increase slowed dramatically to just 12.7 per cent between 1936 and 1945 despite wartime demands for women’s labour.⁶⁴ But the very idea that women had a right to remain in or enter paid employment after marriage was considered sufficiently uncommon that it did not enter public debates until the late 1930s.⁶⁵ Labour social policy assumed the existence of a husband, and when a real one did not exist the state in effect assumed the role of husband for many women, providing for them in the absence of a bread-

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winner. Thus “women’s structured incapacity to earn a family wage could remain unexamined, and their economic autonomy pre-empted.”⁶⁶ Batten’s achievements helped to fuel the flames of this debate. As the most famous Pa¯ keha¯ woman of the mid-1930s – Te Puea was probably the most famous Ma¯ori woman – her strategies to raise funds and commercialize her 1936 tour added weight to the demands for women’s economic independence. In the “Local Gossip” section of the New Zealand Herald Saturday supplement, columnist Mercutio wrote “apropos a little argument that has been proceeding about woman’s place in life and woman’s capabilities, the contestants might note that the first solo flier this country has provided to perform this feat belongs to the allegedly weaker sex.”⁶⁷ An editorial in the New Zealand Herald remarked that Batten’s 1934 flight proved “that female endurance can defy the limits which used to be set upon it.”⁶⁸ Prime Minister Michael Savage agreed: at the civic reception for her in Auckland in October 1936, his telephoned words from Wellington were amplified so that the massed crowd could hear them. “Miss Batten has proved beyond doubt that the assumption that men were always superior was not always right.”⁶⁹ A letter to the Dominion in 1936 went even further in its claim that Batten represented not so much woman as equal to man but woman as independent worker. The writer demanded to know how the Labour government was going to support Batten. After all, “she is one of us, she is one of the people. She is a worker, and no doubt would be working for her living now if she was not doing such mighty things. She is a woman. She wants money, she knows it, and will be brave enough to get it, but why should she have to advertise any commodity?”⁷⁰ If the state refused to support Batten, it would effectively consign her to a form of prostitution: selling her reputation in order to make money. As a woman worker she was entitled to state support, the letter writer implied, and therefore protection from this form of prostitution. Unmarried, Batten clearly needed a surrogate husband. What the letter writer and most other New Zealanders at the time would not have realized was that Batten was herself acting as a kind of surrogate husband. Since her parents were separated, she had a dependant, her mother, to support.⁷¹

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Not all commentators defined Batten as a working woman in need of state support. One dissenting “Fool” suggested that any donations for Batten should go instead toward mothers and poor women. “If the Jeans of New Zealand have shillings to spare, if the young people can raise money, then for heaven’s sake give it to the weary mothers, that they may buy milk, warm clothing, and blankets for their families.” After all, Batten had “a type of courage which I can admire very much. But my mind and heart also deeply admire and revere the courage which sustains these other women, not merely for one short burst of glory, but for every day in the year.” Largely ignoring the Fool’s point, an “Admirer” responded by arguing that Batten could never have made the flight if her sponsors thought like the Fool and that in any case subscription funds were voluntary.⁷² Very few of her struggling compatriots seemed to begrudge her the state grant that she received in 1934. When Frank Langstone, Labour MP for Waimarino, attempted to do so, it backfired on him. In the House of Representatives he asked the prime minister whether “in view of the evident buoyant state of our national finances, he will grant £500 to the mothers of families whose breadwinners are on relief works as a recognition of the sacrifices, bravery, and endurance of these splendid women in the struggle for existence.”⁷³ His remarks were met by a “buzz of critical comment,” and the Dominion the next day accused him of attempting to make political capital out of the awarding of the grant.⁷⁴ These letter writers attempted to pin Batten down as either in need or independent as a way to resolve the contradiction between her assumed dependency as a woman and her demonstrated independence as a solo pilot entering into commercial contracts. The contradiction generated gendered responses even within her own family. After her first record flight her mother “revealed the fact that when the project was first broached the male members of the family opposed and the females supported the idea.”⁷⁵ The N.Z. Truth seized on the scent of a split in the family and asked Batten’s father why she had publicly thanked her mother but not him. He denied that they were on anything but the “best of terms,” although “he made no bones about it that he had some old fashioned ideas as to the sphere to which the so-called weaker sex should confine themselves.”⁷⁶ He continued to insist

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that she was a wilful or headstrong girl over whom he had patriarchal prerogative rather than acknowledging that she was an independent decisionmaking adult. When she flew across the Tasman in 1936, her father was reported as saying she “ought to be spanked.”⁷⁷ Before she set out he complained that the “only way to stop her would be to burn the plane or lock her up.”⁷⁸ Her uncle went even further, suggesting that “the only way to stop Jean from flying the Tasman is to shoot her.” While this image may have been intended to indicate just how determined Batten was, and he went on to say he had “a lot of confidence in her,” these are nevertheless violent ways to suggest controlling a woman’s actions.⁷⁹ Even the mayor of Auckland, Ernest Davis, assumed the right to exercise symbolic patriarchal privilege over Batten. When she climbed out of her Gull at Mangere Aerodrome in Auckland at the end of her record-breaking flight, he remarked “with paternal emphasis” to the twenty-seven-year-old woman, “you are a very naughty girl, and really I think you need a good spanking for giving us such a terribly anxious time here.”⁸⁰ Presumably, a combination of manners, exhaustion after her more than ten-hour solo flight, and the knowledge that comments like this were inevitable kept Batten from snapping at him. The anxiety to which Davis alluded referred to the controversy over the trans-Tasman leg of Batten’s 1936 flight. It was perhaps the most notable example of resistance to her independence. The Tasman had successfully been flown seventeen times by October 1936, but there was an enormous hue and cry over Batten’s flight. Batten’s biographer argues that despite the seventeen crossings, “still fresh in people’s memories was the first singleengined attempt in 1928 by two New Zealanders, George Hood and John Moncrieff ... although they carried a rubber dinghy and signals were heard from them for over 12 hours, they were never seen again.”⁸¹ In addition, Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith had both vanished on separate flights over large bodies of water, in 1934 and 1935 respectively. Batten proceeded with her careful preparations despite threats by both the Australian and New Zealand governments to stop her. The Commonwealth government sought Air Ministry advice and admitted to their New Zealand counterparts in an urgent telegram that “we find ourselves unable to take any action to prevent flight in view aircraft being on British register and

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provisions International Convention aerial navigation which provides freedom innocent passage.”⁸² Since Batten had been careful to secure all the relevant documents before setting off from England, they had no recourse to stop her.⁸³ Resistance to her flight came from more than just the governments. “A number of young women pleaded with her not to attempt to fly the Tasman,”⁸⁴ while a number of other pilots explained that it was just too dangerous and that she should be stopped.⁸⁵ The governments may have had their eyes on the expense of a search if she went missing, her instructions against a search notwithstanding. Yet no such resistance had met her record flight over the South Atlantic the previous year, a flight in the same aeroplane over a longer expanse of water. Batten speculated in her autobiography over the source of the opposition and concluded that “I was a woman flying alone; and Australia like New Zealand is still very much ‘a man’s country.’”⁸⁶ Her flight to Brazil demonstrated British and dominion superiority to the Brazilians and Argentines, particularly because she was a woman. When she performed a similar feat in their own back yard, however, Australian and New Zealand men seemed to find that her gender disturbed their sense of superiority.⁸⁷ Further evidence of her unsettling independence can be found in the whiff of lesbianism that never quite left her. Bill Oliver, a fellow trainee pilot at Stag Lane with Batten in 1930, recalled “very clearly some of the chaps discussing the possibility that she might actually be lesbian,” while another trainee, Tom Hollinrake, remarked: “as far as I was concerned she had no sex appeal whatsoever. I made a couple of attempts to take her out, but gave up. I’m sure that she didn’t go out on dates with anybody. She was singleminded, almost to the point of obsession, about flying to the exclusion of all else. She was most certainly not one of the crowd.”⁸⁸ Oliver’s and Hollinrake’s interpretations have to be read in contradistinction to those of women who encountered Batten and found her allure irresistible. Batten’s independence seems to be the issue that is read differently by these two groups. Men explained away her lack of interest in them by assuming that she had no heterosexual appeal (then why ask her out?) rather than recognizing that they personally may have lacked heterosexual appeal or that she

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may have had more interest in her career than in men, although Hollinrake hints at this latter possibility with his comment about her single-mindedness. Accusations of missing sex appeal were themselves nothing new. For example, Miles Franklin, the famous Australian author of My Brilliant Career, who herself never married, was accused by spurned male suitors of being nothing but a sexless mind at the turn of the century.⁸⁹ What is different about Batten is that intimations of lesbianism crept in. While accusations of lesbianism have frequently been used to undermine independent women with the taint of unnatural vice,⁹⁰ the extraordinary persistence of rumours that Batten may have been a lesbian⁹¹ implies an original or underlying ambiguity if not in herself then at least in the responses that she provoked in women. The question is not whether Batten was or was not a lesbian nor even whether she held a particular attraction for lesbians. Amy Johnson received letters from, in the words of her adviser, “perverted females,” which he destroyed without allowing her to read.⁹² Batten received about one hundred letters a day after her 1934 flight,⁹³ so there is every reason to suppose that lesbians wrote to her. While it was difficult to have an identity as a lesbian in New Zealand at the time, it was not impossible to lead a lesbian life, as the personal histories of such literary notables as Katherine Mansfield, Ursula Bethell, and Eileen Duggan attest.⁹⁴ The question is rather how she appealed to women in such a way as to open up emancipatory possibilities in their own lives. She carried a lesboerotic charge that circulated primarily in gender-specific sites such as tearooms in department stores,⁹⁵ the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, and on “Women’s Pages” of general circulation newspapers. Women were thereby encouraged to respond to her in their own spaces in ways that were not echoed in more formal and paternalistic state and municipal receptions. One reason for the apparent widespread reach of Batten’s lesboerotic charge is that she was slight, winsome, and attractive in quintessentially feminine ways. Her femininity facilitated her circulation in women-only contexts because many of these contexts assumed that femininity appealed to most women. Batten’s femininity was a cause of constant remark and reaffirmation. In Camooweal, Queensland, for example, while sitting in the dining room of a hotel and telling an audience about her lack of fear

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when flying across the Timor Sea without a lifebelt or collapsible boat, she saw a rat. “In a trice she was standing on a chair, her skirts folded closely around her legs.” Her leap, the reporter noted, had been preceded by an appropriately feminine scream.⁹⁶ Another article asserted that she was, among other things, “lissom” and “fresh-complexioned” and “not a severe, unsympathetic impersonation of efficiency, but just a pleasant, normal girl, like any other, but with a rather charming smile.”⁹⁷ In her interactions with women’s groups, Batten sometimes created a sense of female community by humorously drawing attention to her own femininity. “Had I brought all the clothes I would have liked to have brought,” she told the women at a morning tea put on by her old school, “I would have required an extra aeroplane.”⁹⁸ In addition to the stream of articles listing her stylish yet feminine outfits, her femininity was occasionally confirmed by the effect that she had on men. Harold Gatty, another pilot, remarked at a luncheon in Sydney that women had no place in commercial aviation. Most who tried to enter the field did so because they were the unusual, implicitly masculine women that the ICAN Sub-Commission members had identified. Gatty argued that they lacked “the personal charm necessary in their everyday existence ... [Batten] was the exception. She was easy to look at.”⁹⁹ Batten’s femininity, however, challenged the heteronormativity of the nation because she rejected marriage. Media speculation over her marital future was constant. Ellie Bailey, the London correspondent for the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, for example, quashed rumours of a romance in 1937. “Personally,” Bailey wrote after interviewing Batten, “I don’t think this [a rumoured engagement to the pilot Jim Broadbent] is at all likely. Jean seems a very impartial, self-sufficient young woman, and she is very devoted to her mother.”¹⁰⁰ Her devotion to her mother was unexceptional, even traditional, since unmarried daughters typically cared for aging parents, but her self-sufficiency was modern. Nearly a year earlier an N.Z. Truth reporter had asked Batten about the truth of a “secret engagement,” to which she “smilingly replied ‘No, it is not true. Why? Do you want to marry me?’”¹⁰¹ An unsigned article on “The Woman within the Flying Suit” in the Auckland Weekly News reminded its readers that “people wonder whether Miss Batten, who celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday last month, will ever

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marry.” Batten was “non-committal,” leaving the world to “draw its own inferences.”¹⁰² Elsewhere, Batten was more explicit, stating that she would not marry. “Before leaving England I had become engaged, but on arrival in Australia realised that I should have to choose between matrimony and my career ... Now that I had tasted the fruits of success and felt the urge to rise to even greater heights, any responsibility, however light, that would in any way hinder or deter my progress was not to be considered.”¹⁰³ Batten was unusual among aviators in publicly voicing and acting on this determination, although it was a common practice among women in other professions to choose their careers over marriage. Jock Phillips notes that by 1914 “about 50 per cent of women with college degrees” did not marry.¹⁰⁴ This practice was not common among pilots. Of the best-known women pilots in the English-speaking world at the time (Amy Johnson, Amelia Earhart, and Lores Bonney), Batten was the only one who remained unmarried. Certainly, a number of contemporary commentators expressed confidence that someone would eventually claim her. In 1934, for example, the mayor of Auckland, G.W. Hutchinson, drew attention to her thenengagement in his official speech of welcome. He noted that she was expected to return to England to enter “the realm of matrimony,” and he was sure “we wish her all happiness and success in her new career, which will be watched with parental interest by the people of Auckland.”¹⁰⁵ Given that this was her moment of international triumph, Hutchinson’s words had the effect of diminishing her achievement, transforming it into a last jaunt before she embarked on her main career, one that in his eyes clearly precluded any further flights.¹⁰⁶ Two years later the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly carried a graphological analysis of Batten’s handwriting. “Critic,” the graphologist, asserted that Batten’s writing revealed her “fine emotional and responsive character. What a thrill in life it represents!” She possessed caution, boldness, courage, decisiveness, and “a little bit in reserve,” in addition to a “womanly gentleness.” Overall, Critic hoped “that the day will come when she will find suitable appreciation from someone who will understand her and add to her happiness.”¹⁰⁷ By this time Batten’s lack of commitment to marriage

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was better known than it had been in 1934, so this handwriting analysis perhaps represents Critic’s attempt to reconcile Batten’s achievements, extraordinary by any standards, with her femininity. That is, if the main purpose of a woman’s life was supposed to be played out at the scale of intimate relations with men and children, then sooner or later Batten would be domesticated. That the “someone” who might appreciate her was genderless in Critic’s article was perhaps no accident. While heterosexist readers would blithely assume that the “someone” would of course be a man, other women, emboldened by the very idea of Batten, might hope that they could “add to her happiness” as companion or lover. An astrological analysis of Batten’s personality in the same issue of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly went even further in its attempt to make sense of Batten’s combination of the “masculine” traits that made her a successful pilot and the fact that she was “really quite spectacularly beautiful.”¹⁰⁸ The astrology columnist “Maorilander” made no wistful comments about Batten’s future, concentrating instead on aspects of her personality that could be gleaned from her birth. These included “clear and logical” thinking, a tendency to make plain arguments, a “discriminating, critical mind,” “a preference for detailed research,” and “a great aspiration for purity and health.” Among a range of vague qualities, such as musical talent and cultured connections, she also had “independence, and ability to exist without the help of her parents.” Nevertheless, Maorilander claimed, rather strangely given the evidence of Batten’s flights, that “her profession will not be taken very seriously, the private life being of far greater concern.”¹⁰⁹ Despite attempts such as these to almost literally domesticate Batten, she articulated what many women may have been feeling, although she put into practice what must have seemed impossible for most of them. In her history of gender in Taradale, a town in Hawke’s Bay on the east coast of the North Island, the historian Caroline Daley argues that the women in her case study “expressed hesitation about getting married. Marriage meant hard work, and spoilt the fun and freedom of single life.”¹¹⁰ Yet, hesitant or not, marriage remained the rapidly attained destination of the vast majority of Pa¯ keha¯ women in the interwar period. According to official statistics,

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most women who married for the first time did so at age twenty-one, and during the 1930s the idea of “woman’s place in the home was so natural that it was unmentioned.”¹¹¹ The emphasis on her femininity and curiosity about her matrimonial plans may actually have made Batten a subversive figure since she demonstrated that a woman did not have to be masculine or sexually undesirable to be independent and successful. This suggests that accusations or questions about her sexuality were based not on her appearance but on her economic and emotional independence and on the attraction that she held for all women. In the context of shifting gender roles in the Dominion (or indeed at any time), this offered a dangerously subversive conception of lesbianism because it shifted the focus away from men. Batten was not a masculine woman who wanted to be a man, nor was she an unattractive woman who could not get a man, both typical ways of dismissing lesbians. Rather, she was an attractive woman who publicly stated that a man would seriously compromise her independence. Crucially, women did not express pity for her unattached state nor alarm that she questioned the wisdom of heterosexual unions. They admired and desired her, and precisely because she was a national figure the feelings that they expressed were legitimated in their newspapers, magazines, and women’s groups. Their intense love for “Our Jean” was rendered perfectly natural.

