The first installment of the Flying Girl series, Flying Girl, written by Edith Van Dyne, was marketed under the tag line “Exhilarating Books for Girls of Today.”²¹ Sold as “exhilarating,” this series distinguished itself from any other kind of “girl” narrative published before. The story of the Flying Girl follows the life of Orissa Kane from her modest and financially limited beginnings to her exciting and privileged life as a stunt aviator. Offering context for the new narrative, in her Foreword, Van Dyne offers commentary worth quoting at length:

Van Dyne’s personal commentary on the American girl helps to set the stage for her potential reading audience. While visionary in suggesting that girls would soon emulate the accomplishments of Orissa Kane, Van Dyne is likewise apologetic, feeling the need for an explanation for her focus on an airborne heroine in a man’s world, and continues, “An apology may be due those gentlemen who performed so many brilliant feats at the 1911 meet at Dominguez, for having thrust them somewhat into the shade to allow the story to exalt its heroine; but they will understand the exigencies that required this seeming discourtesy….”²³ Van Dyne’s apology while self-deprecating, ascribing all blame to the author for her own approach on an airborne heroine, also demonstrates a depth to Van Dyne’s personal knowledge of the mechanics of the Dominguez meet, which solidifies and gives credibility to the details of her narrative.

Prior to becoming a pilot, Orissa Kane resided in a modest home on a small orange farm in California with her blind widow mother and engineer brother Stephen. Van Dyne describes Orissa as a young girl whose sweet face, slender and graceful form, and a charming personality attracted the admiration of all around her.²⁴ An unlikely heroine; limited by gender and social status Orissa is written to appeal to status quo America. Stephen’s mechanical genius and entrepreneurial spirit to build a new aircraft offers Orissa an avenue of escape into a world where limits of gender do not yet exist and financial opportunities reign abundantly. In order to help finance her brother’s venture, she takes a job as a secretary for a real-estate speculator, Mr. Burthon. Seemingly common from the outside, and sharing the same struggles to be taken seriously as most workingwomen, Orissa maintains a secret intellectual advantage, which combined with her appearance vaults her to an almost mythic-ready status to her peers: “Most girls would have been bewildered by the technicalities and passed the drawings with a glance; but Orissa understood how important to them all this venture was destined to be.”²⁵ For Van Dyne, in order for a girl heroine to be successful in aviation, she had to be able to win over the public with skill, knowledge, and importantly her femininity.

While Orissa and her brother Stephen can be read as representations of American assertiveness, manifest destiny, and products of modernity, Mr. Burthon, represents larger problems associated with capitalist enterprise and the early twentieth century. He is the necessary “bad guy,” and becomes Orissa’s adversary, giving Orissa the opportunity to become a hero. Stated clearly, Orissa’s skill alone was not enough to garner the admiration and attention of the public, as Van Dyne writes: “The morning papers were full of her achievement…praise for her beauty, her daring, her modesty and skill. The attempt of a rival aeroplane to interfere with her flight and her clever rescue of her enemy…made a popular heroine of the girl….”²⁶ As an airborne heroine and phenomenon, Orissa maintains a public following: It was estimated that fully fifty thousand people were in attendance…the girl aviator met with a reception such as has never before been equaled in the annals of aviation.”²⁷

While in the Flying Girl, Orissa becomes a celebrity because of her gender and her disposition, she is forced to deal with larger issues of what it means to be a female flier in the aviation community in the next edition of the series, The Flying Girl and Her Chum. While traveling to an air meet, Orissa becomes a third party to a conversation about her celebrity and personage from members of high society: “’You’ll be disappointed,’ answered the gentleman. ‘She’s a native of these parts, they say’ I presume some big-boned, masculine, orange –picking female.’“²⁸ The girl participant in this conversation, soon-to-be Orissa’s chum, immediately shoots down the notion that women fliers have to be more masculine than feminine, commenting on Orissa’s reputation as a beautiful and feminine young woman. At the beginning of a new era in a new industry, predating Amelia Earhart and other models, the discourse Van Dyne experiments with offers commentary on the gender blending and gender bending that was beginning to ensue. She seems to suggest that if female fliers were any less feminine they would also be far less famous. The problem of negotiating femininity with flying would be actualized years later with Earhart, who mentioned that the two questions she was asked most often were: Were you scared when you flew over the Atlantic and what did you wear during the trip?²⁹ Adding to the complexity of her public persona, Earhart was often depicted as a “Lady Lindy,” sharing incredible similarities physically with Charles Lindbergh. The gender line for female fliers was blurred right down to the clothing they wore, and trends that they set.

