The exclusion of women from airline and aviation history:A feminist historical analysis

This article critically examines how the representation, the ‘placing’ of women in historical representations of air travel has obscured and omitted women’s roles and agency throughout the history of the industry. Drawn from a larger piece of work (see Mills et al., 2023), we revisit literary texts which claim to be complete historical accounts of air travel in the UK, Australia and Canada. In terms of history, we adopt a feminist approach that focuses on how history is discursively produced through texts that exclude the agentic role of women (Scott, 1987).