Conclusions Batten was not the only challenger to interwar heteronormativity based on female dependence. Feminist groups also offered partial challenges to restrictive gendered assumptions. Organizations such as the National Council of Women, Girls’ Friendly Society, and the Y WCA were all run, according to Melanie Nolan, by middle-class feminists. They registered unemployed women, tried to find them work, and lobbied the government to provide aid to such women. Their goals, however, were to maintain class boundaries around wage-earning women, and they focused on domestic service – even if it was unpaid – as the solution to working-class Pa¯ keha¯ women’s unemployment.¹¹² Most Ma¯ori women had been under pressure

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since at least the 1890s, through predominantly Ma¯ori denominational boarding and Native schools, to train as domestic servants or to return to their home communities on completion of their studies and promote assimilation into Pa¯ keha¯-style systems of gendered domesticity.¹¹³ Other venues promoted more radical departures from gendered dependence. Woman Today, a periodical that replaced Working Woman (a Communist Partyaffiliated publication), attempted to provide a socialist-feminist perspective on the condition of working women. It circulated poorly between 1937 and 1939.¹¹⁴ Feminist novelists, such as Jean Devanny and Robin Hyde, argued through their characters for women’s sexual autonomy.¹¹⁵ Batten’s challenge to heteronormativity and therefore to the forms of space that women reproduced in their everyday lives was, arguably, different from the above examples because her appeal, dispersed via her commodified persona, was more widespread. Batten herself seemed to find that the space she created through her actions was painful to inhabit. “It seemed that all through my life I had been forced to make these big decisions and usually alone. I wanted very much to settle down in my own country and lead a calm, peaceful life, but in my heart I knew only too well that I was destined to be a wanderer. I seemed born to travel, and in flying I found the combination of the two things which meant everything to me: the intoxicating drug of speed and freedom to roam the earth.”¹¹⁶ Torn between her role as settled and peaceful national citizen and her intense desire for speed and freedom – a desire that she justified by claiming it as her destiny – Batten acknowledged the contradictory price of her position. On the one hand she was alone; on the other hand nothing (and nobody) meant more to her than speed and freedom. While women reporters, letter writers, and women’s organization members did not highlight freedom and speed in their paeans to her (“Diogenes” was an exception), she did. This discrepancy suggests that they used her to bolster their own desires, which were not necessarily the same as hers. The contradictions Batten embodied suggest that she did indeed speak directly to the changing and difficult gender roles that many women were forced to negotiate in the 1930s. She did not persuade a whole generation of women that they should be pilots, although she did inspire a few

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female pilots, most notably Joyce Prime from Wellington.¹¹⁷ Primarily, however, she represented a challenge to the harsh orthodoxy that women had to be economically and emotionally dependent on others, particularly men. She was economically and emotionally independent of any particular man, although she was dependent on many men as representatives of the state, companies, municipalities, and so on. But she was also dependent on women: women who sent her money and women who provided a market for the products she endorsed and the speeches she gave. For at least some of these women, she also provided a means to express their lesboerotic desires for other women. Her role as a pilot brought with it the glamour, modernity, and apparently gender-neutral promise of airmindedness. Her commodity status made it possible for thousands of skilled consumers to participate in creating and modifying, or domesticating, her meaning for themselves. It was her stated intention not to adopt the traditional and virtually inevitable role of wife, despite being very attractive, that made her more than just a fantasy figure of escapism from Depression-era drudgery.

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In 1934 the British feminist Winifred Holtby claimed that “when an Amy Johnson breaks aviation records, when a Madame Curie discovers radium, an Ethel Smyth composes a Mass, a Frances Perkins controls perhaps the most difficult government department in the American New Deal – then it becomes a trifle harder for young girls to tell themselves: ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m only a woman.’ The possibility of achievement has been vindicated.”¹ These were all proud feminist accomplishments that would spur women on to greater glories and silence any doubts that they had about the importance of their contributions. In 1937 Jean Batten added to the illustrious roster by becoming “the girl who has beaten all the men” when she broke the world record for a flight from Australia to England.² Even C.G. Grey, commenting in 1930 on an impressive flight by Winifred Spooner, remarked that “those furious feminists who claim that a woman can do anything that a man does at least as well, and probably better, have a better argument in Miss Spooner than they have in any other woman flier who has shown up so far,” although his praise was intended to criticize Amy Johnson.³ By modelling achievement and “beating all the men,” pilots such as Johnson and Batten provided convincing support for ongoing feminist struggles

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and demonstrated that women pilots were part of airspace. These women may have persuaded some male aviation officials, as well as other women, that women were entitled to fly. In 1938 the Civil Air Guard (CAG ) was formed in Britain. It was run by Captain Harold Balfour, a friend of Batten’s,⁴ and its purpose was to supply cheap flying training in order to create a pool of reserve pilots available for impending wartime duties. The scheme was open to women as well as men.⁵ By January 1939 the Civil Air Guard had 6,000 members, of whom 299 were women. Six months later it had between 800 and 900 women members, 200 of whom had qualified as pilots.⁶ As these numbers suggest, there were many women flying by the end of the interwar period. Thus the most immediate legacy left by the women discussed in this book, Batten, Johnson, Lady Heath, and Mary Bruce – and by the many others who also flew, such as Pauline Gower, Winifred Spooner, Nancy Bird, Susan Slade, Grace Aitken, Joan Page, Maia Carberry, Audrey Fiander, Pauline Bennett, and Joyce Prime – was the women pilots of the CAG . The significance for these later pilots of the earlier women’s exploits was indicated by Johnson when she went to an interview for a job with the women’s branch of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA ), formed in Britain at the beginning of the Second World War, for which women ferried aircraft from depots to airfields as part of the war effort. “I saw another applicant all dolled up in full Sidcot suit, furlined helmet and goggles, fluffing up her hair etc – the typical CAG Lyons-waitress type,” she wrote. “I suddenly realised I could not go in and sit in line with these girls (who all more or less look up to me as God!), so I turned tail and ran.”⁷ Why does it matter if gender is spatialized and space is gendered, and why is it significant if airspace in particular was gendered? In her discussion of why history is relevant to cultural studies, Meaghan Morris argues that “any analysis of overly specific materials ... runs the risk of a failure to address: the parochial becomes the pointless.”⁸ Airspace is a place that no one can enter without the aid of an expensive machine and at least minimal training in its use. It is a place that has always, more or less, seemed excessively dangerous to most people. It might appear, therefore, to be the ultimate parochial object of study. And this is exactly the point. Airspace

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seems parochial, particularly for feminist scholars, because the history of the struggle to produce it as anything other than a masculine space has been, by and large, erased. Civilian airspace, whether private, commercial, imperial, national, or the pilot’s own body, has been naturalized as masculine. Naturalization is a “form of reification whereby social actors, discourses and practices are re-presented as natural essences or things.”⁹ The process of naturalizing erases the “work of reinterpretation.” What historians, officials, populists, newspaper columnists, and so on then represent as the past is not just partial – no history can reconstruct what really happened in its immense entirety – but is manipulated to appear “as ‘raw facts’ which cannot be contested.”¹⁰ This argument helps to explain why airspace may seem parochial, or at best marginal, to feminist analysis. Aviation histories of the interwar British Empire naturalize civilian airspace as masculine. Women tend to be written out of it. Works that do focus on women pilots contribute to this naturalization by singling out and reinscribing the idea that only exceptional women entered this masculine preserve.¹¹ Airspace, however, is the factory floor, managerial office, and marketplace of the aviation industry. It is national territory and an imaginative realm of possibility. It facilitates international connections and is the place from which bombs and propaganda leaflets fall. It was produced by women as well as men. One of the central ways that airspace was naturalized as masculine was by invoking heteronormative assumptions. The idea that men and women were fundamentally different, with each possessing incompatible, genderappropriate qualities, circulated widely in the interwar British Empire. These assumptions justified attempts to invent and reassert social structures to keep men’s and women’s lives distinct and unequal. The increase in breadwinner ideology, the idea that a woman’s main role was to produce children, emigration schemes to dispose of “surplus” British women, and media emphasis on heterosexual romantic love all indicate that gender relations were in turmoil in the 1920s and 1930s. Within civilian airspace, heteronormativity was a way to insist that men had “masculine” qualities and women had “feminine” qualities and that this division was natural and self-evident. The pilot needed masculine qualities, so many woman pilots had to deal with the idea that they were masculine in one way or another. If

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they were not “masculine-type women,” their command of airspace destabilized gender relations. Threaded throughout all the contemporary discussions about women pilots are references to their degree of femininity or masculinity, as commentators attempt to situate them in relation to sets of heteronormative expectations. The glamour of airmindedness made these women desirable, but their control of airspace forced their spectators to reconsider their ideas about airspace as masculine – although, frequently enough, they did so only to revert to their existing prejudices. As Harold Penrose notes, “most men were reluctant to be piloted by a woman pilot because feminine judgment in emergency differs from theirs.”¹² If gender relations were turbulent, relations between the imperial centre and the colonies and dominions were also under pressure. India wanted dominion status, the dominions wanted to reorganize their position within the Commonwealth and empire, and flying altered the sense of distance between places. Airspace had the potential to be a form of abstract space imposed throughout the unwieldy empire, but this potential was undermined by the actions of pilots such as Jean Batten who embodied their own national desires and promoted local designs on airspace. Between 1922 and 1937 women in Britain and New Zealand struggled very hard to place themselves firmly in all forms of airspace and to insist, despite challenges, that it could be gendered female without simply domesticating it. This was no easy task. They struggled physically, emotionally, and financially to gain access to the promise of the new space. They were sabotaged and underfunded by hostile, jealous, or protectionist men. They suffered setbacks, sunburn, cramp, hunger, thirst, and a deep abiding fear of what would happen if they crashed. The space was infused with economic, political, military, and imaginative meanings. Their presence in it, bringing to it as they did their own versions of its meanings, modified its contours. Their own assumptions about how to utilize it – to find a place to be, to enjoy racist imperialist adventures, to challenge imperial geography, to make money, to pull together a small nation, to inspire other women to feel its seductive power through an erotic charge – and their own positions as aristocratic, middle-class, colonial, married, unmarried, childless, and

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so on also affected what exactly it was that they each produced. But they all helped to produce airspace. “To change life,” writes Lefebvre, “we must first change space.”¹³ Women pilots tried to do just that, to change life by helping to create a new space. Through their embodied production of the five forms of civilian airspace, women challenged the naturalization of airspace as masculine and of heteronormativity as natural. Some of them also challenged elitist and British imperialist notions about which bodies should occupy which airspace. For a short period of time between the wars, they recorporealized this apparently abstract space. In so doing, they also complicated the very imperial notion of spatial hierarchies such as centre-periphery and original-copy. Their flights and the enormous interest in them rewrote geography and the relationship of women to space.

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NOTES

Abbreviations atl awmml ca doris gbpd ia motat nzpd pro

Alexander Turnball Library Auckland War Memorial Museum Library Civil Aviation Department (Record Group), series 1, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kaˉwanatanga, Wellington Office Department of Research and Information Services, r af Museum, Hendon Great Britain Parliamentary Debates Department of Internal Affairs, Head Office [Record Group], series 1, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kaˉwanatanga, Wellington Office Museum of Transport and Technology New Zealand Parliamentary Debates Public Record Office

Introduction 1 Daily Mirror (London), quoted in Evening Post (Wellington), 13 October 1936. 2 Daily Express (London) newspaper banner headline, October 1937, quoted in Ian Mackersey, Jean Batten, 277.

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3 For example, in 1926 Imperial Airways was operating with, among other aircraft, the Armstrong Whitworth Argosy, a three-engined biplane with a closed cabin for the passengers and an open one for the flight crew. Its cruising speed was 90 mph. By 1939 Imperial Airways operated Empire Flying Boats, relatively luxurious (and actually relatively slow) four-engined monoplanes with a cruising speed of 200 mph; see Kenneth Munson, Airliners between the Wars 1919–39, 31. 4 Stella Wolfe Murray, “The Coming Air Age,” 112. Murray was a journalist and enthusiastic air passenger who conceived of, cowrote, and coedited Woman and Flying, an airminded text for British women. 5 A.J. Christopher, The British Empire at Its Zenith, 23. 6 Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds, Unsettling Settler Societies, 3. Apart from New Zealand, examples of settler societies include Australia, Canada, Peru, the United States, Mexico, and Algeria. 7 Raewyn Dalziel, “Presenting the Enfranchisement of New Zealand Women Abroad,” 42–64. 8 Lawrence D. Berg and Robin A. Kearns, “America Unlimited,” 130. 9 Berg and Kearns, ibid., 130, provide the example of Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes to illustrate their point. 10 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather; Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds; Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London. 11 Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel. See, for example, Siân Reynolds, France between the Wars, and Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers. 12 Julian Thomas, “Amy Johnson’s Triumph,” 72–84; Justine Lloyd, “The Impossible Aviatrix,” 137–52. 13 Susan Ware, Still Missing. By contrast, literary theorist Sidonie Smith, Moving Lives, 73–119, provides a close analysis of Earhart’s published writing but demonstrates little knowledge of the historical context. She follows Corn in suggesting that Earhart, along with another US pilot, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, domesticated aviation. 14 Mary Russo, “Reflections on Upward Mobility,” 300. 15 See, for example, Julia Wosk, Women and the Machine; and Ann Herrmann, Queering the Moderns. 16 Georgine Clarsen, “The ‘Dainty Female Toe’ and the ‘Brawny Male Arm,’” 153–63; Laura Doan, “Primum Mobile,” 26–41; Lorraine Coons and Alexander Varias, Tourist Third Cabin; Barbara Schmucki, “On the Trams,” 60–72. 17 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 90. 18 Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography, 17–18; Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place, 148–69. 186

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19 Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism. 20 See, for example, Caroline Daley, Girls and Women, Men and Boys; and the essays in Caroline Daley and Deborah Montgomerie, eds, The Gendered Kiwi. 21 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 54. 22 Neil Smith, Uneven Development, 170. Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 401, argues that the imposition of abstract space was effectively complete (in the West, presumably) by the middle of the twentieth century. My argument that airspace is commodified would not necessarily be supported by Lefebvre since he utilizes a binary opposition between the social and the natural and privileges the natural. The relationship between the sky and airspace is not clear-cut. I am using the term “airspace” to refer to a socially constructed and commodified space, but it clearly depends on the presence of the sky for its existence. 23 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 285–7. 24 Kathleen M. Kirby, Indifferent Boundaries; Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Rose, Feminism and Geography. 25 Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 401. 26 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 287. 27 See, for example, Rose, Feminism and Geography, 66–82. Feminist philosopher Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, examines how metaphors of the dualisms between mind and body and between male and female have been used to create knowledge in philosophy. Political scientist Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women, 33–57, argues that citizenship is based on the illusion of disembodied masculinity, with consequences for “embodied” women. For a survey of how geographers discuss bodies, see Robyn Longhurst, Bodies, 9–32. 28 See Alison Oram, “‘Embittered, Sexless or Homosexual,’” 99–118; and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 245–96. 29 See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, 297–373; and Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian,” 281–93. 30 Laura Doan, Fashioning Saphism, xiii–xiv. 31 For a discussion of debates around passing as male (which is not the same as masculine style) in New Zealand, see Jenny Coleman, “Unsettled Women,” 13–26. 32 English feminists Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby provide an interesting example of this practice. Brittain devoted considerable energy to denying that Holtby, her best friend, was a lesbian and that the two of them had had a lesbian relationship; see Pam Johnson, “‘The Best Friend Whom Life Has Given Me,’” 141–57. Holtby herself was more circumspect, critiquing the 187

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impact of Freud’s ideas and remarking that “we do not even know – though we theorise and penalise with ferocious confidence – whether the ‘normal’ sexual relationship is homo- or bi- or hetero-sexual”; see Winnifred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation, 192. 33 Smith, Moving Lives, 82. 34 Item 1/86, decision of ican at the Sixth Session held in Paris, 3–6 March 1934, pro /avia 2/148. 35 Newspaper clipping (no source given), dated 25 October 1937, Scrapbook of Rito McKinnon (clippings), ms -Papers-6463-2, atl .

