Racing bodies: dress and pioneer women aviators and racing drivers

Abstract

This article explores the dress of pioneer women racing drivers and aviators in the period 1900–39. It traces how they transformed their dress and appearance from the amateur improvisations of the Edwardian period to the streamlined ‘speed queens’ of the 1930s. It argues that their various clothing strategies represented and embodied their determined negotiation of boundaries and frontiers of culture and gender as they successfully embraced the pleasures, dangers and opportunities of new technologies and unprecedented speeds. Visual evidence is used to show how this transformation eventually produced images of celebrity status.