ABSTRACT
As a metaphor for liberation, flying was as suggestive in the late 1930s as in the pioneer days before the First World War. Between the wars, aviation stopped being an eccentric activity, not unlike a sport, and began to be the fastest way to travel, part of the industrial, military and commercial future. Flying was still exotic: most leading politicians had not set foot in a plane. The heroes and heroines of solo flight, from Lindbergh to Saint-Exupéry, from Earhart to Adrienne Bolland, were rarely out of the headlines. Flying had a special appeal in France: Kessel’s L’Equipage was the literary event of 1923; Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de nuit (1931) sold over a million copies. In 1935, the communist daily Humanité ran a series of articles entided ‘Les perceurs du Ciel’, to appeal to both boys and girls. For, unlike the chansons de geste, flying seemed to be something at which young people of both sexes distinguished themselves.2 Although women fliers were always a tiny minority, they were paid disproportionate attention, showing that-after all-it could be done. Women pilots were role models for schoolgirls, symbols of success in a modern technological world. If I have chosen to write about aviation here, it is because it shows particularly clearly both the opportunities and limitations of the age for a postwar generation of women. Aviation had political and military dimensions which histories so far available do not explore.