Chapter One 1 Graham Smith, Taking to the Skies, 233. 2 For a discussion of these techniques, see Kathleen M. Kirby, Indifferent Boundaries, 37–56; and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 201–16. 3 Amy Johnson, “Amy Johnson,” 156. 4 Sir Harry Brittain, By Air, 15; Alan Cobham, Skyways, 2; Colonel the Master of Sempill, The Air and the Plain Man, 121. 5 Stella Wolfe Murray, “The Coming Air Age,” 110. 6 Quoted in Susan Ware, Still Missing, 63. 7 F.T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, 75. 8 An illusion since, as Scott Kirsch points out in “The Incredible Shrinking World?” 546, “the world has not shrunk through technological innovation, but rather, only through the process of representation.” 9 Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers, 2–3. 10 See Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings. 11 For an example of how a nation claimed technological superiority despite evidence to the contrary, see Scott W. Palmer, “On Wings of Courage,” 209–26. 12 Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel, 12. 13 Stella Wolfe Murray, “New Aspects of Aviation,” 90, original emphasis. 14 Ibid., 90–9; Stella Wolfe Murray, “The Airway to the East,” 80–2; Lady Mary Bailey, “Croydon to the Cape and Back Again,” 217. Murray adds a Biblical comment at the end of Bailey’s account. 15 Violet Sweet, “Fan Letters Reveal Interest in Mrs. Bruce’s Achievements: Stirs Japanese Girls’ Hopes,” Japan Times, 5 December 1930, in PRO /AVIA 2/498/63141. The article was one of several attached to the British ambassador’s despatch to London on the visit by Bruce to Japan. The excess of inscription has been noted by others; see Judy Lomax, Women of the Air, 48. 188

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16 Batten owned a Percival Gull, G -ADPR , in which she made three of her five record-breaking flights, in 1935, 1936, and 1937. 17 A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945, 365. 18 Jean Batten, “Foreword,” in My Life. 19 Fritzsche, Nation of Fliers, 215. 20 Ibid., 200–15. 21 Sempill, Air, 96. 22 Leo Amery, “The Empire and Air Communications,” 3; Charles C. Wakefield, “Aviation and the Empire,” 12; Sir Harry Brittain, “Empire Air Policy,” 15; and Norman Leslie, “Aircraft in Imperial Defence,” 24. 23 David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane, 48–9; Viscount Templewood, Empire of the Air, 208–9. 24 Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane, 48. 25 Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism, 97. 26 Quoted in Colin Cook, “A Fascist Memory,” 149. 27 Winston Churchill was apparently “horrified at the indiscreet suggestion that the Royal Air Force might turn its weapons on British workers, and he asked that the references to ‘England’ and Ireland be removed and never referred to again – at least in writing”; see David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control, 41. 28 Templewood, Empire of the Air, 290; Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane, 47. 29 Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane, 57. Constance Babington Smith, Amy Johnson, 288, describes Grey’s editorials as “typically jaundiced.” 30 Jean Batten, Alone in the Sky, 62. 31 Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism, xix. See also Peter Mandler, “The Consciousness of Modernity?” 119–44. 32 Nevertheless, they did utilize aircraft as a way to police Western Samoa, indicating perhaps that the government of New Zealand saw the potential of airspace in differing terms, depending on which role, as either Dominion or colonizer, it was playing. 33 NZPD , vol. 230, 29 October 1931, 608. 34 NZPD , vol. 222, 9 August 1929, 131. The Act gave local authorities the power to take out loans for airfield development. 35 “The Aviation World,” New Zealand Herald, special section, 17 May 1930. 36 Iris Wilkinson, “A Pilot’s Licence Instead of a Latchkey,” 8. 37 “Flying Rally Held,” New Zealand Herald, 4 June 1934. According to Shirley Lainé, Silver Wings, 26–7, Parkinson was, like many New Zealanders, inspired to learn to fly when she saw Charles Kingsford Smith’s Fokker Trimotor Southern Cross. In 1934 she was one of the women pilots who formed 189

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53 54

an escort flight for Batten, accompanying her to Palmerston North, Wanganui, New Plymouth, and Hawera. Templewood, Empire of the Air, 184–6. John Myerscough, “Airport Provision in the Inter-War Years,” 50. Alan Cobham, A Time to Fly, 158–9. A full account of their time with British Hospitals Air Pageant is given in Pauline Gower, Women with Wings. Cobham, A Time to Fly; Gower, Women with Wings. “Empire Air Day,” New Zealand Herald, 22 May 1934. Babington Smith, Amy Johnson, 305–6. Cobham, A Time to Fly, 150–1. Fritzsche, Nation of Fliers, 214. Corn, Winged Gospel, 71–90. Editorial, New Zealand Herald, 15 May 1934. Bernhard Rieger, “‘Fast Couples,’” 374. Barbara Burman, “Racing Bodies,” 320, 304. Amy Johnson in particular struggled with her public image; see Justine Lloyd, “The Impossible Aviatrix,” 141; Rieger, “‘Fast Couples,’” 384–6; and Julian Thomas, “Amy Johnson’s Triumph,” 80–1. Murray, “New Aspects of Aviation,” 95–6. Bruce, neé Petrie, was noted for her love of speed and set land and sea endurance and speed records. She bought a Blackburn Bluebird that she saw in a shop window in London and then learned to fly. She set off in the Bluebird, G -ABDS (nicknamed “A Bloody Daft Stunt” by her detractors), and returned five months later, having crossed the Pacific and Atlantic by steamer with the G -ABDS crated. She went on to fly in a number of capacities, alongside Pauline Gower in the British Hospitals Air Pageant and then for her own delivery company, Air Dispatch; see Lomax, Women of the Air, 43–9. Violet Sweet, “Fan Letters Reveal Interest in Mrs. Bruce’s Achievement: Stirs Japanese Girls’ Hopes,” Japan Times, 5 December 1930, PRO /AVIA 2/498/63141. Editorial, Japan Times, 27 November 1930, PRO /AVIA 2/498/63141.

Chapter Two 1 Stella Wolfe Murray, “New Aspects of Aviation and the New Opportunities They Bring,” 88. 2 Lady Heath, “The Story of Women in Aviation,” 21, noted that by 1929 the Royal Aero Club “curiously enough, does not now permit of women mem190

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3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

bers, although it claims to control the sport of flying in this country.” Heath was an Irishwoman, born Sophie Mary Pierce Evans in Limerick in 1896. She was a keen sportswoman and ardent feminist. Her active promotion of women’s right to airspace won her many female admirers and few male ones. See also Lindie Naughton, Lady Icarus, 110. Hewlett (1864–1943) took up residence in Tauranga in 1927. There, she welcomed both Charles Kingsford Smith in 1932 and Jean Batten in 1934 during their national tours. Von Etzdorf (1907–33) was a member of an aristocratic military family. She gained her licence in 1927 and was employed as a co-pilot on Luft Hansa, the German airline. She also undertook a number of long-distance flights as an unofficial ambassador for German aviation. In 1933 en route to Australia she crashed in Aleppo, Syria. Humiliated and feeling herself disgraced, she shot herself in one of the aerodrome buildings. She was given a state funeral; see Valerie Moolman, Women Aloft, 94. For a fuller discussion of the pre-1924 period in various nations, see Kathleen Brooks-Pazmany, United States Women in Aviation, 1919–1929; Mary Cadogan, Women with Wings; Amelia Earhart, The Fun of It; Henry Holden, Her Mentor Was an Albatross; Judy Lomax, Women of the Air; Charles Paul May, Women in Aeronautics; Eugenie Louise Myles, Airborne from Edmonton; Claudia M. Oakes, United States Women in Aviation through World War I; Siân Reynolds, France between the Wars; Doris L. Rich, Queen Bess: Daredevil Aviator; Joyce Spring, Daring Lady Flyers; and John W. Underwood, The Stinsons. Reynolds, France between the Wars, 75. GBPD , vol. 270, 17 November 1932, 1304–5. Lettice Curtis, Lettice Curtis: Her Autobiography, 108–12, 30; Michael Fahie, A Harvest of Memories, 174. Shirley Lainé, Silver Wings, 108. File opened 29 October 1923, PRO /AVIA 2/205. H. Montgomery Hyde, British Air Policy between the Wars, 1918–1939, 194; Viscount Templewood, Empire of the Air, 290. Air Ministry, 15 July 1924, PRO /AVIA 2/205. Outline of Scheme for Light Aeroplane Clubs, 15 July 1924, PRO /AVIA 2/205. Templewood, Empire of the Air, 202. Ibid., 202–3. Templewood does not clarify whether all sixty-six clubs were eligible under the subsidy scheme. Quoted in Harald Penrose, British Aviation: The Adventuring Years, 1920–1929, 651. 191

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40

Moolman, Women Aloft, 102–3; Graham Smith, Taking to the Skies, 213. Dated 8 November 1923, signed M.B. Verry(?), PRO/AV I A 2/205. GBPD , vol. 263, 15 March 1932, 224. Ibid., 226–7. “Women Aviators Sir Alan Cobham’s Defence,” Sydney Morning Herald, 18 March 1932. Constance Babington Smith, Amy Johnson, 261n. GBPD , vol. 275, 14 March 1933, 1907–08. 18 May 1928, PRO /AVIA 2/1848. Moolman, Women Aloft, 46. Page 19 of Deputation’s report, 18 May 1928, PRO /AVIA 2/1848. GBPD , vol. 263, 15 March 1932, 224. To complete his trio of worthless pilots, Perkins added the figure of the “old gentleman pilot.” This apparently offended some of his honourable colleagues who placed themselves in this category. GBPD , vol. 263, 15 March 1932, 216. Ibid., 221. GBPD , vol. 267, 22 June 1932, 1081. Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion, 93. Royal Aero Club of the United Kingdom Year Book, 30 June 1930, DORIS . Babington Smith, Amy Johnson, 124. Hyde, British Air Policy, 194; Moolman, Women Aloft, 46. Stella Wolfe Murray, “The Call of the Atlantic,” 218. Mackay had been taught to fly by Alan Cobham, a fact that demonstrates his commitment to women pilots even if he would not employ them; see Alan Cobham, A Time to Fly, 145. Smith, Taking to the Skies, 240. Lady Heath’s antecedents were not of the upper class. Her father came from a bourgeois family but through a combination of violence, alcoholism, and mental health problems became destitute. He murdered Heath’s mother, an illegitimate peasant woman; see Naughton, Lady Icarus, 13–26. Heath, however, married up and circulated in upper-class circles until the late 1920s. Development of aviation in the colonies: suggested formation of Light Aeroplane Clubs throughout the Empire, 1936–39, PRO /AVIA 2/1051. Lainé, Silver Wings, 12. All figures taken from New Zealand, Statistical Report on Prices ... 1928. These are averages that give a rough indication of the cost of living.

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41 Labour force participation rates changed during this period. Non-Ma¯ori women increasingly participated in the labour force in both part-time and full-time work, while Ma¯ori women had lower participation rates. Both groups were affected in different ways by the Depression, as more non-Ma¯ori women attempted to earn wages (since they could not claim unemployment benefits) and more Ma¯ori women returned to rural labour; see Lisa Davies, with Natalie Jackson, Women’s Labour Force Participation in New Zealand in the Past 100 Years, 34–7. 42 Christchurch Press, 22 June 1928, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kaˉwanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: CA 1, 81/2/7]. 43 Lainé, Silver Wings, 12. 44 Ministry of Transport, “Review of Policy on Assistance to Aero Clubs.” Thanks to Pam Collings for locating this document. The first Act to Control Aviation in New Zealand became law on 1 March 1919. It “dealt with the regulation of flying activities, licensing of flying schools and personnel, registration of aircraft and granting of airworthiness certificates.” Civil Aviation Regulations were issued in 1921, an Air Board was set up in 1920 (equivalent of an Air Council), the position of controller of civil aviation was created in 1931 (held by Stuart Grant-Dalton until 1935), and the New Zealand Aero Club was formed in 1930, with Sir Francis Boys as its first president and an aero pageant at Marlborough as its first event. It was affiliated with the Royal Aero Club (R A eC ) and the Fedération Aeronautique Internationale. 45 Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kaˉwanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: CA 1, 81/2/7]. Clifford abandoned flying following her marriage in September 1931 and died two days after giving birth to her first child in 1933. She was 25. See Lainé, Silver Wings, 13. 46 This was the dual rate and compared to £1.10s.0d. per hour in England. 47 Iris Wilkinson, “Auckland Girls Conquer the Clouds.” 48 NZPD , vol. 247, 16 October 1936, 848–9. 49 “Aviation in New Zealand,” Aero-Gram, April 1937, 7, Scrapbook of Rito McKinnon, MS -Papers-6463-2, ATL . 50 Heath, “Story,” 27, original emphasis. 51 “Girl as Pilot in New Air Service,” New Zealand Herald, 19 May 1934, Saturday supplement. 52 “Egyptian Girl. Eagerness for Records. May Fly to Australia,” New Zealand Herald, 29 May 1934. 53 Women’s World, New Zealand Herald, 2 June 1934, Saturday supplement.

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54 “Birthday Honours. Mrs H.B. Bonney Gets MBE ,” New Zealand Herald, 4 June 1934. 55 Jane Falloon, Throttle Full Open, 168. 56 Babington Smith, Amy Johnson, 231. 57 Wendy Boase, The Sky’s the Limit, 47. 58 Pauline Gower, Women with Wings, 64. 59 Julie Wosk, Women and the Machine, 154. 60 Cobham to Batten, 29 December 1967, box 2, file 6 (Correspondence 1934– 1980), Jean Batten Papers, DORIS . 61 Colin Cruddas, Those Fabulous Flying Years. 62 Lainé, Silver Wings, 19. 63 Hugh Gardiner, Skyways of Maoriland, 42. Gardiner’s book is a typical example of a text that promotes airmindedness in New Zealand, dispells myths about flying, and explains what is required of pilots. Atypically, it includes a chapter on “Woman as a Pilot,” 42–52. 64 Ibid., 42. 65 Babington Smith, Amy Johnson, 138. 66 Ibid., 242–3; Midge Gillies, Amy Johnson, 243. 67 Nancy Bird, My God! It’s a Woman, 27. Bird (a famous Australian pilot) was no stranger to male prejudice, as the title of her autobiography suggests. In the mid-1930s, she reports, “women who wanted to fly provided flying schools with extra revenue, but we were not seen as potential contributors to the industry proper. [Charles] Kingsford Smith told me he did not approve of women flying. It was not their place” (28). Batten’s hostile biographer, Ian Mackersey, Jean Batten, 188–9, also recounts this incident, in rather more approving terms. 68 Mackersey, Jean Batten, 187–8. 69 Reynolds, France between the Wars, 77. 70 22 June 1931, PRO /AVIA 2/534. 71 Stevens’s phrasing is tortured: “The result which it is desired to achieve, therefore, becomes a failure and much government machinery is set in motion and time exhausted for which there is no recompense”; see 24 June 1931, PRO /AVIA 2/534. 72 Ibid. 73 1 July 1931, PRO /AVIA 2/534. 74 Johnson to Air Ministry, 14 July 1931, PRO /AVIA 2/534. 75 Ibid.

