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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Works Cited
Batten, Jean. Solo Flight. Sydney: Jackson and O’Sullivan, 1934.
Bingham, Adrian. ‘Cultural Hierarchies and the Interwar British Press.’ Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960. Eds. Erica Brown and Mary Grover. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 55–68.
Blythe, Ronald. The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919–1940. London: Phoenix Press, 1963.
Brazil, Angela. Leader of the Lower School. Glasgow: Blackie, 1913.
Brown, Erica and Mary Grover, eds. Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Caprotti, Federico. ‘Visuality, Hybridity, and Colonialism: Imagining Ethiopia Through Colonial Aviation, 1935–1940.’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101:2 (2011): 380–403.
Cunningham, Valentine. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
DeLyser, Dydia. ‘Flying: Feminisms and Mobilities—Crusading for Aviation in the 1920s.’ Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects. Eds. Tim Cressell and Peter Merriman. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 83–96.
Devereux, Cecily. ‘Fashioning the Colonial Girl: “Made in Britain” Femininity in the Imperial Archive.’ Colonial Girlhood in Literature: Culture and History, 1840–1950. Eds. Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 30–44.
Graves, Robert and Alan Hodge. The Long Week End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939. New York: Macmillan, 1941.
Kidman, Fiona. The Infinite Air: A Novel About the Enigmatic Jean Batten. London: Aardvark Bureau, 2013.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60555-1_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-60554-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-60555-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)