Between 1910 and 1929, before the commercialization of flight, girl aviators existed popularly as barnstormers, daredevil stunt performers, and record-breakers surviving and thriving on their personal successes. Female fliers worked individually posing no threat to the emerging patterns that structured the development of aviation; their accomplishments were celebrated, marginalized, and ignored until the next woman did something spectacular and the pattern could start again.⁹ The individual exploits of Amelia Earhart, Jackie Cochran, Bessie Coleman, women of the Ninety-Nines and others like them became perfect examples of women’s emancipation in the postsuffrage era.¹⁰ Their personal successes competed unsuccessfully and lost out to events that shaped and changed the aviation climate approaching WWII and throughout the postwar years. While female pilots garnered attention for stunt work between 1910 and 1920, they’re popularity as public heroes diminished rapidly on into the 1930s. Among the reasons for their decline was their inability to develop professionally, as they were refused latest technologies and access to new training.¹¹ It was during this same period that for many reasons, including the eminent danger of the skies, the complicated nature of the equipment, the need for advanced training, a growing relationship to militaristic endeavors, and increasing need for financial investment that the skies became distinctly male. As public figures and professionals, girl aviators already in popular decline disappeared from mainstream attention when Amelia Earhart failed to return from her last flight. While it would take female aviators more than 75 years to matriculate into a real and legitimate component of the commercial aviation industry, their seemingly more feminine counterparts, stewardesses, instantly secured a permanent place and thrived.¹²

Unlike girl aviators whose occupations depended on singular and sporadic opportunities, the stewardess job matured from a short-term occupation into a long-term profession. If girl aviators were perfect examples of emancipation, stewardesses were perfect counterexamples of domesticity, traditional ideals of womanhood, and second-class citizenship. Stewardesses were the industry’s compromise for an incorporation of female fliers; a less threatening and more controllable entity intended to reinforce the traditional order of the sexes. While the public’s romance with female aviators really began, matured and ended with Amelia Earhart, the stewardess story began with the highly feminized “Original Eight,” a group of beautiful, unmarried young twenty-something nurse graduates and ended with the seductive images of Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones in Coffee, Tea or Me?

Stewardesses assumed the role of airborne heroines on different terms from their girl aviator counterparts. They entered the commercial workforce as permanent, albeit second-class, workers and therefore did not have to labor as hard as female pilots to establish themselves, nor did they rely solely on the exploits of a single-spokesperson for survival. Unlike girl aviators who worked independently, often financing their own efforts and publicity, stewardesses worked collectively. The commercial aviation industry made it a priority to inspire and encourage a culture of wonder, glamour and hero worship around stewardesses for publicity purposes, which made their transition into the role of airborne heroine seamless, diminishing the impact of the girl aviator’s absence on the public’s consciousness. As stewardesses vied for a more equal employment climate on into the 1960s, an era dramatically affected by the civil rights movement, the feminist movement and the sexual revolution, their heroic status was snuffed out by management, the changing trends and interests of the public, and their own professional and personal ambitions. As the image of the stewardess as airborne heroine deteriorated, writers searching for a quick replacement revealed a new narrative of stewardess as sex goddess.

In the moment before the aviation was commercialized, and social limits were officially imposed, a number of significant girls’ aviation series books slipped past cultural gatekeepers and emerged onto the reading scene. Among these were: Dorothy Dixon ¹³ , Girl Flyers ¹⁴, Girl Sky Pilot¹⁵, Ruth Darrow¹⁶, The Flying Girls Series¹⁷, The Girl Aviators Series¹⁸, and Airplane Girl¹⁹. The fact that these narratives existed and flourished as series books begs the historian to ask questions about “girl aviators.” Did writers and publishers want girls to believe that they too could participate in the flight revolution, did they believe it themselves, were these same entities taking radical advantage of the malleable moment for a larger cause of women’s rights, or were these narratives written as part of a larger marketing scheme? I would suggest that the answer is a combination of all of these questions, and like it or not when dealing with the book world, marketing is always a part of what get written. The Stratemeyer Syndicate²⁰ was among the first to write about female pilots, publishing the liberal Flying Girl series in 1911, alongside Hurst and Company’s more conservative, The Girl Aviators series. The arrival of these two series formally announced the debutant airborne heroine and set a high standard for other writers exploring similar themes and literary endeavors.