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76 Gascoigne also listed some of the functions that Johnson and Humphreys attended over the following days. They included a meeting in the building of the Tokyo Asahi, “one of the leading Japanese newspapers” with 2,000 Japanese people present; a reception organized by the Imperial Aviation Society at which Johnson and Humphreys were given the “Red Medal of Merit”; a Rotary Club luncheon; a tea reception given by British residents; a garden party at the house of Lieutenant-General Nagaoka, the “father of Japanese aviation and who, I might perhaps add, is renowned the world over for his immense white moustache which is said to be the longest in the world”; and a luncheon at the Kojunsha, “an important Japanese Club in Tokyo to which many of the most prominent Japanese industrialists belong, which was attended by some one hundred and fifty members”; see Gascoigne to Henderson, 24 August 1931, PRO /AVIA 2/534. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Babington Smith, Amy Johnson, 272. 80 Gascoigne to Henderson, 24 August 1931, PRO /AVIA 2/534. For an account of the Lindberghs’ flight, see Anne Morrow Lindbergh, North to the Orient. 81 This was the case even though many of the early women pilots in New Zealand were themselves members of the wealthy land-owning classes.

Chapter Three 1 Audrey Kobayashi and Linda Peake, “Unnatural Discourse,” 239, original emphasis. 2 Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 210–31. 3 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 229–30. 4 They were Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Greece, India, Iraq, the Irish Free State, Italy, Japan, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Latvia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Persia, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, Siam, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Union of South Africa, and Uruguay. This list is slightly deceptive since initially Britain represented the British Empire, so New Zealand representatives, for example, did not sit on the committees. The USSR , US, and Germany were not signatories; see

195

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5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21

22

Duane W. Freer, “A Convention Is Signed and ICAN Is Born, 1919 to 1926,” 46. Minutes No. 2, 24 May 1923, PRO /AVIA 2/148. Ibid. Item 5/8, Report by Dr Garsaux on the question of the competency of women for piloting aircraft, 18 August 1923, PRO /AVIA 2/148. Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel, 71–90. Item 5/8, PRO /AVIA 2/148. For discussion of feminists’ and women’s demands during this period as well as antifeminist backlash against them and attempts to reassert the prewar gender order, see Johanna Alberti, Beyond Suffrage; Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties, 15–37; Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1959; and Siân Reynolds, France between the Wars. Item 5/8, PRO /AVIA 2/148. See Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire, for a discussion of these tropes. Item 5/8, PRO /AVIA 2/148. Jean Batten, Solo Flight, 33. Alan Cobham, Twenty Thousand Miles in a Flying-Boat. This was a significant slippage. Item 5/8 referred only to piloting, yet here Garsaux suggests that all personnel positions should be closed to women. Stella Wolfe Murray, “The Rescinding of the Ban on Women Pilots,” 34, highlighted the absurd logic of this slippage. Item 5/8, PRO /AVIA 2/148. Heald to Director of Civil Aviation (DCA ), undated [prior to 5 September 1923], PRO /AVIA 2/148. DCA to Heald, 5 September 1923, PRO /AVIA 2/148. Draft Resolution, 13 September 1923, PRO /AVIA 2/148. Doctors had earlier used similar tactics during debates over women’s access to higher education in England and, for example, over the extension of suffrage; see Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres, 60–8; Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Women, 7–41, 102–33; and Anne E. Walker, The Menstrual Cycle, 37–40. For contemporary evaluations of these medical discourses with moral undertones, see Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 32–52; and Winifred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation. For a more recent analysis, see Deirdre Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty.

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23 For a good analysis of the inconsistent application of breadwinner ideology and practice, see Melanie Nolan, Breadwinning. See also Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women, 9, 179–209. 24 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 36–7. Saint-Exupéry went missing during a flight over the Mediterranean in July 1944. He is best known to a general readership as the author of The Little Prince. See also Reynolds, France between the Wars, 78. 25 Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 208. Saint-Exupéry apparently found airspace homoerotic as well as masculine. “My broad-shouldered messmate seemed to me strangely noble; beneath his rough hide I could discern the angel who had vanquished the dragon,” he wrote (5). Referring to his friend Guillaument, he remarked that “shoulder to shoulder with the veteran, I felt a sort of schoolboy peace” (7). 26 Murray, “Rescinding of the Ban,” 30–40; Reynolds, France between the Wars, 69. 27 Foreign News, Times, 22 May 1926. The claim that Great Britain proposed the ban may refer to which nation put forward the Medical Sub-Commission motion at the meeting of the main body of the ICAN. 28 Lindie Naughton, Lady Icarus, 91–4. 29 Murray, “Rescinding of the Ban,” 36–40. 30 The question was reopened as item No. 5 on the agenda of the Medical SubCommission on 23 June 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272. 31 Annex C, Report by Dr Garsaux on item 10/26, 5 June 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272. 32 Ibid. 33 Melanie Ilic, “Soviet Women Workers and Menstruation,” 1409–15. 34 Walker, Menstrual Cycle, 49. 35 Annex C, Report by Dr Garsaux on item 10/26, 5 June 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272. 36 Annex D, Note by Professor di Nola, 23 June 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272. 37 Ibid. 38 See, for example, Chiara Saraceno, “Redefining Maternity and Paternity,” 196–210. 39 Annex D, Note by Professor di Nola, 23 June 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272, original emphasis. 40 Minutes No. 9, 23 June 1923, PRO /AVIA 2/272. 41 Annex D, Note by Group-Captain Martin Flack, 21 July 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272.

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42 Ibid. 43 Annex F, Note by Professor A. di Nola, 8 December 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272. 44 Ibid. The minutes are English translations of French documents and were annotated, presumably by Flack, to clarify incoherent translations. Next to the word “reflection,” he wrote, “I don’t know what this means. Probably, I think, quick responses” (original emphasis). 45 Annex C, Report by Dr Garsaux, 28 November 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272. It is not clear why there is a discrepancy over the date here. Garsaux’s report, dated 28 November, clearly refers to di Nola’s note of 8 December 1926. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Minutes No. 10, 8 December 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272. 49 The meeting closed at 1:15 P.M .; see Draft Resolution, 8 December 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272. 50 The effects on women of the idea that women’s bodies were by nature pathological are discussed in Moscucci, Science of Women, 102–33. 51 Patricia Vertinsky, “The Social Construction of the Gendered Body,” 159. 52 Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, 50. For an analysis of the links between women and irrational nature, see Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature. 53 Item 6/22, PRO /AVIA 2/148. 54 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 139. 55 The term is used by Gatens in her Imaginary Bodies. 56 Uli Linke, Blood and Nation, 236. 57 Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 139. 58 Linke, Blood and Nation, 158. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 185. Incidentally, men were considered to have an equivalent to menstrual power in their bleeding haemorrhoids (187). 61 Mary Chadwick, The Psychological Effects of Menstruation, 7, 12. See also Walker, Menstrual Cycle, 19–23. 62 According to Linke, Blood and Nation, 162: the making of the modern body was not the result of developments in science and medicine alone. In the course of the nineteenth century the body gradually emerged as a multilayered entity, with each layer constituted as the text of a different episteme, a different field of knowledge, a different age, and each woven out of a distinct tropological fabric spun from earlier historical material. The metaphori-

198

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63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74

75

cal stratigraphy of body and blood ... reveals disturbing temporal densities: the “new” corporeal aesthetic was mediated by a tenacious stream of images and motifs that persisted over centuries. At times, these mythographic patterns seemed to blend and merge, but occasionally, and remarkably, they resurfaced in their original form. This is a similar point to that made by Lefebvre, Production of Space, 229–30, about old spatial forms underpinning modern ones. Lowell Thomas, European Skyways, 431–3; Ferry Gwynn-Jones, Pioneer Airwoman, 125. Given Bonney’s persistent bad luck, perhaps she should have succumbed to the vogue. John G. Fuller, The Airmen Who Would Not Die, 291. Midge Gillies, Amy Johnson, 175–6. Sir Harry Brittain, By Air, 34. Annex D, Note by Professor di Nola, 23 June 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272. Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 70–1. Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 124–5. Smith, Myths and Memories, 86. See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather; and Brackette F. Williams, “Introduction: Mannish Women and Gender after the Act,” 1–30. Heather Winlow, “Anthropometric Cartography,” 509–10, also notes that by the midnineteenth century British scientists took up the concept of “race” as an index of degeneracy and applied it to “those regarded as socially and physically degenerate within Great Britain, such as the urban poor, prostitutes, criminals and the ‘feeble-minded.’ Lower social classes were reconstructed as alien ‘races’ and were seen as a threat to the racial future of the stock and thus to civilisation itself.” Peter Mandler, “The Conciousness of Modernity?” 132. Mandler insists that national character is not racial, but he disregards texts that explicitly racialize it. Julian S. Huxley and A.C. Haddon, We Europeans, 262–3. Winlow, “Anthropometric Cartography,” 510–11, notes that Fleure actually took an “anti-racist stance, and criticized the Nordic myth and schemes of racial purity. He attacked notions of national type, arguing that race type was a projection of the scientific mind ... His approach subverted some of the notions supported by other British scientists, such as John Beddoe, who viewed increasing numbers of dark types in cities as a sign of national deterioration.” Grant, Passing of the Great Race, xix.

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76 Ibid., 190. Grant also suggested that because of migrations the “different races of Europe are now often represented by distinct classes.” He gave the example of Hungary, commenting that the majority, the Alpines, “is of no intellectual or social importance, since all the professional and military classes in Transylvania are either Magyar or Saxon” – that is, Nordic (273). In his introduction to the fourth edition, Grant proudly claimed that the first edition had helped to foster a climate in which the US Congress adopted “discriminatory and restrictive measures against the immigration of undesirable races and peoples” (xxviii). 77 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. 78 Marquess of Londonderry, Ourselves and Germany, 13. 79 Gascoigne to Henderson, 24 August 1931, PRO /AVIA 2/534/61341. Given the reputation that the English had for overboiled food and filthy habits, this was harsh criticism indeed. For example, Robert Noel Bradley, Racial Origins of English Character, 144, commented that “the English are essentially bad cooks, in the same way as they dress badly.” 80 Arthur Bryant, The National Character. 81 Editorial, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 3 March 1938. 82 Bradley, Racial Origins, 13. Bradley’s argument is a good example of Smith’s ideological myth of descent in Myths and Memories, 72: “The Whigs and the Loyal Associations, founded by Arthur Young in 1792, looked back with nostalgia to the image of peaceful evolution and liberty represented by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the gradual growth of representative government, and the origins of Parliament in the ‘free’ institutions of Germanic tribes.” 83 Bradley, Racial Origins, 23. 84 Ibid., 26. 85 Ibid., 29. This claim links directly to Grant’s assertion in Passing of the Great Race, 167, that the Nordics were a “purely European type” rather than a “western extension of the Asiatic subspecies.” 86 Bradley, Racial Origins, 35. 87 Ibid., 37. 88 Item 6/22, PRO /AVIA 2/148. 89 Elisa Camiscioli, “Producing Citizens, Reproducing the ‘French Race,’” 595, 605. 90 Bradley, Racial Origins, 128. 91 These types of texts refer to English traits, whereas the Medical SubCommission minutes refer to British women. Given that the British representative represented the British Empire in its entirety, the Sub-Commission’s

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92 93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

use of the broader term makes sense as an umbrella term. In 1932 the prime minister was asked in the House of Commons whether he would encourage the use of “British instead of English in all official statements involving matters which affect the common interests of England, Scotland and Wales”; see GBPD , vol 262, 29 Feb. 1932, 772–3. Bradley, Racial Origins, 119. Ibid., 147–8. Annex F, Note by Professor A. di Nola, 8 December 1926, PRO /AVIA 2/272. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 26–67. Murray, “Rescinding of the Ban,” 30. Ibid., 31. Murray’s criticism of male pilots’ dependence on alcohol was well founded. The dangerous drinking culture of male pilots deserves a study in itself and is well documented in various biographies. See, for example, Ian Mackersey, Smithy; and David Luff, Mollison. Mollison was the husband of Amy Johnson. Murray, “Rescinding of the Ban,” 32. Penny Tinkler, Constructing Girlhood, 27; Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination, 5. Adrian Bingham, “‘Stop the Flapper Vote Folly,’” 17–37. Murray, “Rescinding of the Ban,” 33. Ibid., 33–4. See, for example, Barbara Brookes and Margaret Tennant, “Making Girls Modern,” 565–81. Murray, “Rescinding of the Ban,” 34–5. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36. “Women and Flying,” Times, 27 April 1927. In June 1927 the Medical Sub-Commission forwarded its draft resolution to the ICAN proper; see Item 1/8b, Draft Resolution, 21 June 1927, PRO / AVIA 2/272. Encl. 92 of Minute sheet, 17 March 1924, PRO /AVIA 2/148.

Chapter Four 1 Amy Johnson to United Empire Party, 5 March 1930, Amy Johnson Papers, DORIS . 2 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 240–307.

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3 “Tired of Flying,” Argus, 19 October 1936. 4 After the First World War, Britain had many surplus aircraft available relatively cheaply, and large numbers of decommissioned pilots flooded the market looking for work in their field. Sir Alan Cobham puts the numbers at 22,000 pilots, with perhaps 1,000 civil positions available. Numerous air transport companies set up to fly passengers around Britain and across the English Channel to connect to European services. These initiatives remained chronically underfunded, with most teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Flying was expensive, crashes were still common, and a company with one or at most two machines was in serious trouble if it lost a machine, a pilot, and a couple of fare-paying passengers in an accident. After a few desperate years the government was persuaded that its policy of no policy toward civil aviation (Winston Churchill famously remarked in 1920 that civil aviation would have to fly by itself) was not working. One result, after a number of subsidy schemes for air transport companies, was the incorporation on 1 April 1924 of Imperial Airways, a subsidized private monopoly that flew passengers and mail around selected parts of the empire. For a fuller discussion of this period, see Alan Cobham, A Time to Fly, 31–2; Robin Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes, 1918 to 1939, 39–75; and Peter Fearon, “The Growth of Aviation in Britain,” 21–40. The incorporation of Imperial Airways on All Fools’ Day has been noted as entirely appropriate by a number of commentators. 5 The Statute of Westminster, based on the Balfour Declaration at the Imperial Conference of 1926, altered the relationship between the Parliament of the United Kingdom and the dominions (Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and Ireland). Intended to acknowledge the increasing independence of the dominions and to create “equality of status” between them, key changes included the provision that “no dominion law should be void on the ground that it was repugnant to the law of England; it enacted that a dominion parliament could make laws having extraterritorial operation and that the United Kingdom could no longer legislate for a dominion unless that particular dominion had requested and consented to the passage of the act in question”; see Angus Ross, “New Zealand and the Statute of Westminster,” 136. In addition, it lifted various restrictions. New Zealand’s politicians were resistant to this piece of legislation and did not adopt the statute until 1947. 6 See, for example, Dorothy Page, “Women and Nationality,” 157–75. 7 Andrew S. Thompson, Imperial Britain, 10. 8 Ibid., 181. 202

