In 1921, Adrienne Bolland, a French woman aged twenty-six, flew solo across the Andes in a borrowed Caudron G3, an aircraft with a maximum altitude of only 12,000 feet, so she had to find a corridor through the highest peaks in order to survive. The only reason she had a plane at all was that she had personally approached the manufacturer, Rene Caudron, and demonstrated at his request her ability to loop the loop. Bolland's rather spectacular exploit was widely reported – the Andes had only been overflown for the first time in 1918 by Lieutenant Candelaria – and she became the first of the postwar generation of French women aviators to catch the public eye.

Aviators of both sexes had something of the status of film stars in the inter-war years, in France and indeed elsewhere. Endlessly photographed, whether men or women, they seemed equally heroic central figures in an epic of apparently identical character. A small aircraft would taxi to a halt on some bumpy airfield in Morocco, the Far East or the Ile-de-France, and a lone figure would climb out, to be welcomed by a reception committee and sometimes an excited crowd. Or else the solitary flier would be reported missing, his or her chances of survival shrinking with every hour that passed. The differences in the lives of men and women pilots that lay behind this familiar scenario were not always obvious, but they fit into what is beginning to look like a complex period in French history for relations between the sexes.

The Great War unquestionably brought dramatic changes to a whole generation of women in France. Replacing men of their own age, women might have spent the war years running small businesses, shops and family farms; teaching mixed classes of schoolchildren; manufacturing munitions, or working in offices (flying planes was not an option). About what happened after the war, different sources tell different stories. Women munitions workers, for instance, immediately lost their jobs but many women clerical workers stayed on. Popular perception was that women were working 'in all walks of life' in post-1918 France, but the census figures tell us that overall in the inter-war period, the number of employed women fell.

Historians looking for broad explanations have drawn on this contradictory evidence to argue either that war was on balance a force for women's emancipation in France or, on the contrary, that the inter-war period turned the clock back again, since the French state urged women to return to the home and refused them civil and political rights. Closer examination of what was and what was not being done by women between the wars is one way of escaping massive generalisations which make no allowance for differences of generation, class or culture. Aviation is a rather specialised activity, but it raises questions to do with both technology and freedom as they related to women at this time.

Recent research on French women's employment has suggested that the fall in overall numbers masks a shift from the traditional to the modern sector. In inter-war France, fewer women would be found in traditionally female sectors of the economy, such as textile factories (now more mechanised, and also in decline), or in particular those home-based trades of dressmaker, laundress, and general processor of clothing by which so many women had earned a living before the war. Increasingly, women were being employed in the technically more advanced sectors of manufacture, which called for a semi-skilled labour force and to which the 'Fordist' organisation of the munitions factories had pointed the way.

At the same time, a wider range of options became thinkable, at least for educated women. Secondary education for girls was slowly expanding and there were more chances for the daughters of middle-class families to take white-collar jobs in say, the civil service, banking, or hospitals, where they were visible to the public. As for the professions, there had been a handful of women doctors and lawyers before the war; the inter-war period was the time when they began to appear in statistically significant numbers.

Attitudes had changed too, though not identically everywhere. Many Frenchmen, after the experience of the war, longed for some kind of restoration of the pre-war world. But the generation of women who were already adult in 1914 had often discovered previously under-used administrative talents. These were the women who were taken aback when the French Senate blocked women's suffrage bills time after time in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of them prolonged their wartime work into campaigns for peace, for women's rights, and a wide variety of social causes. Different again was the younger generation of women coming of age after 1920. It included many girls who left their villages for the towns and were more likely to experiment with the changed social, as distinct from political, status of women. They were more familiar with the new technology, whether the telephone switchboard or, if they were privileged, the motor car. And if a jeune fille moderne were really determined, she might fly a plane. It was neither physically nor technically beyond her and, perhaps equally important, it was a new activity where no traditions applied. As a symbol of emancipation, it could hardly be bettered.