In both of Van Dyne’s stories, Orissa struggles to come to terms with her celebrity and identity as a female pilot marking a major problem those real-life professional women aviators like Bessie Coleman, Jackie Cochran, and Amelia Earhart no doubt confronted in their daily lives. Women aviators lived in between two worlds, in a sort of feminized double consciousness. On the one hand, as daredevils and record-breakers they maintained an audience, while on the other hand they strove often times unsuccessfully to be recognized by their male counterparts as aviation professionals, an identity that would give them coveted access into the commercial sector. Identifying this complex burden, Van Dyne addresses the question of naming women career aviators, writing:
“Do you call it ‘aviatrix’ or ‘aviatrice’? The feminine of ‘aviator,’ you know.” I should say ‘aviatress,’ now that you appeal to me,” was the laughing reply. “Some of the newspaper men, so love to coin new words, have tried to saddle ‘aviatrice’ on the girl aviator, and the French have dubbed her ‘aviatrix’ without rhyme or reason. It seems to me that if ‘seamstress,’ ‘governess’ or ‘hostess’ is proper, ‘aviatress’ is also correct and, moreover, it is thoroughly American. But in the profession–on the aviation field-they call themselves ‘aviators,’ whether men or women, just as an author is always an ‘author,’ regardless of sex.”³⁰

It is obvious that Van Dyne can see herself in a larger argument about the places of professional women, offering commentary with the example of her own professional calling. Trapped between being seen by members of the public as a “dare-devil” on the basis of her sex and desiring to been considered a professional aviator, on the basis of her talent Orissa states: “I am not a ‘dare-devil,’ I assure you’…‘I know the newspapers call me that, and compare me with the witch on a broomstick; but in truth I am as calculating and cold as any aviator in America.”³¹

The second-class status of female fliers is a convention employed by Van Dyne to keep the narrative somewhat conservatively safe from its liberal edge. Orissa always places her brother’s work ahead of her own popularity. Her life’s ambitions would not be possible without the ability of her brother, a fact that she promotes on into, The Flying Girl and Her Chum. Van Dyne writes:
“She has a fine aeroplane,” was her reply. “Her brother invented it, you know. It’s the Kane Aircraft, the safest and speediest yet made, and Stephen Kane has taught his sister how to handle it. That she flies his aircraft successfully is due, I am sure, to her brother’s genius; not to any especial merit of her own.”³²

What becomes interesting is that Van Dyne while keeping the audience conscious of Orissa’s second class status, subtly rationalizes Orissa’s modestly offering that Stephen seldom flew his own aircraft, for an accidental fall had lamed him so that he was not as expert an aviator as his sister had proved to be, making this entire venture provocative.³³ Years later a similar moment would be actualized with commentary by O.O. McIntyre of Hearts’s International Cosmopolitan on Amelia Earhart’s journey across the Atlantic, writing, “There was a catch in our throats and a bursting pride in our hearts when we read she [Earhart] told the English newspaper men awaiting her landing that she was ‘merely baggage’–and that the entire credit for the successful voyage was due solely to the two men in the plane.”³⁴

Margaret Burnham, writer of The Girl Aviators, published the first of the four volume series in 1911 under the modest and protective tag line, “Clean Aviation Stories.”³⁵ The stories in this series describe the lives of Roy and Peggy Prescott, orphans living in the care of their aunt, Miss. Prescott, on Long Island. While at school Roy is described as having imbibed the aerial fever, and had built a fine monoplane, the Golden Butterfly, with which he won a large monetary prize while also encountering a series of extraordinary aerial adventures. Peggy often participates in the adventures, and is described as having on more than one occasion rescued her brother from major difficulties. Burnham takes a more conservative approach than Van Dyne in this series, placing the girl aviators under the supervision of or behind their male counterparts, though she offers obvious commentary on women in aviation, worth quoting at length. Excitedly reading a description of the allocation of prize money for an upcoming flying contest, Roy declares:

The conversation between Roy and Peggy while humorous and excessive, conveys a powerful image of the possibilities flight offered women’s liberation, and the real message that women wanted, planned, and were taking to the skies, not only for enjoyment but with professional and personal purpose.