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9 Ibid., 166–8. 10 After a crash in the United States during Mary Bruce’s round-the-world flight in 1930–31, the wings of her Blackburn Bluebird had to be rebuilt. The women who performed the work wrote a message to Bruce on the fuselage of her aeroplane that read “the very best of luck and a Happy New Year to you, from all the girls who mended your wings”; see the Hon. Mrs Victor Bruce, The Bluebird’s Flight, 216. Women had been employed in aeroplane factories to build wings since at least the First World War. 11 Viscount Templewood, Empire of the Air, 88. 12 Colonel the Master of Sempill, The Air and the Plain Man, 115. 13 Sempill, Air, 73. 14 “Farewell to Time and Space!” Review of Reviews, December 1934, 37–41. 15 An example of these changing meanings of imperial airspace can be found in the increased coverage that long-distance flights received from the normally dismissive Times in London in 1936 compared to earlier years. 16 Articles 1 and 2 under Chapter 1 of the Convention and Article 15 under Chapter 4. The earliest international regulations governing airspace were formulated at a conference in Paris in 1910. For an introduction to this conference, see David L. Butler, “Technogeopolitics and the Struggle for Control of World Air Routes, 1910–1928,” 635–58. 17 Canada, Air Regulations, 1920, 62–3. 18 Ibid., 65–6. 19 In 1931 Imperial Airways began to survey the route that the Persians had proposed for the airline. It was a route that the airline realized “would be almost impossible to maintain as in places there were no roads, telegraph or W/T stations. Natural obstacles once one left the plains of Iraq included mountains up to 14,000 feet high, salt deserts which turned into quagmires in winter, sand-storms, and a scarcity of water, while as one approached Gwardar from Bam the desert turned to jungle.” Imperial Airways negotiated a route along the Trucial Coast with the Trucial states instead; see Higham, Britain’s Imperial Air Routes, 131. The Trucial Coast was on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf between Bahrain and Muscat. 20 As noted by Marc L.J. Dierikx, “Struggle for Prominence,” 334–5, “Aviation was one of the more visible means by which imperialist rivalry was continued in Africa and Asia. Aerial communications provided a yardstick by which the technological capabilities of the mother country could be judged.” 21 Ibid., 340. For a similar argument in relation to Africa, see Robert L. McCormack, “Imperialism, Air Transport and Colonial Development,” 374–95. 22 GBPD , vol. 310, 30 March 1936, 1715–17. 203

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23 Dierikx, “Struggle for Prominence,” 334. 24 Lady Heath, “Nairobi to Cairo,” 160. 25 These incidents are also referred to in Judy Lomax, Women of the Air, 41; and Wendy Boase, The Sky’s the Limit, 55. 26 Sir Harry Brittain, By Air, 180. 27 Quoted in ibid., 180. 28 See Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 45–6. 29 In his excellent study of air policing, Air Power and Colonial Control, David E. Omissi discusses the British Air Ministry’s complicated manoeuvres to justify bombing people in peace time. Not only were bombings utilized in place of the “laborious, lengthy and often unrewarding process ... of seriously addressing the issues that troubled” dissidents (94), but women (and children) were killed in bombing raids on nomadic tribes. The Air Force justified such killings in various ways that ranged from its officers’ assumptions that the victims’ lives were worthless, to the idea that they were regarded as property by the men with whom they lived and so did not compare to European women, to the idea that they were combatants, to the idea that tribes (including the women) were collectively responsible for the actions of some of their members, and finally to the idea that once bombings were proceeded by leafleted warnings (problematic enough), it was the fault of the tribesmen if women and children were killed. Under-Secretary of State for Air Sir Phillip Sassoon was circumspect in his description of this process to Parliament. He called it “the giving of a helping hand to a district commissioner in the collection of taxes from semi-nomadic tribes whose sense of public duty is not so keenly developed as that of the British Income Tax-payers”; see GBPD , vol. 262, 10 March 1932, 2014. 30 Cobham, Time to Fly, 144. Templewood, Empire of the Air, 11, described himself as a “young man” of about forty years when he was secretary of state for air. 31 Activities that the R AF undertook included air policing and the bombing of populations that were resisting taxation, mapping, surveillance, air ambulance work, aerial photography of archaeological sites, locust control, flood and fire spotting, fishery protection duties, and the ideological function served by their visible presence and apparent technological supremacy; see Omissi, Air Power, 173. 32 Philip Sassoon, The Third Route, 4. Ferdinand de Lesseps was the French engineer responsible for building the Suez Canal. 33 Templewood, Empire of the Air, 90.

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54

GBPD , vol. 240, 26 June 1930, 1413–14. GBPD , vol. 312, 19 May 1936, 1096. Sempill, Air, 96–7. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 240. Scott Kirsch, “The Incredible Shrinking World?” 529–55. Peter J. Taylor, Modernities, 11–12, makes a similar criticism of Harvey’s analysis, which he describes as part of a “Whig-diffusionist geohistorical world view.” Doreen Massey, Power-Geometries and the Politics of Space-Time, 60. Harriet J.M. Camac, From India to England by Air, 1. “Tired of Flying,” Argus, 19 October 1936. Templewood, Empire of the Air, 303. Lady Heath, “My Flight from the Cape to Croydon,” 123–5. Omissi, Air Power, 96. Range is the distance that an aeroplane can fly under ideal conditions on a full tank of petrol at normal cruising speed. The first direct transatlantic flight from St John’s, Newfoundland, to Clifden, Ireland, was made from 14 to 15 June 1919 by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown in a Vickers Vimy. However, scheduled passenger flights across the North Atlantic did not commence until twenty years later. In 1939 Pan-American Airways inaugurated their service in July, and Imperial Airways started regular flights in August. Thompson, Imperial Britain, 77. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress, 107. See also Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications, for a discussion of how changes in the form of communication technology affect the control of empires. Cobham, Time to Fly, 144. Between 1868, when New Zealand adopted New Zealand Mean Time, and 1945, when the Standard Time Act was passed, New Zealand was eleven and a half hours ahead of GMT ; see Eric Pawson, “Local Times and Standard Time in New Zealand,” 278–87. Stella Wolfe Murray, “The Airway to the East,” 79. Bruce, Bluebird’s Flight, 190. Jean Batten, Alone in the Sky, 75. This book is a barely revised version of her 1938 autobiography, My Life. Robin Hyde, The Godwits Fly, xx–xxi. Godwits are migratory birds that are native to New Zealand. For a discussion of this point, see Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem. For a discussion of how the empire was viewed by Dominion settlers, see Angela Woollacott, “‘All This Is the Empire, I Told Myself,’” 1003–29.

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55 Her decision seems to have been based on a number of factors. One is that her father (located in New Zealand) did not want her to learn to fly. His antipodean location made it difficult for him to influence her once she was in England and also made it easier for her to obscure her activities from him. The journey to England and/or Europe, in search of fame, fortune, or training, was also a relatively common one, as Hyde’s text suggests. Australian historian Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London, examines such journeys in the Australian context. 56 For discussions of different epistemological approaches to imperialism, see Alison Blunt, Travel, Gender and Imperialism; Felix Driver, Geography Militant; and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. See also Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, particularly pages 129–33 and 168–81, for a discussion of the long-term implications of differing discourses of empire for emancipatory projects and postcolonial subjectivity. 57 Meaghan Morris, Too Soon, Too Late, 155. 58 Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire. 59 Ibid., 70. 60 There were 102 books in the Biggles series, the last published in 1970. Nineteen were published between 1932 and 1939. In their biography (or hagiography) of W.E. Johns – simply titled Biggles! – Peter Berresford Ellis and Jennifer Schofield discuss and by and large dismiss the criticism that Johns was racist. They do note, however, that while there are “some racist remarks and comments” in the books, these should be contextualized in relation to “the attitudes prevalent when they were written” (235). It is precisely these prevalent attitudes that are of interest here. Johns also created a female character, Worrals of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WA AF ), who had her own series of eleven books (one more than Gimlet, the male commando) published between 1941 and 1950. 61 Graham Smith, Taking to the Skies, 222. 62 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, 36–7. 63 Brittain, By Air, 42. 64 Mary Cadogan, Women with Wings, 130–5. 65 Michael Fahie, A Harvest of Memories, 131. 66 Batten, Alone in the Sky, 4. 67 Lady Heath, “My Sunstroke Adventure,” 138. 68 Amy Johnson, Sky Roads of the World, 41. 69 Midge Gillies, Amy Johnson, 271–3. 70 Phillips, Mapping Men, 101.

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71 Bradshaw to Mackersey (Batten’s biographer), 11 January 1988; and “The Flight of Time in a Changing World: Reminiscences by Muriel A. Bradshaw,” 20 December 1991 (unpublished manuscript), Muriel Agnes Bradshaw Papers 1899–1991, Ref. No: 92-279, ATL . Incidentally, Bradshaw also knew Iris Wilkinson (Robin Hyde). Of her, Bradshaw wrote, “I fell in love with her at first sight, she looked so lovely and quite ethereal” (25). 72 Joyce Prime Scrapbook, Batten Archives, MOTAT. Prime appears to have corresponded with Batten about aviation and with Batten’s mother about newspaper and magazine clippings of Batten. 73 Scrapbook of Rito McKinnon, MS -Papers-6463-1, ATL . 74 Phillips, Mapping Men, 87. 75 Jean Batten, Solo Flight, 122. 76 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 175. For an example of how schooling imposed a sense of imperial geography, see Avril M.C. Maddrell, “Empire, Emigration and School Geography,” 373–87; and Kuni Jenkins and Kay Morris Matthews, “Knowing Their Place,” 85–105. 77 Through this process they also represented the modernist sensibility of “conjoining the ephemeral and the fleeting with the eternal and the immutable,” popular since at least Baudelaire first noted the tension in 1863 and very much a tenor of the interwar period; see Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 10. 78 Gordon Pirie, “Air Journeys as Imperial Tourism in the 1930s.” 79 Bruce, Bluebird’s Flight, 55. 80 Ibid., 88. 81 Crawford to Johnson, 24 May 1930. Crawford engaged a man called O’Neill who worked for the Territory Times in Darwin to ghost-write Johnson’s story in the first person. Cables dated 19 May 1930, Daily Mail to Amy Johnson, AC 77/23/122, Amy Johnson Papers, DORIS . 82 Batten, Solo Flight, 33. 83 Ibid., 36–7. Her phrasing begs two questions: what was she defining as civilization, and whom did she imagine was watching her? 84 Stella Wolfe Murray, “New Aspects of Aviation and the New Opportunities They Bring,” 96. 85 Ibid., 98. 86 Thompson, Imperial Britain, 142–6. 87 John Callaghan, Great Power Complex, 36. Thompson, Imperial Britain, 183, records that assisted migration “accounted for over 31 per cent of total emigration in the period 1923–29, while at the same time probably increasing

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88 89

90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105

the ratio of female to male migrants as well as the number of child migrants.” Katie Pickles, “Empire Settlement and Single British Women as New Zealand Domestic Servants during the 1920s,” 22–44. Many thanks to Lisa Chilton for directing me to this material. Her suggestions were not entirely specious. Amy Johnson met her future husband, James Mollison, in the Commonwealth. She first encountered him in 1930 in Australia, where he was an airline pilot, while she was touring after her flight, and then they met again in Cape Town, South Africa, in March 1932 when he had completed a long-distance flight from England and she was convalescing after what was probably a hysterectomy; see Constance Babington Smith, Amy Johnson, 248, 274–7. Whether Mollison could be described as the “backbone of Great Britain” is another matter. During an address to the Federation of Chambers of Commerce in London, the Prince of Wales claimed that Johnson had undertaken a “plucky singlehanded attempt to shorten the distance between England and Australia”; see Times, 27 May 1930. Despatch No. 23, 24 May 1930, PRO /AVIA 2/480. Ibid. Ibid. Despatch No. 55, 28 May 1930, PRO /AVIA 2/480. Ibid., emphasis added. The idea that the Shell company was in some way sponsoring her flight was a common misconception, of which Shell took advantage. Despatch No. 55, 28 May 1930, PRO /AVIA 2/480. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. John Stroud, Annals of British and Commonwealth Air Transport, 1919–1960, 121. Dierikx, “Struggle for Prominence,” 333–51. Ibid., 340. Ibid., 344. Before leaving Thies to fly across the South Atlantic Ocean to Brazil, and facing a shorter space in which to take off than she had anticipated, Batten attempted to lighten her load by jettisoning substantial amounts of equipment. She removed everything from her aeroplane and then decided what constituted “absolute necessities.” “Smiling at my own optimism,” she wrote, “I surveyed the assorted collection and selected two evening dresses, which weighed practically nothing, and to the surprise of all present put them back 208

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106 107

108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122

into the locker. After all, if I crossed the Atlantic successfully they would be more useful than the tool-kit”; see Batten, Alone in the Sky, 87. Referring to her flight between Luxor and Cairo, Lady Heath, “Nairobi to Cairo,” 168, remarked (with absurd metonymy) that she “was flying on an extremely small map – a page torn from an atlas.” 1 April 1930, PRO /AVIA 2/480, and 21 May 1931, PRO /AVIA 2/534. Johnson was irritated at having to pay the Air Ministry, and Lady Heath shared her frustration. At Nairobi she complained that “having so far spent £10 on telegrams to tell the authorities where we were and what we were trying to do for aviation and the British Empire, it was a little trying to find that two-thirds of the telegrams were never delivered, and when they did get through were so mutilated as to make no sense”; see Lady Heath, “My Big Game Interlude,” 156. “More Birthday Honours – Lord Wakefield,” New Zealand Herald, 5 June 1934. Charles Cheers Wakefield (1859–1941) amassed a range of honours in his lifetime and was made a viscount in the 1934 King’s Birthday Honours. Jean K. Chalaby, “‘Smiling Pictures Make People Smile,’” 39. Thompson, Imperial Britain, 62–4; Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 33–4. David Cannadine, Class in Britain, 130. The Daily Mail targeted not just middle-class readers in general but women in particular. It promoted the notion of the modern athletic woman who was also a consumer; see Adrian Bingham, “‘Stop the Flapper Vote Folly,’” 30–1. Humphreys to Johnson, 9 May 1930, AC 77/23/61, Amy Johnson Papers, DORIS . AC 77/23/282, Amy Johnson Papers, DORIS . Reproduced with permission from the Castrol Archive. Batten to Westcott, 26 October 1936, Jean Batten Letters, 1936–38, MS 90/1, AWMML . Ibid. Batten to Clarke, 15 December 1937, Jean Batten Letters, 1936–38, MS 90/1, AWMML . Batten to Clarke, 4 February 1938, ibid. Batten to Clarke, 10 February 1938, ibid. Cobham, Time to Fly, 140. Batten to Westcott, 26 October 1937, Jean Batten Letters, 1936–38, MS 90/1, AWMML . Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart, 177–8, argues that Empire Day was not a widely celebrated civic date in the Dominion. First celebrated as Empire Day in New Zealand in 1904, the 24 May holiday marked Queen Victoria’s 209

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123 124 125 126

birthday and had been designated an imperial public holiday at the suggestion of Lord Meath. Yet New Zealanders were half-hearted about it. It lapsed in 1910: the king’s birthday, 6 June, was celebrated instead. Certainly, by the 1930s various groups were trying to promote it again – the aero clubs wanted to use it as an excuse to hold flying events that would promote airmindedness – but most of the reported speeches and news of activities about it were from Britain. He implies that it was rekindled during the First World War but gives no details. David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane, 39, says that school children in Britain began to celebrate Empire Day from 1916 onward. “Empire Day – Food from Dominion,” New Zealand Herald, 21 May 1934. The United Empire Party was founded in 1929 by two of the press lords, Beaverbrook and Rothermere. Its platform was Empire Free Trade. It lasted barely two years; see A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945, 282–3. Johnson to Polson, 5 March 1930, AC 77/23/56, Amy Johnson Papers, DORIS . The number of male pilots undertaking long-distance records is very difficult to ascertain since records fell so swiftly that few details of individual attempts have been compiled except for particular routes; see, for example, Frank H. Ellis and E.M. Ellis, Atlantic Air Conquest. In addition, male pilots had dominated prewar flights, when almost every flight set a new record, so by the 1920s male record flights were extremely commonplace. Many record flights were also undertaken by armed services personnel either in teams or with team support, whether privately or publicly funded, so their flights did not carry the same discursive weight that women pilots’ flights did. Furthermore, male pilots did not necessarily rely on corporate sponsorship for their flights. Some were independently wealthy, some had more success than women did in attracting private benefactors (Johnson received no reply when she wrote to the fascist Lady Houston, the sponsor of a team of four men in their flight over Everest), and some set up airline companies themselves in order to attract investment that could be used to finance record flights; see Ian Mackersey, Smithy, for an example of this latter practice. Feminist Winifred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation, 88, 90, provides an explanation for why “when groups of women wish to do anything, to build a college, found a newspaper, or finance a flight round the world, they are still faced by appalling difficulties.” She notes that patriarchal capitalism disadvantages women. “It is part of the ironical injustice of a capitalist system that lucrative deals can be put through moderately well in a good office, better still in the dining-room of a first-rate restaurant, best of all on the deck of a 210

