Book Review - Spitfire Women

I would say that every woman should learn to fly,” Pauline Gower, the founder of the women’s Air Transport Auxilliary (ATA) told the Woman’s Journal in 1942. “Psychologically it is the best antidote to the manifold neuroses which beset modern woman.”

Without Pauline Gower, her tenacity and her connections, it is unlikely the women’s group would have been formed at all. There was considerable resistance, both verbally and physically, to women flying, and in one case an actual death was attributed to sugar having been put in the fuel tank of one of the women pilots. But fly they did, and by the end of the war women were even being trained ab initio, so great was the need for pilots...