But it was far from easy for a woman to get started at flying. Virtually all men aviators in France in the 1920s had learnt to fly during the war – under dangerous and difficult conditions of course, but by the same token, survivors had many hours' flying experience, in all weathers and several types of plane. They had often been obliged to turn mechanic and service the engine. It had been an excellent free apprenticeship. After the war, there were comparatively few jobs in flying, but determined pilots found work. Some stayed in military aviation to form the future French air force. Some, like Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the author of the best-seller Night Flighf (1931), joined the team of the pioneering Latecoere airline company (later Aeropostale). Some former pilots bought up army surplus planes cheaply and went in for barnstorming and aerobatics. Enthusiasts among plane-makers and fliers aimed for aviation records. (France held eleven world speed records between 1919 and 1924).

Women had no such automatic access to planes. As private individuals, they had to pay for flying lessons (usually given by ex-army pilots) and thereafter for every hour in the sky. As a result, early women aviators often came from families with enough money to give them at least a start. But others worked at a variety of jobs to pay for lessons. Maryse Hilsz (1903-46) paid for hers by parachute jumping. Maryse Bastie (1898-1952) had started out working in a shoe factory, and was always short of money. A French flying magazine in 1937 carried the following not untypical notice: 'Girl, pilot, 25, shorthand and typing, good English, offers office work in exchange for flying hours'.

To obtain a plane (essential for any serious flying) women had to beg, borrow or save up, usually acquiring second-hand aircraft of not very recent design, unless they could persuade a manufacturer to provide one in exchange for publicity. Adrienne Bolland was not the only one who had to resort to stunts: Maryse Bastie flew under the bridge at Bordeaux in 1925 just after obtaining her pilot's licence, but it took her another two years to acquire a plane.

It was hardly surprising then that the numbers of women pilots were not great – indeed there were fewer French women fliers proportionately after the Great War than before (when out of a few hundred aviators, seven were women). In 1926, Le Matin reported that there were only ten women in France with pilot's licences, compared with several thousand men. In 1932 the figure had only risen to about forty, and as late as the outbreak of war in 1939, there were no more than 150 women fliers in France. (There were between one and two thousand women aviators worldwide in the 1930s, over 500 of whom were American.) These are very small numbers indeed.

But then flying did not offer much of a future for women. Both military and commercial flying were closed to them. Newspapers sometimes carried stories about wealthy young women buying planes and hedgehopping all summer to visit their friends, suggesting that it was simply a distraction for the rich. But it would be more accurate to say that women had been left behind at the stage when flying was a sport. The two decades between the wars saw aviation move from the 'heroic pioneer' phase – its apogee Lindbergh's transatlantic flight in 1927 to a rapturous reception in France – towards the establishment of commercial airlines, regular airmail services and a new generation of military planes in the 1930s. Women had remained at the pioneer stage, never incorporated into aviation's new directions.

In 1925, the permanent committee of the international had declared that women were not to be granted licences to fly passengers on public transport planes (although several women, including Adrienne Bolland, already held them). The French representative to the committee (who happened to be the future prime minister, P. E. Flandin) supported the women's claim, but strong opposition from elsewhere, particularly from Britain, prevailed. The ruling was later amended to allow the granting of licences, but commercial airlines maintained the ban. Nor was there any provision for French women to join the army, so they had no access to military planes. And manufacturers were extremely reluctant to take women on as publicity agents, let alone test pilots, fearing, perhaps rightly, that extra bad publicity would result from a woman being killed in a crash. Indeed it does seem that the death of Helene Boucher (1908-34) a talented young flier who was killed on a practice flight after carrying off several speed records, one against all-comers, did discourage further offers to women.