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127 128

129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137

private yacht. And, with notable exceptions, the offices de luxe, the running accounts at the Ritz-Carlton, and the private yachts, do not belong to business or professional women.” Gillies, Amy Johnson, 200. Discussing his proposed flight to Darwin or Koepang to meet the incoming Batten, Ulm explained that “on a normal charter flight such as this I would charge 4/- per mile, which would total approximately £1,100, and therefore my margin to cover the insurance risk, my own time, and profit, would be £325”; see Ulm to Westcott, 17 April 1934, Charles Thomas Phillipe Ulm, 1879–1934, Letters 1933–34, AWMML . Johnson to Shell-Mex and BP Ltd, 3 March 1936, AC 77/23/250, Amy Johnson Papers, DORIS . O.B.D. No. 185 (publicity), Amy Johnson Papers, box 9, DORIS . Reproduced with permission from the Castrol Archive. Gurney to Hoare, 25 November 1935, PRO /AVIA 2/887. Millington-Drake to Hoare, 6 December 1935, PRO /AVIA 2/887. Park to British Ambassador, Buenos Aires, 7 December 1935, PRO /AVIA 2/887. Ibid. Troutbeck to Burkett, 15 January 1936, PRO /AVIA 2/887. Burkett to Troutbeck, 16 May 1936, PRO /AVIA 2/887. While Heath secured the position, there is no clear evidence that she actually flew for KLM . On 27 July 1928 the Times reported that Heath had been engaged to fly as co-pilot on the fifteen-passenger, three-engined Fokker airliner on its regular Amsterdam-Batavia service. However, on 11 August the Times also reported that she was convalescing in a London nursing home having undergone an appendectomy; see “First Woman Air Line Pilot – Lady Heath’s Appointment,” Times, 27 July 1928; and Times, 11 August 1928, 13. There is no further mention of her airline career.

Chapter Five 1 “I had flown 14,000 miles to link England, the heart of the Empire, with the city of Auckland, New Zealand, in 11 days 45 minutes, the fastest time in history. With this flight I realised the ultimate of my ambition, and I fervently hoped that it would prove the forerunner of a speedy air service from England”; see Jean Batten, Alone in the Sky, 159. 2 Batten to Wakefield, 25 October 1936, Jean Batten Papers, DORIS . 3 Jean Batten, My Life, 242. 211

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4 “Auckland Homage,” Dominion, 20 October 1936. 5 “Pa¯ keha¯” refers to non-Ma¯ori light-skinned New Zealanders, particularly those of British descent. 6 R.M. Burdon, New Dominion, 104. 7 W. David McIntyre, “Imperialism and Nationalism,” 338. 8 For an introduction to this movement, see Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Kingitanga, 1–32. 9 Tourism was a very lucrative trade. Rangitiaria Dennan, Guide Rangi of Rotorua, 16, one of the famous guides of Whakarewarewa, estimated that before the eruption of Tarawera in 1886 her tribe, the Tuhourangi, earned about £6,000 a year from tourists. 10 Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender Ironies of Nationalism, 2. 11 For a discussion of Richard Jebb’s ideas about colonial nationalism, see John Eddy and Derek Schreuder, eds, Rise of Colonial Nationalism. 12 Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Vol. 4, 1921–1940, B 59. 13 Historian Michael King, Te Puea, 181, argues that Bledisloe’s “acceptance of the title ‘King’ did much to remove the reticence about using it in government and public service circles ... [he] neither patronised nor romanticised the Maori as many of his predecessors had done [and] he preferred the expression ‘Maori,’ for example, at a time when most officials continued to say ‘Native.’” 14 For an introduction to the treaty and the conflicts arising from it, see Ann Parsonson, “The Challenge to Mana Maori,” 167–98. 15 This struggle is ongoing, although since the 1980s it has had considerable success; see Ranginui Walker’s aptly titled Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou/Struggle without End, 90 onward. More recent proposals to amend the relationship of the New Zealand state to the British Crown add complexity to the struggle. 16 Among many others, Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou, 28, questions the historical evidence for the existence of both Hawaiki and the seven waka, but they remain foundational myths of Ma¯ori and New Zealand identity. Recent scholarship has unearthed evidence of many more waka.Jeff Evans, Nga Waka o Nehera/The First Voyaging Canoes, has compiled a list of the many waka that travelled to and around Aotearoa, based on documents that recorded oral accounts and traditional songs. His list includes information on cargoes, crew members, and stories associated with the waka. 17 According to Michael King, “Between Two Worlds,” 286, the Ma¯ori population increased “from an estimated low point of 42,113 in 1896, to 45,549 in 1901, 56,987 in 1921, and 115,676 in 1951.”

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18 Examples include the farm development schemes of Sir Apirana Ngata, minister of Native affairs, as he moved away from his earlier assimilationist position and encouraged the renaissance of tribal culture. More ambitiously, he also attempted to promote the idea of combining the individualism demanded by the Pa¯ keha¯ economy with a continuing strong tribal society; see Jeffrey Sissons, “Post-Assimilationist Thought of Sir Apirana Ngata,” 54–8. 19 James Bennett, “Maori as Honorary Members of the White Tribe,” 33–54. Rangitiaria Dennan, Guide Rangi of Rotorua, 142, also pointed out in her 1968 autobiography that “many New Zealanders have been brought up to believe there is no social bar between pakeha and Maori; that we are one country on earth where there is absolutely no colour barrier. This is just not true ... There are still plenty of pakehas who do not want to mix with Maoris as their equals, but generally speaking our two races get on better together than do any other white and coloured peoples anywhere else on earth.” Michael Bassett, The Mother of All Departments, 58, asserts that Chinese immigrants were denied New Zealand citizenship from 1908 onward, when the Aliens Act was passed giving the government the “power to reject applications on the grounds of race.” 20 Maorilander, “The Birthday Star Map of Jean Batten,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 29 October 1936, 53. 21 Peter Gibbons, “Cultural Colonisation and National Identity,” 14. 22 Ibid., 13. 23 Kirstie Ross, “‘Schooled by Nature,’” 51–61. 24 See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather, 9–10, for a discussion of the connections between linear time and imperial progress. 25 See, for example, Robin Hyde, Nor the Years Condemn, 117; and Keith Sinclair, A Destiny Apart, 94–108. The phenomenon of calling England “Home” was not restricted to New Zealanders, as Australians too practised it; see Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London, 19. 26 Julian Thomas, “Amy Johnson’s Triumph, Australia 1930,” 76. 27 Batten, Alone in the Sky, 6. Crossing the Equator had a long history as a ritual accompanied by shipboard celebrations, rather like the newer celebrations associated with crossing the International Date Line in the Pacific. 28 “Across Australia,” New Zealand Herald, 29 May 1934; “Great Flight,” New Zealand Herald, 24 May 1934. 29 She described herself as “astounded” by London. “The tremendous number of people was bewildering, for the total population of my own country was less than two millions”; see Batten, Alone in the Sky, 6. Woollacott, To Try Her

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30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Fortune, 48, suggests that white colonials in England were deliberately made to feel uncomfortable. Although not subject to racism, they were subject to evaluation by the British that placed them in a “status supposedly unmarked by race yet different from and subordinate to Englishness and thus ultimately available for the purposes of discrimination.” Batten, Alone in the Sky, 118, 32. Both books are by Keith Sinclair, the first as editor, and both have telling subtitles: Distance Looks Our Way: The Effects of Remoteness on New Zealand and A Destiny Apart: New Zealand’s Search for National Identity. The phrase “distance looks our way” is from a poem by Charles Brasch (1909–73). Matthew G. Henry, “Banal Nationalism and New Zealand Human Geography,” 117–19. Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and Its Enemies, 22. Bev James and Kay Saville-Smith, Gender, Culture and Power, 20–3. Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country? 242. Erik Olssen, “Towards a New Society,” 264. Matthew G. Henry, “Banal Nationalism and New Zealand Human Geography,” 135–8. Patricia Grimshaw, “Women’s Suffrage in New Zealand Revisited,” 38–9, original emphasis. Ellie Bailey, “True New Zealander,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 8 July 1937, 39. Lotty May Nash was in fact English-born. She married Walter Nash in Birmingham when she was working there as a postal clerk. In an editorial for New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 27 January 1938, 1, Dyson commented on the qualities of another New Zealander: June Barson, an Aucklander, who had won a Deanna Durbin sound-a-like contest, was “utterly unspoilt by the adulation of hundreds of admirers ... and unaffected by the social prominence that her sudden spring to fame ha[d] brought her.” “Gossip Mongers,” N.Z. Truth, 6 June 1934, 11. “Auckland Social Tit-bits,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 28 June 1934, 44. “Wellington Social Whirl,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 2 August 1934, 40. “Auckland Homage,” Dominion, 20 October 1936. Raewyn Dalziel, “Presenting the Enfranchisement of New Zealand Women Abroad,” 45. Ruth Butterworth, “The Media,” 143. “Scene at Landing,” New Zealand Herald, 12 September 1928. “Invitation to Airmen,” New Zealand Herald, 12 September 1928. Editorial, New Zealand Herald, 12 September 1928.

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49 See Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers; and Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel. 50 See, for example, Gertrude Stein, Picasso; and F.T. Marinetti, Marinetti: Selected Writings. 51 Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and Its Enemies, 40. 52 Unlike Johnson, Batten never named her aircraft. 53 Batten, Solo Flight, 84. 54 Ibid., 112. 55 Ian Mackersey, Jean Batten, 125. 56 “Auckland Aero Club News,” New Zealand Herald, 26 May 1934, Supplement 5; Dominion, 24 May 1934, 10; Editorial, New Zealand Herald, 24 May 1934. The pressure Batten was facing that required such courage can be estimated by comparing her story to that of the German pilot Marga von Etzdorf, who committed suicide in an admission of absolute defeat after her third crash in 1933; see Fritzsche, Nation of Fliers, 158. 57 Editorial, Dominion, 28 June 1934. 58 Editorial, New Zealand Herald, 26 May 1930. 59 Letters to the Editor, New Zealand Herald, 26 May 1934, 29 May 1934, and 31 May 1934; Editorials, New Zealand Herald, 24 May 1934 and 25 June 1934. 60 In her 1938 novel, The Godwits Fly, Robin Hyde mentions the Copper Trail, a “huge snake of pennies” that is supposed to cover the whole length of the North Island in order to raise money for comforts for wounded soldiers and sailors during the First World War. “Auckland is further ahead with the Copper Trail than Wellington, and that is a disgrace for Wellington,” her narrator notes (69). 61 Telegram, Ulm to Ardell, 22 June 1934, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/25 pt 1]. 62 “Town Topics,” New Zealand Observer, 28 June 1934, 3. 63 Memo, Ardell to Private Secretary, 11 June 1934, Archives New Zealand/ Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/25 pt 1]. 64 Everybody, it seemed, was trying to come up with ideas for generating income to support Batten. Examples include a fund set up by the Auckland Harbour Board; aero clubs charging admission to see Batten; a proposal to issue commemorative stamps; and the suggestion that all the “Jeans” in the country donate a shilling to a Jean Batten fund. 65 Memo, Ardell to Permanent Head, Prime Minister’s Department, 21 June 1934, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/25 pt 1]. 215

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66 F.D. Thomson, in Cabinet, 27 June 1934, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/25 pt 1]. In her autobiography, Alone in the Sky, 50, Batten does not make it clear whether she was aware of the grant before it was publicly announced. 67 Ian Mackersey, Smithy, 184. 68 Bassett, Mother of All Departments, 83. 69 Burdon, New Dominion, 106; Tom Brooking, “Economic Transformation,” 244. 70 James Watson, Links, 182. 71 Ardell to Private Secretary, 5 July 1934, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/25 pt 1]. 72 Batten, Solo Flight, 209. 73 Don Stafford, Flying the Thermal Skies, 39–40, 12. 74 Fifth Annual Report of New Zealand Aero Club, Supplement to Wings, 1 December 1934, 3, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/25 pt 1]. 75 Debates over the Local Authorities Empowering (Aviation Encouragement) Act (1929) provoked similar tensions. The Act allowed local authorities to raise loans for airfield construction and created tension between national plans for a network of airfields and local concerns over how the network would reposition particular regions in the nation. Concerns expressed during the debate over the bill included anxiety that small counties would be unable to raise sufficient loans and be left out altogether; fear that enthusiasts would stir up a desire for an aerodrome in a location with little practical value; and worries that the governor general could use public lands for aerodromes without local consultation; see NZPD , vol. 222, 9 August 1929, 101–30. 76 Bassett, Mother of All Departments, 72–3, 107. 77 Hawke’s Bay Herald, 27 July 1934, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/ 25 pt 1]. 78 Ardell to Bob Smillie, 1 August 1934, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/25 pt 1]. 79 “A Gay Scene,” Dominion, 29 June 1934.

216

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80 The government confiscated large areas of Waikato land, regardless of which side the occupants had taken, after the wars that it initiated with the people of the region. One of Te Puea’s aims, along with other leaders of the period such as Sir Apirina Ngata, was to re-establish her people’s meaningful links to the land. 81 King, Te Puea, 189–91. 82 See, for example, Marion Hurst, “A Great New Zealand Woman: The Princess Te Puea Herangi” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 1 November 1934, 16. 83 King, “Between Two Worlds,” 297. 84 Batten, Solo Flight, 210. Te Arawa was a confederation of tribes in the Rotorua and Bay of Plenty region. “Arawa” was also the name of one of the original waka. Batten was hosted by Tuhourangi who were part of Te Arawa. 85 Mita Taupopki and Makereti, known to tourists as Maggie Papakura and the sister of Bella, were the first Ma¯ori to fly, according to Rangitaiaria Dennan, Guide Rangi of Rotorua, 56. She claims that they flew at Croydon airport during a concert tour to England for the king’s Coronation in 1911. Croydon did not open until 1920, so they may have flown from Hendon or Brooklands, two other London aerodromes. 86 She translates the term as “chieftainess.” Spellings of translated words do change, but the title is presumably rangatiratanga, or chieftainship. 87 Batten, Solo Flight, 211. 88 Ibid., 207–8, 210–12. A haka is a traditional dance of warrior postures and chants, performed by men. A poi dance is a dance performed by women in which, to quote Batten, Solo Flight, 207–8, “the Maori girls twirl tiny balls on the ends of strings, keeping perfect time, and the beat of the pois against their flaxen skirts forms a soft accompaniment to their tuneful singing.” 89 He does not resemble either George Forbes or Ramsay MacDonald, the New Zealand and British prime ministers respectively. The lines of latitude and longitude emanating from his crown seem to indicate that he is the globe. 90 While it may be conventional to depict a nation as a sole female form, this is not rigidly followed in cartoons: an earlier cartoon commenting on the threat of Australian federation depicted Zealandia holding the hand of a Ma¯ori woman as together they resisted the ogre of federation; see Sinclair, Destiny Apart, 114. 91 McIntyre, “Imperialism and Nationalism,” 346. 92 The idea for this sketch may have been in part a response to the controversy that began in the winter of 1936 over the statue of a naked male athlete at the entrance to the Auckland Domain, an area of public recreational land.

