Margery Brown’s Air-Age Utopia for American Women

Abstract

Abstract Among the women pilots prominent during the American between-the-wars years, Margery Brown (1892–1961) set no records and made no thrilling flights. During the “Golden Age of American Aviation” (1925–40), however, she published eight articles that established her as an articulate voice advocating aviation as a benefit to America’s women. She postulated a technologically based utopia in which the transformative power of aviation would bring about a new freedom for those women who chose to embrace it. Flight would allow women to demonstrate their ability to master a new and sophisticated technology. They would gain moral discipline and would shed the cultural limitations that had for so long held them back. They would abolish gender discrimination in the air, achieving a transcendent degree of liberation and a new freedom, all gained through the agency of flight.