Helene Boucher's short career in fact illustrates several of the pressures, both enabling and inhibiting, on the woman aviator. She came from a well-off background (her father was an architect) and from the generation that took new technology in its stride. At eighteen, she was riding her brother's motor cycle and driving the family car. When in 1930, at the age of twenty-two, she was taken for her first joy-ride in a light plane, she was immediately smitten with love of the air, but her family refused to pay for lessons, on the grounds that flying was too dangerous. She managed nevertheless to borrow and persuade her way through instruction, finally receiving her licence from the hands of Adrienne Bolland. Money was always something of a problem, despite her background. For a while, she apparently ran a small hat shop (some accounts suggest it specialised in leather flying caps); and her first plane was a modest second-hand Gipsy Moth.

Early in 1933, she set off on a solo flight to Saigon, but was forced down by engine trouble in Iraq. Despite the failure, press interest in her trip was intense and she returned to France to find herself a celebrity. Her real talent turned out to be for speed. The famous aerobatics expert, Micahel Detroyat, took her on as a pupil,. At the suggestion of a manufacturer, she entered the '12 hours of Angers' flying contest in July 1934, taking the world record for light planes over 1,000 km. In August the same year, at Istres, she captured several records, including the world women's speed record, on one day. Most exceptionally, she had been offered work as a test pilot by the firm of Caudron-Renault, and found herself flying the new and fast small plane, the Rafale. Within a year, she had made the transition from amateur to professional flier.

In November 1934, Helene Boucher was at the height of her fame. That month, a Renault advertisement showed a photograph of her (taken incidentally by Robert Doisneau, Renault's staff photographer at the time) at the wheel of a sports car, with the caption 'To experience the joys of speed on the road, Helene Boucher, the world's fastest airwoman, was bound to choose the 6-cylinder Renault Vivasport'. On November 30th, on a practice flight at Guyancourt airfield near Versailles, she crashed her Rafale on landing and was killed instantly. She was twenty-six. The French public was only too accustomed to the deaths of young male pilots in these circumstances. (Illustration that week published the photographs of thirty fliers killed in the previous two years) but this was the first time a woman had died on a test flight. There were inevitably suggestions that she had not received enough training for the kind of planes she was being asked to fly.

In the last year of her life, Helene Boucher had in fact come much closer to the male pilot's lifestyle than most other women. She remained an exception in this respect. Perhaps because of her death, French women fliers continued to be kept at arm's length from the most advanced aviation technology. This may help to explain the rather peculiar nature of French women's record-bagging exploits in the 1930s.

For men, records and 'raids' (long-distance flights) had by then become something of a hobby, to be attempted in their spare time. The one that really mattered depended on having access to modern aircraft. Women on the other hand went on competing for all kinds of records, most of them calling for endurance, courage and determination, but which were no longer of major technical interest. Consequently their only competitors were other women. Thus in 1934, a Frenchwoman carried off the 'feminine altitude record for a light two-seater plane with a passenger', while the 'longest solo flight in a straight line by a woman' was the object of cut-throat competition between several French women aviators in the late 1930s. Andree Dupeyron, whose story was later turned into the wartime film Le Ciel est a Vous, wrested it from Elisabeth Lion in 1938, but went missing in the Middle-Eastern desert in the attempt, and the nation held its breath until she was found. Occasionally French women accomplished all-time feats, such as Maryse Bastie's record time for a solo crossing of the South Atlantic in 1937, shortly after the Frenchman Jean Mermoz had disappeared on the same route.

But on the whole, women's records tended to be for solo flights, in light planes, competing against other women – in short, they conformed to patterns of segregation visible in women's sport. A French air force commander, interviewed by a women's newspaper in 1939, deplored this waste of talent. Instead of bagging prizes, he suggested, women pilots should be learning all the things they were not being taught – flying by instruments, night flying, how to land fast planes, the use of radio. The aviator Madeleine Charnaux said much the same in a lecture that year, also pointing out that record-hunting turned women pilots into self-centred individualists. Not being used to working in teams (such as a military squadron, the crew of a commercial airline, or Didier Daurat's famous equipe at Aeropostale) they had no collective identity, no solidarity among themse!ves, and rather enjoyed the 'queen bee' identity they had acquired. (The British airwoman Amy Johnson once admitted in print to feeling aggrieved when she first saw another woman in the hangar.)