217

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93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101

102 103 104 105

The besieged City Council received, among petitions and angry letters, a poem that ended with the words, “So Take down the Statue at the Domain / And put up one of Jean Batten, and her airoplane [sic]”; see Caroline Daley, “A Gendered Domain,” 88, original emphasis. Batten to Westcott, 20 October 1936, Jean Batten Letters, 1936–38, MS 90/1, AWMML . Ibid. “Tired of Flying,” Argus, 19 October 1936. Batten, Alone in the Sky, 161. Evening Post (Wellington), 24 October 1936, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/25 pt 2]. The filing practice of the Department of Internal Affairs appears to have been such that rather than begin a new file for Batten’s 1936 visit, administrative staff merely added a “part 2” to the original 1934 file. Batten, Alone in the Sky, 154. Report of interview between Jones and Batten, 19 October 1936, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/25 pt 2]. Brooking, “Economic Transformation,” 253. Large farms fared better than small farms under Coalition policies designed to deal with the contracting economy. Political historian Len Richardson, “Parties and Political Change,” 226, notes of the period 1931 to 1935 that “the defence of farmers’ incomes was undeniably important to New Zealand, but the Coalition policy of giving it priority over even the minimum welfare of wage-earners, was an act of social aggression.” In 1931 the government cut civil service wages by 10 per cent and empowered the supposedly independent Arbitration Court to reduce all other wages by 10 per cent. Brooking, “Economic Transformation,” 251, adds that the Depression had an uneven impact on New Zealanders. While some were in work camps, others “drove to race meetings or exclusive clubs in the latest model cars, and dressed in the height of fashion.” Batten’s complicated position as a gendered individual with a dependant, her mother, during this period of transition in the form of the nation will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. Brooking, “Economic Transformation,” 252. “Man Who Guarded Jean Batten – and Why,” N.Z. Truth, 21 October 1936, 1. Ibid.

218

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106 These contracts appear to have been arranged in Australia, before she departed for New Zealand; see Mackersey, Jean Batten, 241–2; and “Man Who Guarded Jean Batten – and Why,” N.Z. Truth, 21 October 1936, 1. 107 “Man Who Guarded Jean Batten – and Why,” N.Z. Truth, 21 October 1936, 1. Mackersey, Jean Batten, 249, describes them as working “with ruthless efficiency.” 108 Editorial, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 29 October 1936. New Zealand stations could not run advertisements; see Butterworth, “The Media,” 148. 109 Editorial, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 29 October 1936. 110 N.Z. Truth, 4 November 1936, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/ 25 pt 2]. 111 For a collection of these clippings, see Joyce Prime Scrapbook, Batten Archives, MOTAT. 112 “In my home there was great interest when the figure was completed,” Batten claimed in My Life, 296, “for I happened to be the first New Zealand born person to be included in Tussaud’s collection.” 113 Ellie Bailey, “New Zealand’s No. 1 Girl,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 20 January 1938, 20. 114 “Sydney Reached – Tumultuous Welcome for Miss Batten,” Dominion, 14 October 1936. 115 Of course, technically she was a British subject, but she rarely referred to herself as such. New Zealand nationality was not created until 1948. The varying legal categories of national identity were extremely complicated in the British Empire. Prior to 1948 New Zealanders were British subjects under the “common code” of the British Empire, which entitled them to some forms of intra-imperial emigration, office holding, and the like; see Robert R. Wilson and Robert E. Clute, “Commonwealth Citizenship and Common Status,” 566–87. New Zealand citizenship was a different category, which the New Zealand government could grant or refuse to settlers prior to 1948. It enacted racist anti-Chinese citizenship policies in the early years of the twentieth century, for example; see Bassett, Mother of All Departments, 58. The status of New Zealand’s British subjects was also complicated by the British Nationality and Status of Aliens (in New Zealand) Act 1923 and its various amendments in 1924, 1928, and 1934–35, based on the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914 (Imperial). These Acts required British subjects to have an adequate knowledge of the English language,

219

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116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123

which affected Ma¯ori and Pacific Islanders living in New Zealand, the Cook Islands, and Western Samoa. The Acts also removed the British nationality of women who married aliens. Editorial, Times, 25 October 1937. Earlier reports consistently refer to her as a New Zealander; see, for example, “Miss Batten Flying to Rio,” Times, 15 November 1935; “Britannia Trophy for Miss Batten,” Times, 15 May 1936. Raewyn Dalziel, “Presenting the Enfranchisement of New Zealand Women Abroad,” 60. Batten, of course, never married and had no children. For a brief biography of Hyde, see Gillian Boddy and Jacqueline Matthews, eds, Disputed Ground, 3–141. Stuart Murray, Never a Soul at Home, 190. Heather Roberts, Where Did She Come From? Murray, Never a Soul at Home, 191. Mary Paul, Her Side of the Story, 162. Hyde, The Godwits Fly, 184–5.

Chapter Six 1 Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country? 245. 2 Diogenes, “Viva! Jean Batten!” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 31 May 1934, 16. 3 Ibid. 4 Sally R. Munt, Heroic Desire, 4. 5 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 4. 6 “Buy Empire Goods,” advertisement, New Zealand Herald, 21 May 1934. 7 Stephen Constantine, “‘Bringing the Empire Alive,’” 192–231. 8 A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945, 333–4. 9 “Effect of Ottawa,” Dominion, 5 October 1936. 10 Victoria de Grazia, “Empowering Women as Citizen-Consumers,” 275–86. 11 Victoria de Grazia, “Nationalizing Women,” 338. 12 De Grazia, “Empowering Women,” 278. 13 Meaghan Morris, Too Soon, Too Late, 90–1. The idea that the commodity is a seductive illusion was particularly developed in the work of Walter Benjamin and taken up ad nauseam by masculinist critical theorists, all fascinated by the idea of the commodity fetish. As Morris remarks, “the commodities in a Discount House boast no halo, no aura” (90). 14 Joy Parr, Domestic Goods, 14.

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15 The power of Hollywood to affect New Zealand’s cultural nationalism was a source of concern to local writers and filmmakers; see Rachel Barrowman, A Popular Vision, 51. 16 Phillips, A Man’s Country? 229. 17 Susan Ware, Still Missing, 179–80; Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing, 142, 145. 18 Stacey, Star Gazing, 126. 19 Diana Fuss, quoted in Valerie J. Korinek, “‘Don’t Let Your Girlfriends Ruin Your Marriage’: Lesbian Imagery in Chatelaine Magazine, 1950–1969,” 85. 20 Munt, Heroic Desire, 11–12. 21 For a discussion of how the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly encouraged women to insert themselves into the discourses, see Pamela Hyde, “Managing Bodies – Managing Relationships,” 157–71. 22 For a discussion of the Y WCA and the ways that elite women and workingclass women interacted, particularly during the Depression, see Sandra Coney, Every Girl, 192–209. 23 See Anne Else, ed., Women Together. Some organizations had mixed memberships. Else discusses, for example, women’s institutes in which “Maori women were encouraged either to join with Pakeha women or to form their own Maori institutes. The first, Te Awapuni, was formed in 1929 at Kohupatiki in Hawke’s Bay” (26). 24 Ardell to Town Clerk, Hawera, 18 July 1934, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/25 pt 1]. 25 Rees to Batten, 30 July 1934, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/ 25 pt 1]. 26 “More Receptions – Auckland Girl Flier,” New Zealand Herald, 2 June 1934. 27 “Gallant Girl Flier,” New Zealand Herald, 26 June 1934. 28 See, for example, “Woman as a Worker: Employment Problem,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 8 July 1937, 33. 29 “Over the Teacups,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 26 April 1934, 20; “All the World Is in the Air,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 1 November 1934, 5. 30 “N.Z. Girl Conquers the Air,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 31 May 1934, 16–18. 31 “Solar Biology,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 28 June 1934, 33. 32 “Auckland Social Tit-Bits,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 28 June 1934, 44. 33 Batten to Cyril Westcott, 26 October 1936, Jean Batten Letters, 1936–38, MS 90/1, AWMML . One of these strips is in the Jean Batten collection at MOTAT, Auckland. 221

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34 Charmosan creme, advertisement, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 5 November 1936, 59. 35 “Jean Batten Fund,” New Zealand Herald, 1 June 1934; “Presentation Fund,” New Zealand Herald, 26 June 1934. 36 Munt, Heroic Desire, 5. 37 “A Gay Scene,” Dominion, 29 June 1934. 38 Editorial, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 29 October 1936. 39 “Wellington Social Whirl,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 12 July 1934, 40. 40 “Plucky Airwoman,” Dominion, 28 June 1934. 41 “Auckland Social Tit-Bits,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 22 October 1936, 18. 42 “Wellington Social Whirl,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 12 July 1934, 40 43 Ibid. 44 Jean Batten, Alone in the Sky, 17, 18, 29, 35, 43, 77, 141. 45 Karen M. Morin, Robyn Longhurst, and Lynda Johnston, “(Troubling) Spaces of Mountains and Men,” 129. 46 Ian Mackersey, Jean Batten, 180. 47 Erik Olssen, “Towards a New Society,” 258. 48 Katie Pickles, “Empire Settlement and Single British Women as New Zealand Domestic Servants during the 1920s,” 39–40. 49 For an introduction to the various debates listed, see Olssen, “Towards a New Society,” 254–84. 50 See, for example, “This Population Question,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 6 May 1937, 37. 51 Gelis Gray, “Racial Welfare – Marriage of the Unfit,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 29 March 1934, 33. 52 Letters page, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 29 March 1934, 32. 53 Maureen Molloy, “Citizenship, Property and Bodies,” 296. 54 “Woman as a Worker: Employment Problem,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 8 July 1937, 33. 55 Marilyn Lake, “The Inviolable Woman,” 223–40; Barbara Brookes, “A Weakness for Strong Subjects,” 140–56. 56 The notion of female dependency predated the 1930s, of course. According to sociologists Wendy Larner and Paul Spoonley, “Post-Colonial Politics in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” 46, from at least the 1880s “employers, politicians and institutions of the state ... vigorously promoted ... the notion of the ‘family man’ and the cult of domesticity.” For more detailed historical analysis of the sex ratio and its impact on families, see Charlotte Macdonald, “Too

222

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57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Many Men and Too Few Women,” 17–35; and Erik Olssen, “Families and the Gendering of European New Zealand in the Colonial Period, 1840–80,” 37–62. Jock Phillips, A Man’s Country? 223, examines how the ideal of the “family man” was propagated in the first two decades of the twentieth century by government and private agencies in an attempt to curb the “culture of unattached, irresponsible males.” Melanie Nolan, Breadwinning, 141. Annabel Cooper and Maureen Molloy, “Poverty, Dependence and ‘Women,’” 37. Ibid., 38. Tim Frank, “Bread Queues and Breadwinners,” 118. Cooper and Molloy, “Poverty, Dependence and ‘Women,’” 38. Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism, makes a similar argument about Britain. Nolan, Breadwinning, 163. Ibid., 137–91. See also Melanie Nolan, “‘Politics Swept under a Domestic Carpet’?” 199–217. Frank, “Bread Queues,” 130. Nolan, Breadwinning, 185–6. Cooper and Molloy, “Poverty, Dependence and ‘Women,’” 52–3. Mercutio, “Local Gossip,” New Zealand Herald, 26 May 1934, Saturday supplement, 1. Editorial, New Zealand Herald, 24 May 1934, 12. “Auckland Homage,” Dominion, 20 October 1936. “New Zealander,” letter to editor, Dominion, 21 October 1936. According to Batten’s biographer, Mackersey, Jean Batten, 25–7, the Battens separated in about 1920 as a result of Fred’s infidelity, although they never divorced. “Fool,” letter to editor, New Zealand Herald, 5 June 1934; “Admirer,” letter to editor, New Zealand Herald, 6 June 1934. NZPD , vol. 238, 12 July 1934, 373. “Grant to Miss Batten,” Dominion, 30 June 1934. See also Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and Its Enemies, 52, on the idea of acceptable unequal wealth and degrees of hard work. “Mother’s Confidence,” New Zealand Herald, 24 May 1934. “Gossip Mongers,” N.Z. Truth, 6 June 1934, 11. “‘Ought to Be Spanked,’ Says Dad as Jean Batten Flies Tasman Sea,” Toronto Daily Star, 16 October 1936. “Tasman Flight Plan Opposed,” Dominion, 13 October 1936.

223

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79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91

92 93 94

“Uncle Confident,” Dominion, 15 October 1936. “What a Girl!” Dominion, 17 October 1936. Mackersey, Jean Batten, 239, footnote. Telegram, Prime Minister J.A. Lyons, Canberra, to Premier, Wellington, 14 October 1936, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office, [Archives New Zealand: IA 1, 1934/193/25 pt 2]. Batten, Alone in the Sky, 152. “Tasman Flight,” Dominion, 15 October 1936. See “Tasman Flight Plan Opposed,” Dominion, 13 October 1936. Batten, Alone in the Sky, 152. The Australian pilot Lores Bonney encountered similar masculine resistance to her flights; see Ferry Gwynn-Jones, Pioneer Airwoman. Mackersey, Jean Batten, 50–1. Sylvia Martin, Passionate Friends, 37. Gill Valentine, “(Hetero)sexing Space,” 411. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 281, argues that in the United States by the 1920s “charges of lesbianism had become a common way to discredit women professionals, reformers, and educators.” See, for example, Mackersey’s hostile biography, Jean Batten, especially page 33, where he takes seriously rumours that Batten and her mother had a lesbian relationship with each other. However, her former teacher remarked of them, “I have always felt that this was a natural relationship and had nothing to do with sexual perversion”; see “The Flight of Time in a Changing World: Reminiscences by Muriel A. Bradshaw,” 20 December 1991 (unpublished manuscript), Muriel Agnes Bradshaw Papers, 1899–1991, Ref. No: 92–279, ATL . More positively, during my research in New Zealand, every lesbian I met enthusiastically claimed Batten as one of our own. Constance Babington Smith, Amy Johnson, 257n1. Mackersey, Jean Batten, 176. In addition to her well-documented relationship with Ida Baker, Mansfield had an affair with Maata Mahupuku. And Bethell lived with her partner, Effie Pollen, for many years, as did Duggan with Julia McLeely. For a discussion of the ways that the relationships of New Zealand’s lesbians vanish from the historical record, see Aorewa McLeod, “New Zealand’s Lost Lesbian Writers and Artists,” 49–62; and Alison J. Laurie, “Frances Mary Hodgkins,” 27–47. Both McLeod and Laurie acknowledge that the “ghosting” of these relationships makes it hard to assess their degree of openness. For a heterosexualized account of a lesbian relationship during the 1930s, see Margaret Escott, Show Down. 224

N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 7 2 – 6

95 An Afternoon Tea Reception, D.I.C. Tea Rooms, advertisement, Dominion, 24 October 1936; and “D.I.C. Reception,” Woman’s World, Dominion, 29 October 1936. 96 “Aviatrix and Rat – Jean Batten’s Fright,” New Zealand Herald, 4 June 1934. 97 “Girl Aviator,” Dominion, 24 October 1936. 98 “Girl Flier Welcomed,” New Zealand Herald, 27 June 1934. 99 Press clipping, dated 26 May, Scrapbook of Rito McKinnon, MS -Papers6463-1, ATL . 100 Ellie Bailey, “Jean Batten’s Arrival,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 9 December 1937, 58. 101 “Jean Batten and Rumor of Love,” N.Z. Truth, 20 January 1937, 1. 102 “The Woman within the Flying Suit,” Weekly News, 14 October 1936, 2. 103 Batten, Alone in the Sky, 57. Batten may have been wise. In his study of transport in New Zealand, historian James Watson, Links, 218, notes that while women motor vehicle drivers earned increasing acceptance in the 1930s, “the general pattern at marriage was for women to give up driving.” The same may well have been true of pilots. Certainly, Aroha Clifford gave up flying upon her marriage. 104 Phillips, A Man’s Country? 224. 105 “Town Hall Reception,” New Zealand Herald, 26 June 1934. 106 Batten’s sponsor, Lord Wakefield, might have shared Hutchinson’s assumption. According to Winifred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation, 86, Wakefield wrote that “a small wage, some leisure and more freedom is all that a young, intelligent and, above all, an attractive-looking girl demands from her job; the rest she hopes to be supplied a few years later by a generous husband.” 107 Critic, “What Your Handwriting Shows,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 29 October 1936, 48. 108 Bill Oliver, quoted in Mackersey, Jean Batten, 46. 109 Maorilander, “The Birthday Star Map of Jean Batten,” New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, 29 October 1936, 53. 110 Caroline Daley, Girls and Women, Men and Boys, 21. 111 New Zealand, New Zealand Official Yearbook, 102; Molloy, “Citizenship, Property and Bodies,” 300. 112 Nolan, Breadwinning, 174–7. Sandra Coney, Every Girl, 197–8, notes that the middle-class leadership of the Y WCA “expected working class girls to work under conditions which would have been unthinkable for their own daughters ... When domestic positions without pay were offered to the employment register, a spokeswoman said that she believed most offers were made 225

