Abstract
The glamourous aviatrix evoked public fascination throughout the 1930s. Amy Johnson, Jean Batten and Beryl Markham, in particular, served as examples of the potential of the modern woman and helped create new ideals of feminine heroism. This chapter looks into the lives and representations of these aviatrices—and their intersections with girls’ school stories—to examine 1930s gender politics and the relation between Britain and its colonies with regard to gendered behaviour. Popular representations of aviatrices created an, at times, eccentric unconventional femininity, while also relying on the ex-centricity of feminities that contravened the norms in the metropolis. As this chapter demonstrates, these women carved a space of relative freedom, in spite of the fact that representations of them often limited what they could do as women.
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Rea, A. (2020). ‘True Blue Heroines’: The 1930s Aviatrix and Eccentric Colonial Femininity. In: McCluskey, M., Seaber, L. (eds) Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_8
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