The press and media encouraged this star system to the full, not only by treating fliers as heroines but also by focusing on their appearance and costume. Women fliers rapidly learned that what one wore at the reception after the flight was as important as what one wore in the air. Adrienne Bolland wore silk pyjamas under her flying suit in 1921, and later admitted to having had an accident on one occasion, 'because my mascara ran'. Although possibly more noticeable in France, preoccupation with the appearance of women aviators was international. The British flier Pauline Gower was distressed on landing after a particularly tough flight, because she was 'minus the two necessities of life. I had... neither a powder puff nor a comb'. In the male world of aviation, which obliged them on occasions to be 'one of the boys', women aviators took every opportunity to stress that they were not really boys at all. A significant number of them married fellow airmen or mechanics, which was one way of resolving the resulting sexual tension.

That French airwomen remained exceptional, glamorous figures, rather than being integrated into aviation structures, is confirmed by their exclusion from 'popular aviation'. Leon Blum's Popular Front government of 1936 introduced a new initiative, I'aviation populaire, a programme intended to widen the social clientele of private flying, which, despite previous government subsidies, remained largely confined to the upper-class members of flying clubs. Worried by the openly extreme right-wing sympathies of many clubs (those bearing the name of the aviator Jean Mermoz in particular) the air minister, the radical Pierre Cot, provided funds for encouraging schoolchildren to take an interest in flying, and to allow them to move on to gliding, with flying lessons for eighteen to twenty year olds. Literally thousands of young pilots took their licences – 23,000 in 1937. Yet again however, women or rather girls were excluded: at least part of the intention behind popular aviation was to recruit future military pilots. Despite pressure from several women fliers, notably Maryse Bastie then at the height of her fame, Pierre Cot said that France would wait 'until the aeroplane is considered a normal means of transport before we can judge on a wide scale the equal merits of men and women in aviation' (in contrast to the French government's attitude to commercial licences in the 1920s).

The only initiative in women's aviation remotely comparable to what was possible for young men was l'aviation sanitaire – a privately organised flying ambulance service, associated with the Red Cross, which recruited and trained women nurses to be parachutists from planes flown by women pilots. Although small, it is worthy of note and provided some satisfaction to those who took part. It attracted nothing like the press attention of the lone flier.

Small numbers, elite status, limited possibilities – was women's aviation after all a misleading symbol of emancipation? The answer must be a mixed one. In the first place, and most obviously, flying was physically liberating like nothing else. The motor car may have allowed a greater number of women to escape from a narrow radius, at a time when public transport was still something of an adventure. But to be able as Helene Boucher was, to set off for Saigon at the age of twenty-four was much more exhilarating. Most long-distance flights took aviators to French colonies, still in the 1930s scattered throughout Asia and Africa, but even a short flight meant new horizons.

It should also theoretically have spelled a new relation between women and technology, and up to a point it did. But here, there was a curious parallel between women's industrial employment and aviation. Technological advance had made it possible for 'a slip of a girl' as the papers often said, to fly a plane. Similarly, it had devised machines which meant that a semi-skilled woman or girl in a factory making bicycles, automobiles or indeed aeroplanes, could carry out tasks previously handled by a skilled male worker. But in both cases, the women did not fully control the technology. Women aviators were mostly, by their own account, able to perform only the simplest repairs to their machines, and relied (as admittedly did many men) on their 'trusty mechanic'. Nor were they familiar with the latest design of planes. Similarly, the woman machine-hand usually depended on the male titter who regulated the machine. The technology of the period opened some doors to women but shut others in their faces.