N OT E S TO PAG E S 1 7 7 – 8 3

113

114 115 116 117

from ‘sheer kindness and a desire to help.’” Unemployed women had a different perspective. They regarded offers of unpaid work as “an attempt at exploitation.” Kuni Jenkins and Kay Morris Matthews, “Knowing Their Place,” 85–105. Rangitiaria Dennan, Guide Rangi of Rotorua, 63, confirms this practice. She attended the famous Hukarere School in Napier, the aim of which “was to prepare Maori girls for a career as wives and mothers.” Just as working-class Pa¯ keha¯ women rejected domestic service, many Ma¯ori women disregarded the object of their education and chose to pursue professional careers in nursing and teaching instead. Barrowman, Popular Vision, 35. Robin Hyde, quoted in Barrowman, Popular Vision, 130, described Devanny’s The Butcher Shop (1926) as “New Zealand’s one and only home-grown banned novel.” Batten, Alone in the Sky, 162. Shirley Lainé, Silver Wings, 30–2.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13

Winifred Holtby, Women and a Changing Civilisation, 105. Quoted in Ian Mackersey, Jean Batten, 277. Quoted in Harald Penrose, British Aviation: Widening Horizons, 1930–1934, 35. Mackersey, Jean Batten, 290. Lettice Curtis, “Flying for All,” 76–82. Ibid., 80, 82. Constance Babington Smith, Amy Johnson, 345. The existence of the women’s branch of the ATA , under the command of Pauline Gower, indicated that although they did not undertake combat roles, women had gained partial access to the hallowed masculine preserve of military airspace. Meaghan Morris, Too Soon, Too Late, 6, original emphasis. Ana Maria Alonso, “The Effects of Truth,” 44. Ibid., 45. See, for example, Judy Lomax, Women of the Air. Penrose, Widening Horizons, 95. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 190.

226

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Collections Alexander Turnball Library, Wellington Amy Johnson Papers, Department of Research and Information Services, R AF Hendon Batten Archives, Walsh Memorial Library, Museum of Transport and Technology Charles Thomas Phillipe Ulm Papers, Auckland War Memorial Museum Library Civil Aviation Department [Record Group], series 1, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office Department of Internal Affairs, Head Office [Record Group], series 1, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Ka¯wanatanga, Wellington Office Great Britain Parliamentary Debates Jean Batten Papers, Auckland War Memorial Museum Library Jean Batten Papers, Department of Research and Information Services, R AF Hendon Public Record Office, Kew New Zealand Parliamentary Debates

Newspapers and Magazines Argus (Melbourne)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dominion (Wellington) New Zealand Herald (Auckland) New Zealand Observer (Auckland) New Zealand Woman’s Weekly N.Z. Truth (Auckland) Times (London) Weekly News (Auckland)

Secondary Sources Alberti, Johanna. Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914–28. London: Macmillan, 1989. Alonso, Ana Maria. “The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community.” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (1988): 33–57. Amery, Leo. “The Empire and Air Communications.” In C.G. Burge, ed., The Air Annual of the British Empire, 1929, 3–6. London: Gale and Polden, 1929. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1996. Babington Smith, Constance. Amy Johnson. London: White Lion, 1977. Bailey, Hon. Lady Mary. “Croydon to the Cape and Back Again.” In Lady Heath and Stella Wolfe Murray, eds, Woman and Flying, 203–17. London: John Long, 1929. Barrowman, Rachel. A Popular Vision: The Arts and the Left in New Zealand, 1930– 1950. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1991. Bassett, Michael. The Mother of All Departments: The History of the Department of Internal Affairs. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1997. Batten, Jean. Alone in the Sky. Auckland: Technical Books, 1979. – My Life. London: George Harrap and Co., 1938. – Solo Flight. Sydney: Jackson and O’Sullivan, 1934. Beddoe, Deirdre. Back to Home and Duty: Women between the Wars, 1918–1939. London: Pandora, 1989. Beddoe, John. The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe. Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1885. Bennett, James. “Maori as Honorary Members of the White Tribe.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 29, no. 3 (2001): 33–54. Berg, Lawrence D., and Robin A. Kearns. “America Unlimited.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16 (1998): 128–32.

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INDEX

abstract space, 11, 18, 54, 92, 182–3; and red tape, 48 adventure, 15, 18, 57, 84, 93–101, 105, 107, 164 adventuress, 101, 113; Amy Johnson as, 103–8 airmindedness, 14, 17–18, 182; and empire unity, 22–3; and gender, 18–19, 27–8, 36; imperialist, 22; internationalist, 20–2; and military, 35–6; nationalist, 24; promotion of, 25–9, 137–8; relation to airspace, 20, 178, 182 airspace, 12, 39, 43; history of, 3–4; imperial, 83–7; New Zealand, 119–20, 140–1; production of, 10–11, 17–18, 29; types of, 6, 14–16, 32 Air Transport Auxiliary, 33, 42–3, 96, 180

Allen, Mary, 23 Amery, Leo, 22 Anglo-German Fellowship, 21 Ardell, D., 133–4, 137–8 Bailey, Ellie, 127, 148, 173 Bailey, Lady Mary, 39, 100, 125 Baker, Valentine Henry, 45 Balfour, Harold, 180 Barnard, William Edward, 24–5 Batten, Jean, 15, 23, 179; and adventure stories, 57, 96–100; being New Zealander, 15, 125; connections with Maori, 117, 123–4, 138–40; funding for flights, 27, 111–12, 114–15; and imperial airspace, 82; media comments about, 3–4, 130–2, 145–8, 160–2, 168–9; men’s hostility to, 46, 170–1; physical qualities, 3, 127–8,

INDEX

161, 163–4, 173; reception in New Zealand, 117, 124, 133, 142; riot over, 16; and Tasman Sea, 90, 141, 170–1; on time, 92; women’s response to, 152–4, 159–60. See also consumers; lesboerotic desire Biggles, 95–6 Bird, S.W., 46 Birkenhead, Lord, 91–2 Bledisloe, Lord, 122, 127, 138–9, 157, 163 Boku, Kei Gen, 50 Bolland, Adrienne, 56, 60–1 Bonney, Lores, 43, 70, 174 Bradley, Robert, 74–6 Brancker, Sir Sefton, 58, 79 breadwinning, 54, 59–60, 80, 151, 165–8, 181 British Hospitals Air Pageant, 26, 44 Brittain, Sir Harry: on imperial rivalries, 22; on male camaraderie, 95; on superstition, 70 Brown, Winifred, 36–7 Bruce, Mary, 26, 39, 44, 83, 101, 116, 180; in Japan, 29; on “Treatment of Savages,” 98–9; on time, 92; writing on Bluebird, 21 Butler, Vera and Frank Hedges, 32

126, 130, 157–9, 176; solidarity, 62 Clifford, Aroha, 33, 41 Cobham, Sir Alan, 26–7, 88, 91, 110, 112; on women pilots, 36, 44 Consumers, 162; desiring, 154, 163; role of, 154–7; skilled, 16, 154 Corn, Joseph, 8 Curtis, Lettice, 33 Davis, Ernest, 119, 127–8, 170 decorporealization, 11–12, 14, 18, 54 de Grazia, Victoria, 155–6 de Havilland, aircraft firm, 35, 111, 130 de Saint-Exupéry, Antoine, 60–1, 95–6, 98 di Nola, Professor Dott. Gr. Uff. Angelo, 62–7, 70, 76–7, 81 domestication, 126, 175, 178, 182; of commodities, 154, 156–7, 162–5; and flight, 8; and gender roles, 9, 19 Drinkwater, Winifred, 43 Drummond Hogg, J., 103–4, 106–7 Dyson, Hedda, 74, 147, 160, 163 Earhart, Amelia, 9, 15, 23, 37, 174 Eliott-Lynn, Sophie. See Heath, Lady Mary Ellis, Havelock, 12 el Nade, Lostia, 43 embodiment, 183; body-as-machine, 68; and decorporealization, 10–12; discourse of, 54; and eugenics, 71, 126; women’s bodies, 68–71,

Camac, Harriet, 90 Chapman, Jack, 46 Civil Air Guard, 180 Clarke, Jock, 111–12 class, 10, 32, 52, 81, 100; and Amy Johnson, 49; and Daily Mail, 110; and flying clubs, 35, 37–40; and Lady Heath, 76; in New Zealand,

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INDEX

76–7, 80–1, 154, 156. See also Batten, Jean

Heath, Lady Mary, 27, 39, 83, 125; and adventure, 96, 100–1; on Africa, 91; and “B” licence ban, 54–5, 61, 81; and KLM , 116; on learning to fly, 43; on prejudice, 44 heteronormativity, discourse of, 12–13, 16, 181–3; and Batten, 173; challenges to, 176–7; and economic independence, 151, 154 Hewlett, Hilda B., 32–3 Hislop, James, 135 Hoare, Sir Samuel, 38, 79–80, 85, 89–91; on airmindedness, 34–5 Hollinrake, Tom, 171 Holtby, Winifred, 179 Houston, Lady, 23 Humphreys, Jack, 50, 110–11 Hunter, Trevor, 160 Hutchinson, G.W., 174 Huxley, Julian: and Alfred Haddon, 72 Hyde, Robin, 25, 149–50, 177; on godwits, 93. See also Wilkinson, Iris

fascism, 17, 38, 68, 130, 150, 165; and flight, 23–4 femininity, 10, 12–13, 54, 76, 181–2. See also adventure feminists, 5, 57, 179; literature, 10, 150 Field, Dorothy: criticism of, 44–5 Fitzmaurice, H., 104–8 Flack, Group Captain Martin, 62, 64–7, 70, 77–9, 81 Flandin, P.E., 61 Forbes, Emma, 163 Forbes, George, 133, 145 Foucault, Michel, 68 Franklin, Miles, 172 Freud, Sigmund, 13 Gardiner, Hugh: on women pilots, 45 Garsaux, Dr, 55–8, 75, 80–1; on genital troubles, 62–3, 66 Gascoigne, Alvary, 50–1 Gatty, Harold, 173 Gower, Pauline, 26–7, 42–4, 96, 101, 180 Grant, Madison, 72–3 Grey, C.G., 24, 35, 179 Grey, Gelis, 166 Guest, Frederick, 21, 37

Imperial Airways, 60, 83, 85–6, 89, 107 ICAN, 4, 8, 14, 49, 55, 58, 61, 80–1, 85, 109, 151, 173 Isitt, Major L.M., 41, 135 Johnson, Amy, 14, 15, 172; and adventure, 18, 96; funding for flights, 27, 111, 112–14; and imperial airspace, 46–51, 82, 101; and media, 99, 131–2;

Hall, Radclyffe, 13 Hardie, E.F., 25 Harvey, David, 89–90 Heald, Colonel, 55, 58, 81

247

INDEX

and prejudice, 45–6. See also adventuress; spectacle Jones, Frederick, 41–2, 144

Millington-Drake, E., 114 mobility, 9–10 modernity, 10, 17, 121, 154, 173, 178; and aeroplanes, 20; conservative, 24, 40; in New Zealand, 128–30, 141, 148, 150, 156–7; and women, 27–9, 79–80 Mollison, Amy. See Johnson, Amy Mollison, James, 114 Mosley, Oswald, 23 Murray, Stella Wolfe, 27, 61–2; on airmindedness, 28–9; on imperial opportunities, 100–1; on Lady Heath, 61; on maternal power, 55, 77–9; on menstruation, 79; on time, 92; on women promoting flight, 19, 30; on women voters, 5–6

Kingsford Smith, Charles, 128, 134, 137, 170 Koizumi, Matajiro, 50 KLM , 83, 108, 116 KNILM , 103–7 Langstone, Frank, 169 Lefebvre, Henri, 11, 183 lesbian, 13, 157, 171, 176 lesbianism, 13, 78, 171–2, 176 lesboerotic desire, 16, 151, 157, 163–4, 172, 178 Leslie, Norman, 22–3 Lindbergh, Charles and Anne, 51 Linton-Orman, Rotha, 23 Londonderry, Lord, 73; on Batten, 21–2 Lovelock, Jack, 142

Nash, Lottie May, 127 National Flying Services, 37 O’Gorman, Lieutenant Colonel, 38 Oliver, Bill, 171

Mackay, Elsie, 39 Maclean, Neil, 38–9 McEntree, Valentine, 38 magic, 5, 54, 67, 69, 165 maps, 98, 109; mapping, 17 Marinetti, F.T., 19 masculinity, 10, 11–14, 17, 53–5, 59–61, 66, 76, 81, 181–3. See also adventure maternal power, 54–5, 77–9, 100 maternal role, 63; childbirth, 58 McKinnon, Rito, 97 menstruation, 46, 54, 64–8, 70, 81; menstrual power, 69; menstrual problems, 62–6, 79

Papakura, Bella, 139 Park, Group Captain, 115 Parkinson, Eva, 25 Paterson, A.S., 152 Percival: aircraft firm, 21; Gull aircraft type, 124, 162, 170 Perkins, Walter D., 36–8, 42, 60 pioneer type, 126–8, 142, 161 Plunket Society, 126, 165 pregnancy, 63, 65–7 Prime, Joyce, 97, 178, 180 pronatalism, 63, 80, 166

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INDEX

race: British stock, 100; in New Zealand, 123; race suicide, 165–6; racialized characteristics, 54, 62, 71–6, 81; racism, 71, 95, 98, 116, 166 Reitsch, Hanna, 23 Rhys Davies, John, 38 Roe, A.V., 23 Rolls, Charles, 32 Rothermere, Lord, 23 Royal Air Force, 21, 25–6, 35–6, 85, 88, 116

superstition, 65, 70 surplus women, 5, 78, 100, 165, 181

Sandford, Gladys, 33 Sassoon, Sir Philip, 39, 88, 98 Savage, Michael, 41–2, 145, 168 Scott, Charles W.A., 45–6 Sempill, Master of, on empire unity, 22, 85, 89 Semple, Robert, 25 Simmonds, Oliver, 36 Slade, Susan, 35 Smilie, Bob, 111 spectacle, 8–9, 28, 113 Spicer, Dorothy, 26 Spooner, Winifred, 179–80 Stevens, W., 47–8 Stopes, Marie, 5 subsidies, flying training, 10; British, 34–40, 52; New Zealand, 40–2, 52 Sudan, ban on unaccompanied women flying over, 87

Ulm, Charles, 113, 128, 133–4, 170

Taupopoki, Mita, 139 Te Puea Herangi, Te Kirihaehae, 138–9, 157, 168 Thaden, Louise, 19 time, 7, 92 time-space compression, 82, 84–5, 88–92, 116, 119, 128–9 Treaty of Waitangi, 122 Tsurumi, Dr, 62, 66–7, 81

waka, 121–4, 139 Wakefield, C.C. & Co., 27, 45–6, 110–14, 142, 157 Wakefield, Lord, 103, 124; on patriotism, 22; sponsoring flights, 110–12, 120, 138 Waung, Yen Chi, 160 Westcott, Cyril, 111, 113–14, 142 Wilkinson, Iris, 25; on injustice of subsidies, 41–2, 52. See also Hyde, Robin witches, 69 winged gospel, 8, 21, 27 Women’s Amateur Athletic Association, 61 Women’s International Aeronautical Association, 41, 44

249