LITERARY REVIEW

WHEN Ruth Elder arrived back in New York in 1927 after attempting to cross the Atlantic in her monoplane American Girl, the crowds were in awe.

The female aviator dubbed the “Flying Flapper” looked like a chic society woman with her Parisian suit, fox-fur coat, and bobbed hair.

It didn’t matter that American Girl was downed into the sea several hundred miles north of the Azores. As far as the media and newspapers were concerned, “Miss” Elder was a new kind of femme fatale.

In this compulsive book – part Barbie movie and part Wacky Races – social historian Midge Gillies tells the story of six women who competed to cross the Atlantic in the late 1920s.

Charles Lindbergh had been the first pilot to succeed non-stop solo in 1927, but now the race was on for the first “girl” flyer to complete the 3,000-mile arduous journey.

In an age of female emancipation, women were flying high.

Gillies’ half-dozen heroines hail from a wide background. There is peer’s daughter Hon. Elsie Mackay, African-American Bessie Coleman whose mother had been born into slavery, and Amelia Earhart who became the first female pilot to cross the Atlantic solo and non-stop.  

As for Ruth, she turned out to be on the run from a scandalous romantic past.

It was not all fun, games, or easy times; there were difficult or serious aspects involved. Four of Gillies’ Atlantic Furies failed to return from their expeditions, the most famous being Earhart who set off in 1937 in a bid to be the first woman aviator to circle the Equator.

Following several crackly radio messages received on July 2, her bright silver Lockhead Electra disappeared from the skies over the Central Pacific. It has yet to be found.

Gillies is adept in giving us a bone-shaking sense of what it must have been like to sit high in the skies, munching on chocolate for energy and in trying to screen out the propeller noise.

Flying through freezing fog involved terrifyingly low visibility, yet straining to get a better view could prove fatal.

In 1926 Coleman unhooked her safety belt to peer over the fuselage just as her plane dipped, with the result that she somersaulted to earth in front of horrified bystanders.

Not everyone believed that a woman’s place was in the skies. One doctor specialising in aviation medicine reported that having a period put a woman pilot at risk of crashing her plane. And then we read the dark comments of Major Oliver Stewart who wrote in the Tatler: “(Women) will be persuaded to mend their ways only when they have learned the truth that the lipstick is mightier than the joystick”.

Gillies makes short work of this historical misogyny, arguing that the courageous women who vied to cross the Atlantic were never going to put up with a man telling them what to do. (It is surely no coincidence that her heroines had 15 marriages between them.)

By the end of this thrilling book, it is impossible not to cheer for these magnificent women in their flying machines.

– Atlantic Furies by Midge Gillies is published by Scribe, 416pp