What then of the wider question of political emancipation? One might expect aviation to have some impact, and indeed the memoirs of a surprising number of French women who were young girls during this period speak of the importance for them of airwomen as heroines and role models. If women could fly planes, perhaps anything was possible. In the short term however, it is not easy to see that French-women's rights were particularly advanced by aviation, and one striking instance of an attempt to link the two tells a depressing story. In 1934, Louise Weiss, a well-connected journalist, launched a movement called Femme Nouvelle, 'New Woman', which deliberately modelled itself on the British suffragettes and campaigned for the right to vote. In October 1934, she arranged a grand meeting in Bordeaux, to be attended by the aviators Adrienne Bolland, Maryse Bastie and Helene Boucher. The local flying clubs turned out in force, and press reaction was favourable. But shortly afterwards, as Weiss reports in her memoirs, 'the plane manufacturers let my heroines of the air know that by defending their rights they ran the risk of losing precious support; and they were totally dependent on the aviation industry, so they let me know that they could not help me any more'.

Given the many contradictions in the story of French airwomen, it is perhaps not surprising that the climate of opinion towards them was variable. France, despite its refusal to grant women civil and political rights, sometimes offered women opportunities not available in other countries. Before 1914, women students refused admission to medical schools in their own countries had come to study in Paris. And between the wars, the black American woman pilot Bessie Coleman came to train for her licence in France, remarking that aviation there was untainted by racial prejudice. But the adulation the French public sporadically accorded women pilots could easily turn to disapproval and rejection.

In April 1939 for instance, Paris Match published under the heading 'The Little Girls', a strongly-worded article about Amelia Earhart (who had vanished in 1937), Helene Boucher, Lena Bernstein (whose death may have been suicide in despair at failing to get finance) and Edmee Jarland, (a gliding champion killed in March 1939, in an accident for which she was not responsible). The article ended, 'these little girls died because they had chosen a calling which was not a metier de femme, a woman's business'. Marie-Claire, the new 'modern' women's magazine of the late 1930s, ran enthusiastic articles about Andree Dupeyron's exploits, but warned its readers that there were no opportunities for girls who thought of flying as a career. Women aviators with young children could also expect press criticism for the risks they took, as Dupeyron found after her Middle East adventure.

Many factors combined to make the inter-war period a historically specific one, the age of the lone aviator, but also of the woman aviator, in France and elsewhere. The Second World War precipitated the changes already taking place in aviation, and after 1945, there would be virtually no place for women in the greatly expanded commercial air fleets – except as stewardesses. Unlike other combatant countries, France had not created auxiliary women's units for non-combatant flying during the admittedly shorter period that the French air force was in action, although one or two individuals were called upon. With one striking exception – Jacqueline Auriol – French women did not learn to fly the planes of the new jet age. It is only very recently and generally after legislative change, that women in France and elsewhere have been able to become commercial airline pilots.

The star billing of France's women aviators has, in the end, much in common with those other exceptional figures, the three women ministers appointed by Leon Blum to his government in 1936. In both cases, they were much photographed and are often cited as evidence of the progress of women's rights in inter-war France. In both cases, little is known about the reality behind the pictures – the work done by the ministers, the day-to-day problems of the aviators. In both cases, exceptions which did not seriously threaten the structures either of politics or aviation could be tolerated. The structures easily survived: the mass of French women continued to be deprived of the vote (until 1945) and women fliers continued to be banned from where most French aviation was going on. High-flying women can tell us something about the limits of the possible, and that is not negligible, but they are not necessarily an index of significant change.

Further Reading

• Wendy Boase, The Sky's The Limit: Women Pioneers in Aviation (Osprey, 1979)
• Judy Lomax, Women Of The Air (John Murray, 1986)
• Joseph J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America's Romance With Aviation, 1900-1950 (University Press, 1983)
• J. F. McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Position of Women in French Society 1870-1939 (Harvester, 1981)
• Renate Bridenthal et al. (eds), Becoming Visible, Women in European History (2nd edition, Houghton Mifflin, 1987)

About the Author

Sian Reynolds is senior lecturer in French history at the University of Sussex, and author of the forthcoming Britannica's Typesetters: Women Compositors in Edwardian Edinburgh for Edinburgh University Press.