Interview with Liz Millward: Why New Zealand?
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Interview with Liz Millward: Why New Zealand? Jennifer Roth is an Associate Professor in Jennifer Roth: Women’s Studies at Lakehead University. Congratulations on winning the 2009 CWSA/ ACÉF Book Prize. I loved your book, Women Roth joins in conversation with Liz Millward, in Imperial Airspace, 1922–1937 (McGill- an Associate Professor in the Women’s and Queen’s University Press, 2008). What drew Gender Studies Program at the University of you to the topic? Manitoba and the 2009 CWSA/ACÉF Book Prize Winner. Liz Millward: Thank you. A number of factors combined to bring this topic to my attention. The first is autobiographical. My father worked in the civil aviation industry, and before that both my mother and father worked in the Royal Canadian Air Force and Royal Air Force, respectively. Our lives were regulated by the rhythms of the civil aviation industry and it was dominated by men to the extent that women were almost completely excluded from performing any role except that of providing secretarial support. The very few who occasionally appeared were relentlessly criticized. But because of my mother’s experi- ence in the RCAF—not as a pilot—I knew that women could be involved in the vast infrastructure that supports flight. Growing up in England, I had also heard of Jean Batten and Amy Johnson, two of the pilots I discuss in the book. They were both fêted as national heroines during the 1930s, which made the lack of women in the present even more noticeable, at least to me. Academically, I was drawn to consid- er the place of women in British imperial air- space for three reasons. First, my master’s thesis examined the representation of some of the women who had been involved in civil aviation before the First World War in Canada and the U.S. That research indicated that, from the very beginnings of powered, con- trolled flight, women had tried to earn their living via aviation. So women did form part of the industry’s history: it was never a men-only space. Second, the existing literature about women in aviation tends to focus on the per- sonal characteristics of individual pilots. The www.msvu.ca/atlantis ■□ 36.1, 2013 119 literature resorts to popular psychology or examine the processes at work in creating biography as it tries to account for why par- this utterly male-dominated industry, which is ticular women managed to succeed in a field founded on masculinist ideas about the links which was dominated by men. Educational between power, dominance, technology, and experiences, class struggles, being the eldest progress, and which has been used as a tool child, a sporty temperament, a dominant fath- of imperial expansion and, significantly, col- er (or mother), resistance to racism, or having onial resistance. For many of us today, this (or not having) brothers (or sisters) have all industry determines our movements in the been wheeled out to “explain” the apparently sense of which destinations we can reach exceptional character of the inter-war woman in a timely fashion, and the recent chaos pilot (Falloon, 1999; Luff 2002; Gillies 2003; caused by the closure of European airspace Naughton 2004; Render 1992; Rich 1995). because of the volcanic ash cloud, as well as One of the worst examples of this approach is concerns over global warming, should at least Jean Batten: The Garbo of the Skies by Ian encourage us to wonder how this astonishing Mackersey (1990). In their recent discussion edifice came into being in the first place. As of Batten, Anne Collett and Clive Gilson feminist scholars we never assume that any remark that Mackersey’s “construction of realm is always already masculine or femin- Batten’s life relies heavily upon a psych- ine. We have to account for how they became ological interpretation of character and action defined as one or the other (rarely both at the that is largely removed from and uninformed same time). by gendered history. Yet the attitude of per- To undertake that account I needed sonal ambivalence and, at times, animosity the third element, which was the intellectual toward his subject that acts to undermine framework. When I began the book (as a doc- Batten’s achievements, appears to be gen- toral dissertation), I was studying imperial and der-based” (2009, 221). This is a generous colonial women’s history and feminist geog- reading, because Mackersey’s book actually raphy and had been reading Henri Lefebvre seems more like a vicious attack designed to on the production of space (1991). That body destroy any vestiges of respect one could of scholarship discusses the relationship be- have for Batten. Deploying an old technique, tween the domestic and imperial, examines he tries to suggest that Batten’s technological how women undermined the imperial project, competence (as pilot and navigator) was analyzes British women’s forays into the because she was an “unnatural” woman, pos- colonies and dominions as agents of imperial- sibly in a sexual relationship with her mother ism, and explores the brutal suppression and (1990, 33). The individualizing misogyny of forms of resistance of women who were this type of work is actually inspiring, in the colonized by imperial forces (for example, sense that it, and the less offensive but still see Burton 1994; Mills 1996). This is all ex- highly individualized biographical approaches tremely significant work, providing ways to mentioned above, leaves everything un- understand the interrelations of race, class, explained. None of these books analyze how and sexuality, but I thought it should also be aviation became a men’s realm and they do able to account for the ways in which British not treat women pilots as part of the collective imperial airspace was gendered and to pro- category of women situated within larger eco- vide a way to understand the complex role of nomic, political, and social processes. In- settler white women in metropole-periphery stead, the individualizing accounts take men’s relations. Fortunately I was studying under dominance of the technological facets of avi- the supervision of Dr. Bettina Bradbury, who ation and the physical and imaginative realm expected me to expand my analysis well of airspace for granted: these do not even beyond questions of representation and into need explaining. pragmatic concerns with laws, regulations, What I hoped to do with the research and technology—the how and what that was avoid the biographical approach with its needs to be in place before the right “why” heroic accounts of women overcoming their can be discerned. circumstances. Instead, I wanted to closely 120 www.msvu.ca/atlantis ■□ 36.1, 2013 Jennifer Roth: airside. But in the 1930s, the British appropri- Why New Zealand and Jean Batten, specific- ated Batten and her achievements for them- ally, as an example of the metropole- selves, to bolster British prestige and promote periphery relationship with respect to women British aircraft manufacturing. In her own pub- in flight? lic persona, then, she embodies the tension pulling her, and other colonial subjects, in dif- Liz Millward: ferent directions. The metropole demands— The short answer is because Batten was the always—that everything, every achievement first person in the world to fly from England to and every notable person, belongs to it, while New Zealand non-stop (meaning that it was the periphery also asserts its claims to in- one continuous journey, although she did dependence, whatever that may look like, by land along the way). So she was the first per- holding up the successful public figure as the son to link the two nations by air. The longer epitome of its own characteristics. answer is that since a study of this length Batten and New Zealand provide su- could not be comprehensive, and although perb examples of this tension and of the dual women pilots flew within or across most processes of imperialism and nationalism. regions of the bloated British Empire, I con- Critical geographers Lawrence Berg and centrated on “Home” and the settler society Robin Kearns refer to “decentred geography” furthest from the seat of that Empire. The (1998), which unsettles the dominance of the relationship between England and the Antipo- centre, with its claims to be both represent- des is part of the English national imaginary. ative of certain core values and at the van- New Zealand is as far away from England as guard of significant change, by examining the it is possible to go and, as a cluster of small alternative epistemologies and alternative islands, it physically mirrors the British Isles. geographies which are generated by periph- Many English people—me included—have eral locations. From these places, folk look relatives who settled there. From the signing back at the metropole and also, importantly, of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, it came look sideways to each other, to nearby places under British sovereignty, eventually sharing which are considered to be on the periphery the British model of political, legal, and of power as well. Batten’s multiple inter- educational systems. But it is far from being a actions in New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, simple copy of the metropole. Women won Argentina, and England signified many differ- the right to vote there in 1893, and Māori- ent things and offset any easy perception that Pākehā relations, while certainly unequal and technological knowledge and prestige were oppressive, have been far more complex than being transmitted from the centre of an the more common genocidal and assimila- empire to its peripheral colonies and domin- tionist practices of other parts of the British ions. Batten herself was committed to her Empire such as Canada and Australia.