Eleonora Federici Flying Away from Home: Amy Johnson If women have always been daring adventurous travellers exploring unknown and unexplored areas, in the 1930s – the golden era of aviation – they were not merely travellers but pilots. Not only did they travel abroad escaping gender roles and social constraints but actually f lew away from home, broke f light records and captured people’s imaginations. he sky – a masculine domain – was transformed into the house of the new ‘angels’. ‘Airwomen’, as they were called, crossed gender, class, ethnic and geographical borders because, as Wohl suggests, ‘f light became a metaphor for the transformation of consciousness, its liberation from the constraints of normal day-to-day existence’ (Wohl 1994, 161).1 Women pilots broke away from the role that society had established for them; f lying meant achieving the right for free- dom, the choice of a dif ferent life. he irst woman to get a pilot’s licence was the French Raymonde de Laroche in 1910 and then in 1912 the American Harriet Quimby crossed the Channel in a Bleriot monoplane (for more about her career see Holden 1993; Naughton 2004). he famous aviatrice Lady Heath, whose nickname was ‘Lady Hell of a Din’ because of her talent for self-publicity, declared that ‘f lying was as easy as Charlestoning’ (Gillies 2003, 65) while her aristocrat rival Lady Bailey, also Irish and married to a South African millionaire, ater f lying 8000 miles from England to Cape Town, said she was sorry to be so late because she got muddled in the mountains (for more information about her life and f lights see Falloon 1999; Boase 1979). Another famous aviatrice, the Duchess of Bedford, obtained a pilot’s licence at the age of sixty-seven and disappeared on a solo f light over the North Sea ive years later (see De Bernardi 1984; Lomax 1987). In 1929 the Women’s Air Race – known as the ‘Powder 1 It was even possible for an African-American, Bessie Coleman, to become a pilot and break racial boundaries. See Rich (1993) for an overview on her life.